Native to the cloud forests of Ecuador and Colombia, the Olinguito is the newest member of the raccoon family.
Kristofer Helgen, curator of mammals at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, in a special announcement made in Washington D.C., presented anatomical and DNA evidence that establish the Olinguito (pronounced oh-lin-GHEE-toe) as a living species distinct from other known olingos, carnivorous tree-dwelling mammals native to Central and South America. His team’s work, also published today in the journal ZooKeys, represents the first discovery of a new carnivorous mammal species in the American continents in more than three decades.
Olinguitos, formally known as Bassaricyon neblina, inhabit the cloud forests of Ecuador and Colombia in the thousands, and the team’s analysis suggests that they are distributed widely enough to exist as four separate subspecies. “This is extremely unusual in carnivores,” Helgen said, in advance of the announcement. “I honestly think that this could be the last time in history that we will turn up this kind of situation both a new carnivore, and one thats widespread enough to have multiple kinds”.
With blood samples taken from the Olinguitos and several other olingos, the researchers also performed DNA analysis, finding that the animals are far more genetically distinct than first imagined. Though other olingos lived as little as three miles away, Olinguitos shared only about 90 percent of their DNA with these olingos.
To visit these biologically rich, moist, high-elevation forests, often called cloud forests, Helgen teamed with biologist Roland Kays of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and C. Miguel Pinto, a mammalogist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City and a native of Quito, Ecuador. They traveled to Ecuadors’ Otonga Reserve, on the western slope of the Andes in 2006.
The team spent parts of the next few years visiting the Otonga Reserve and other cloud forests in Ecuador and Colombia, studying the characteristics and behavior of the creatures that the researchers began to call Olinguitos (adding the Spanish suffix “-ito” to olingo, because of the smaller size). Like other olingo species, the Olinguitos were mostly active at night, but they were slightly smaller: on average, 14 inches long and two pounds in weight, compared to 16 inches and 2.4 pounds. Though they occasionally ate insects, they largely fed on tree fruit. Adept at jumping and climbing, the animals seldom descended from the trees, and they gave birth to one baby at a time.
Helgen, Kays and the other researchers will continue studying the behavior of the Olinguitos and attempt to assess their conservation status. An analysis of suitable habitats suggests that an estimated 42 percent of the animal’s potential range has already been deforested.