The Sad Story of a Rare Cat and Its Loyal Parasite

Last edited Sat Feb 2, 2019, 02:43 PM - Edit history (1)

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/03/iberian-lynx-parasite/580435/

The lynx, in our eyes, is a wildcat of unthreatening dimensions. It has tufted ears and a spotted coat. The ruff beneath its chin grows in two bunches, recalling the beards of the men of Byzantium. Its stubby, black-tipped tail makes you think it might have lost a more splendid appendage to a fire. The lynx is mostly solitary, and rarely seen. Its dens are found in forests and between boulders, in Europe, Asia, and North America. The bobcat, a species of lynx, lives in the Catskill Mountains—do you hear cat-skill or cats-kill?—hunting little mammals. Another species, the Iberian lynx, was once the rarest cat on Earth: For a time, there were just 94. Today, more than 500 Iberian lynxes live in Portugal and Spain; bringing them back cost more than $76 million.

The lynx, to a louse, is—but doesn’t this sound like the start of a Jorge Luis Borges story? To a louse a lynx is a meal of preposterous magnitude. Also, habitat. Unlike, say, fleas—ready defectors—lice are loyal. Each species tends to colonize a specific type of animal. And almost every furred creature is populated by a unique kind of louse. Though bobcat lice are strangers to the lice that roam lynxes in Romania, they have some similarities: They have dozens of young but care for none; they emit no noise. Some lice suck, and these tend to be homebodies (they live at the base of a hair). The Iberian lynx’s louse, by contrast, likes to chew. It wanders the lynx, stopping to lever up flakes of skin and create tiny blood lagoons from which to drink. It is intrepid, a description further justified by the fact that it is eyeless. The louse has no idea what its lynx looks like, and the lynx cannot see the louse either—though the lynx feels the louse acutely.

We had scarcely discovered the Iberian lynx’s louse before it vanished. The creature was identified in 1997 when an adult louse and a nymph (a baby louse) were removed from the pelt of a dead lynx; it was later named Felicola isidoroi. At the time, Iberian lynxes were in severe decline as a result of a virus in rabbits, their prey. With this decline, the domain of the isidoroi louse dwindled and its habitat fragmented, as lynxes were less likely to cross paths with one another.

When conservationists took Iberian lynxes into captive breeding programs, they deloused them, dewilding the natural environment that is a lynx. Even if the lynxes hadn’t been deloused, their lice may not have survived captivity. Wildcats in enclosures tend to overgroom and pace. These can be fatal events for a louse that’s scratched off or dislodged by fretful movement.

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