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Conservationists aim to save South America’s super tiny wild cat, the guina

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For more than 200 million years, the ancient Valdivian Temperate Forest in southwestern Chile has been a refuge for plant and animal species found nowhere else on Earth. This global biodiversity hotspot is home to monkey puzzle trees (Araucaria araucana), the endangered chinchilla (Chinchilla lanigera), threatened southern pudu (Pudu puda) — the world’s smallest deer — and two critically endangered species: the Juan Fernández firecrown (Sephanoides fernandensis), a hummingbird, and the northern Darwin’s frog (Rhinoderma rufum). But that’s not all. The guina (Leopardus guigna), the smallest cat in the Americas, also lives here, among the dense understories of bamboo and ferns, hunting for prey including rodents, marsupials, birds and reptiles. Also called the kodkod or Chilean cat, the diminutive guina weighs in at only 2-7 pounds, considerably smaller than domestic cats. It has a bushy tail, spotted brown fur and prominent stripes on the cheeks of its small, round head. It is also one of the most threatened cats in South America, currently listed as vulnerable. The guina’s habitat is a roughly 160,000-square-kilometer (62,000-square-mile) coastal strip in central and southern Chile, southwestern Argentina, and the large island of Chiloé off the coast of southern Chile. In northern and central Chile, the slightly larger and lighter subspecies (L. g. tigrillo) inhabits Mediterranean climate type woodlands and forests. In their southern range, the darker and smaller subspecies (L. g. guigna) inhabits the denser Valdivian Temperate Rainforest, the Patagonian forest in southern Chile and the Andean Patagonian forest in southwestern Argentina. While the…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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