If thecats have been on the iosland for 1000 years they have lived and hunted and bred in the habitat. Is all wildlife wiped out by them? Obviously not. "Invasive species" is a modern term used when there are plans to "eradicate" or wipe out a species.
Quite obviously these cats are NOT an ecological disaster because they still have prey and there are other predators.
"Trapping in the forest" for what purpose? To kill obviously. It seems everyone can throw out evolutionary development when they want.
Living and breeding on the island for a thousand years makes these cats a native species. No shortage of food.
Are we trying to cover up problems created by people here?
On the trail floor that day in 2009 lay the sprawled body of a white-furred sifaka, a kind of lemur. “I touched the bottom of his foot,” said Michelle Sauther, a biological anthropologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “It was still warm.” Then she heard a rustle. Looking up, she caught a glimpse of a tiger-striped feline dissolving back into the forest—one of Madagascar’s “forest cats.”
Cats didn’t evolve on the island, and the history of these elusive felines—twice the size of house cats—has long been a mystery. Now, researchers have revealed the cats’ origin story: They descend from domestic kitties that hopped off Arabian trading ships perhaps more than 1000 years ago. By pinpointing them as a separate population that has spent centuries adapting to Madagascar, the work may offer a first step toward limiting the toll these relentless hunters take on the island’s rich biodiversity.
With males averaging more than 0.6 meters long, the forest cats have striped tabby coats, straight tails, and a voracious appetite for native birds, snakes, rodents, and lemurs. They also compete with endemic carnivores like mongooses, said Zachary Farris, a biologist at Appalachian State University who was unaffiliated with the research team.
The felines could be the feral descendants of the domestic cat Felis catus brought to the island several hundred years ago by Europeans; if so, controlling domestic village cats might limit the population in the forest. Or they might be descendants of small wildcats “that had somehow gotten over here from mainland Africa,” Sauther says.
But Sauther’s team uncovered a different story when it sampled DNA from the blood of forest cats trapped using live mice or beef parts as bait. Leslie Lyons, an expert in cat genomics at the University of Missouri, Columbia, helped compare the forest cat genomes with those of cats around the world. The closest match: domestics from Arabian Sea locales such as Kuwait and Oman, the researchers reported at the end of February in the journal Conservation Genetics. Like other domestic cats that went wild, including Maine coons and feral cats in Australia, the Middle Eastern cats swelled in size in their new home, Lyons notes.
The Arabian origin “makes sense,” said Asia Murphy, a Ph.D. student at Pennsylvania State University, University Park, who studies the fossa, an endemic carnivore that competes with forest cats. “Madagascar is a pretty special place when it comes to cultural mixing.”
Linguistic and cultural evidence attests to Arabic influence on the island, linked to Indian Ocean trade routes that stretched from Arabian ports to Madagascar starting in the second millennium B.C.E. Cats employed as mousers on those ships could have deserted at port.
Another invasive species supports that scenario. Arabian ships also transported Indian civets to the island around 900 C.E. for the oil produced in their anal glands, which was used in perfumes. “Boats transporting civets [likely] were also carrying cats,” Farris said.
More genomics work could tighten the timeline of when the cats arrived or tell the story of another forest cat variety, called the fitoaty, that researchers haven’t yet sampled. And knowing the cats aren’t just recent runaways suggests trapping in the forest, rather than simply neutering village cats, might be the quickest way to control them, Murphy said.
For Lyons, this record of Arabian Sea cats sailing to Madagascar adds to the global story of cat dispersal. “People think about dogs all the time,” she says, “but the cat has been a very silent partner in our migration.”
Just posted by Steve Willis on the AOP Face Book page:
Just heard the very sad news that veteran US UFO investigator Ted Phillips has passed away.
Ted was a engineer, professional photographer, professional musician. He was a participant in the Vanguard Satellite Tracking Program and a field engineer on the Minuteman Missile Project. He began investigating UFO reports in 1964. He was a research associate of Dr. J. Allen Hynek from 1968 until Dr. Hynek’s death in 1986. It was at Allen Hynek’s suggestion that he began specializing in physical traces with UFO sightings in 1968. Phillips has personally investigated hundreds of UFO cases and his files contain 5,031 physical trace landings from 94 countries
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please note that Phillips passed away in January of this year
I was contacted by a "stringer" (freelance) reporter who said that he was working on a story for the Guardian newspaper and he was given my name as "someone who worked covertly with the Government" on UFOs. No. Lie. I was told that I had also had my book, UFO Contact, forwarded to the United States Air Force. Half truth. An old contact had lent a copy of the book to someone who is in the USAF and he told the contact that he was going to buy four more copies for colleagues "into" the UFO subject -all were, apparently in ranks ranging from Colonel, Captain and so on. Yes, four copies were bought by someone in the US but even as publisher I am not allowed that information. I never forwarded copies of any material -books or otherwise- to the USAF. The reporter then referred to an incident I was involved in while in Germany in the early 1980s. Only two people have ever beemn told the story and I can guess which one it was who blabbed. So if anything appears in print I deny it all -and check facts with me first.
I know I waste my time with these appeals but I was always told I was appealing...
Ahem
If anyone knows of any largely unreported pre 1990 alien entity/CE 3K encounters from the UK could they please let me know. I have extensive files so date, location and witness name ought to stop anyone wasting their time as I can check the AOPB files first.
I can be contacted via the AE/CE3K Face Book page or AOP Bureau Face Book Messenger or aopbureau@yahoo.co.uk
