Unlikely friendship between predator and prey stuns scientists
A camera trap set up to study birds in southeastern Peru instead filmed an ocelot following an opossum through the jungle at night. The ocelot, a predatory cat, moved in tandem with the small marsupial.
Researchers at the Cocha Cashu Biological Station initially assumed that the ocelot was hungrily stalking the opossum. A few minutes later, however, the camera caught the pair walking back the way they came. and the opossum was clearly relaxed around its companion.
'They were like two old friends walking home from a bar,' Isabel Damas Moreira, an ecologist at Bielefeld University in Germany, told the New York Times.
Ecologists in other parts of the Amazon had filmed similar interactions between the two species on three occasions between 2019 and 2023.
To understand what was happening, Damas Moreira left strips of fabric infused with ocelot scent in front of camera traps. Opossums visited the strips 12 times, often biting, sniffing or rubbing against them. A puma-scented strip set up for comparison was visited just once.
One theory that the researchers are considering is 'chemical camouflage', where the opossums use the ocelots' scent to hide themselves from bigger predators. In return, the ocelots use the opossums' body odour to conceal themselves from their prey.
Unlike ocelots, opossums are immune to the venom of Amazonian pit vipers. Trailing an opossum might protect ocelots from snakes while they hunt at night, Ettore Camerlenghi, an evolutionary biologist, said. A similar partnership exists between coyotes and badgers in the Mojave desert, where rattlesnakes are a constant danger.
Another possibility is that opossums guide the ocelots to prey that is too big to tackle themselves. When the ocelot has had its fill, the opossum can feast on the leftover carrion.
Diego Astua, an opossum researcher at the University of Pernambuco in Brazil, said the behaviour was all the more remarkable because opossums are solitary animals that rarely socialise with anyone other than their families or mating partners.
He said: 'We are likely to find more and more surprising records like this.'
Camerlenghi said that the chance discovery only happened because of advances in night-time video technology. Still photos alone would have given the impression that the ocelot was hunting the opossum.
He added: 'Science often works like that. You search for one thing and end up finding something else, which sometimes turns out to be even more interesting than what you were originally after.'
Another example of 'hunting mutualism' is between humans and honeyguide birds in Africa and Asia. The birds lead people to beehives, and feast on the beeswax after the humans crack them open.
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