Big cats to soon understand celebrity paparazzi frustrations, just in time for Caturday

A big problem with protecting endangered great cats is keeping an eye on the naturally stealthy animals in the field. This is especially true of the endangered tiger, whose remaining numbers in the wild are quite scarce.  While camera traps are nothing new, they were mostly developed for game hunters and really aren't fast enough to catch fast-moving cats most of the time.  Not only that, monitoring a tiger population over a large area requires thousands of them and the coast can be prohibitive.

The good news is that the technology in cellphone cameras is making available a new kind of camera trap that is lightweight and much cheaper than the old models.  Not only that, the cameras photograph animals in three-tenths of a second, which was about as long as it took for the cats to enter the center of the frame.  Grateful for these new camera traps, researchers plan to deploy them across tiger territory in Russia, Malaysia and Indonesia. But cameras are also headed to Gabon and Uganda for the study of forest leopards and the rare African golden cat.

It will be a while before the results of the switch to the new technology are fully known. But test cameras have already produced great shots of everything from big cats to other wildlife and even the cats’ biggest enemies: poachers.