What Happens When Your New Cat Species Goes Mega-Viral?

For seven weeks this past summer, Vicky Ossio didn’t know if any of the 1,200 rescued animals in her care would survive.

Ossio is the co-founder of Senda Verde, a Bolivian wildlife sanctuary two-and-a-half hours from the capital city of La Paz. Senda Verde lies in one of the areas that was severely affected by anti-government road blockades, which cut off the flow of fuel and food in the country this summer. Each week, she needs to source nearly 500 pounds of meat to feed all the Andean bears, jaguars, and many wild cats in her care. “I would wake up and the only thing I did during the whole day is try to find food,” says Ossio.   

Miraculously, Senda Verde survived the blockades by buying in-season fruit from their neighbors and relying on a flock of 60 egg-laying chickens. But the experience was still fresh in Ossio’s mind when the news broke last month: Scientists had confirmed that one of the wild cats in the sanctuary was, in fact, a newly discovered species, now known as the tilcayo. Native to Bolivia, genetics revealed that the small, spotted feline had diverged from other members of the tiger cat species complex around 1.4 million years ago.

To say Ossio was unprepared for the tidal wave of media coverage the discovery would generate would be an understatement. Reporters from around the world had her phone ringing every ten minutes, even while she was traveling through remote parts of the country. Soon after, Ossio was informed that more than $150,000 had been donated to the sanctuary through a crypto campaign. “You have no idea the peace of mind that granted us,” Ossio says. The money should ensure the sanctuary can afford food for its inhabitants no matter what other unforeseen events lie down the road.  

“Getting funding for small cats is so hard,” says  Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz, a Bolivian biologist and co-lead author of the study that described the tilcayo. “But now, somehow, we broke the internet with a small cat.” About a month since the discovery was announced, the extreme attention has led to an optimistic outlook for studying and protecting the new cat species—and a few weird consequences of sudden viral fame.

After the news broke, Nogales-Ascarrunz, who is also a National Geographic Explorer, conducted hours and hours of interviews, then watched in awe as tilcayo stories took over her Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and even LinkedIn feeds. Friends in Germany, Poland, and India all reached out to congratulate her.  “I’m so tired of seeing my face,” she laughs.

Except, it wasn’t always Nogales-Ascarrunz’s face. In numerous AI-generated stories about the tilcayo, the Bolivian researcher says her images were rendered with more Caucasian features. “They made me white with blonde hair,” she says. In other AI-generated posts, the only scientists shown were fictional men.    

At one point during the media frenzy, Ossio says their website was receiving 137 hacking attempts every ten minutes. There have also been some worrying phone calls. Someone in Seattle offered to buy the tilcayo, she says. Another call, this one from a region in Bolivia well-known for its ties to drug producers, wanted Ossio’s help determining if a similar-looking cat they had in their possession was also a tilcayo. In Ossio’s eyes, both instances raise the issue of mascotism—or when wild animals become so popular, it creates an uptick in people trying to find them in the wild and then keep them or sell them as pets. “Of course, we don’t want to put the tilcayos at risk,” says Ossio.

Fortunately, most developments to emerge out of the tilcayo media bonanza have been positive. In the weeks since the tilcayo went viral, Nogales-Ascarrunz has enjoyed seeing fan art of the cat from around the world. She and her study coauthor, Eduardo Eizirik, were also given an award by the governor of La Paz. But one of the more curious developments to emerge from the attention is related to the tilcayo’s name.

In their study, the scientists gave the cat the name “tilcayo,” because that is how some locals in the region referred to it back when it was thought to be a different species. However, when Nogales-Ascarrunz investigated whether the word had any meaning, she came up empty in both Spanish and Quechua, a locally spoken indigenous language.

However, she’s now been contacted by a linguist who believes the word might come from another indigenous South American language known as Aymara. The translation? Til comes from a word that means “small” and cayo from another that means “paw” or “foot."

All of which would make sense, she says, since the tilcayo has a smaller footprint than both ocelots and margays.

Similarly, more than a few citizen scientists have begun to send photos of small, spotted cat specimens to the researchers, wondering if they, too, had captured evidence of a tilcayo. So far, most appear to be margays, says Nogales-Ascarrunz. Even still, the interest is inspiring, she says.

At the same time, awareness of the tilcayo may also create the political pressure needed to protect local people and animals from illegal gold-mining activities that threaten much of Bolivia. These operations draw sediment up from rivers and then use mercury like a magnet to extract tiny flakes of gold that are otherwise missed by panning. Some of that mercury washes into waterways, eventually finding its way into fish and other animals. Local people rely on these animals for food, which in turn puts them at risk for heavy metal poisoning.

According to Ossio, illegal gold mining often occurs in the region, impacting the water near the sanctuary.

“The water looked like chocolate milk, and that was from the mining,” says Joel Sartore, a National Geographic Explorer and photographer who traveled to Senda Verde to film the tilcayo. “Three days later, after the police had come and made them stop, the water was a lot clearer. Not gin-clear, but you could clearly see the difference just by looking at it.”

Illegal mining has traditionally been difficult to root out. But now, with local, regional, and national politicians all eager to protect the tilcayo, the tide may be beginning to turn.

“We are using the tilcayo as a flagship to hopefully get Coroico [the nearby community] free of mining,” says Ossio.

For her part, Nogales-Ascarrunz hopes the cat’s international profile will also make it easier to find funding for the next step—more science to learn more about the tilcayo and how to protect it.

Bolivia isn’t known for its World Cup team, and it’s never won one of the Big Four international beauty pageants, she jokes. “But right now, with science and biodiversity, the whole world is talking about Bolivia,” says Nogales-Ascarrunz.