By KiddieDaily Editors · 2026-06-29 · 3 min read · 1 source

Telling one guiña from another: It’s all about the angle

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Facebook Linkedin Threads Whatsapp Reddit Email Page link Guiña are small cats found in Chile and Argentina. Though in 2025 the IUCN downlisted the species to least concern, not enough is known about populations under threat from habitat loss, persecution and forest fires.To help fill those gaps, researchers switched the angle of the camera traps used for surverying the species to film guiña individuals from above rather than at ground level. That enabled them to identify individual cats during camera trapping between February 2019 and November 2020 in a protected area in Reñihué Valley, Chile.If used more widely in camera trap surveys, this technique could help accurately estimate guiña populations in the wild.The researchers also say this technique could be applied to other small cat species.See All Key Ideas Guiña are small-forest-dwelling felids found in Chile and Argentina that are distinguished only by small, subtle black dots, making it difficult to tell one cat from another.

A change in camera trap angle could open the door to a better understanding of their populations, with important conservation implications, a recent study says. Normally, researchers place camera traps at ground level to snap pictures of cats as they walk by. But telling one guiña (Leopardus guigna) from another from that angle proved incredibly challenging.

“One of the fundamental questions in ecology is always how many individuals are there or what are the densities,” Nicholas Galvez, an associate professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, told Mongabay in an interview. “Sometimes that sounds like a very easy question, but it’s actually really difficult to answer in the field, especially with a species so small and cryptic.” To solve that problem, Galvez and his team switched their cameras to point downward, in a “zenith” position, attaching them to tree branches and poles in a temperate forest in Chile’s Reñihué Valley, in northern Patagonia. That switch enabled the scientists to identify 12 individuals based on their unique markings on their backs.

The findings were published in the journal Oryx. Ilaria Agostini, a researcher with Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council, said it’s exciting research. “For the first time, it seems feasible to identify individuals in this very subtly marked cat,” she said in a video interview.

When using camera traps for her own research on guiñas in Argentina, Agostini wasn’t able to identify individual animals using lateral views. This technique, the researchers say, could have important conservation implications. Until 2025, when the IUCN reclassified the species as of least concern, the guiña was listed as vulnerable.

The change in status was not without controversy, as three of the six recognized subpopulations (those in Argentina, central and northern Chile) remain highly threatened. Part of the concern among some conservationists was the lack of data on those threatened populations. But this technique could, in time, change that.

Omar Ohrens, a conservation scientist for Panthera, described it as “potentially transformative” in that regard, adding it still needs further testing before wider adoption. “There is currently a striking absence of reliable population estimates for this species across its range, making this work very timely,” he wrote in an email.

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