Fishing Cat

Prionailurus viverrinus

There are a number of feline species that swim and/or like water, but few of them are as at-home in the water as the fishing cat, which is native to parts of southeast Asia. Fishing cats attack ducks by swimming under water and coming up from beneath them.

But (like many of the other small cats) relatively little is known about their ways in the wild. There have been very few radio-tracking studies of them, and as-of 2002, there had only been two fishing cat den sites examined in the wild by scientists.

What is known, however, is that they are becoming very hard to find in many areas of their reported natural range. It's believed that the major reason for their increased rarity is Man's ever-increasing encroachment upon their natural habitat (wetlands and adjacent areas). Water pollution can kill one of their major food sources, as well as potentially directly poisoning them. The fact that fishing cats are considered to be edible by people who live near them doesn't help their numbers, either. Nor does the fact that locals often think of these cats as pests that will kill their poultry. So sometimes they're thought-of as vermin or a food source by the people who live closest to them, rather than an increasingly rare animal to be valued for its own sake and conserved.

Few of them are in zoos, and the numbers of fishing cats available for captive breeding is very limited.

Fishing cats prey mostly on fish, small mammals, snakes, birds, and crustaceans, and they've lived to be ten years old in cpativity.

For more information about the fishing cat:

Feline Conservation Federation
Smithsonian National Zoological Park
Article by Paul Massicot

Reference:
Mel Sunquist and Fiona Sunquist. Wild Cats of the World University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2002, pp. 241-245