A male jaguar has made an unprecedented trek, skirting 2100 kilometres of the southern edge of the Amazon rainforest. The journey – which crossed highways, farms, ranches and other human-modified landscapes – expands our knowledge of what these big cats are capable of.

was about 60 to 100 kilometres, says at University College Dublin in Ireland. Knowing these animals are capable of travelling much longer distances reveals further challenges in protecting them. “Individuals that are travelling so far are more exposed to human-related risks like hunting or killing because of attacks on livestock,” says Morant.

He and his colleagues have been tracking jaguars in Brazil via GPS collars as part of a larger ongoing project that started in 1999. The researchers wanted to better understand how jaguars use their environments along the Araguaia river, a potential wildlife corridor connecting the Cerrado grasslands with the Amazon.

They captured the male, dubbed Gaspar, as part of this work, fitting him with a collar on 11 November 2024. The 8-year-old jaguar then spent some time in his established range, about 700 square kilometres along the Araguaia river, before setting out on a massive southward trek, skirting the border of the Amazon to inland Cerrado.

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The researchers recorded that Gaspar travelled 2122 kilometres, until his collar stopped transmitting locations in late Novemeber 2025, but that is as the crow flies. The actual distance is probably much more, says Morant.

While Gaspar mostly stuck to forested areas, he also crossed through heavily modified human landscapes, such as farms, ranches and roads. Dispersals, albeit shorter ones, are common in individuals aged 1 to 3 years old that are looking to establish a new territory, but it is unclear why an older adult like Gaspar made this move. He might have been searching for better food resources, mating opportunities or a better habitat in general, says Morant.

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“Beyond the extraordinary distance travelled, I find [it] especially intriguing that he apparently did not establish a territory despite more than a year of continuous 
movement through areas that were, at least in part, potentially suitable for jaguars,” says at the Spanish National Research Council.

The findings also reveal an additional challenge in protecting such wide-ranging cats. In these human-modified areas, jaguars face threats from poaching, as ranchers often kill them to protect livestock. “Maybe we need to rethink how protected areas are framed and organised,” says Morant.

Gaspar’s fate is now uncertain. He may have been shot or poisoned, or the collar may have just stopped working, says Morant, which could mean Gaspar is still traversing the Brazilian landscape.

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Cuteness, it would seem, is one of life’s most endearing evolutionary strategies – and one that felines have hijacked to remarkable levels. For cat lovers, our furry feline friends are akin to our closest companions, and this is reflected in our neurobiology: being close to them triggers activity in the same emotion-processing region of the brain. Even when we’re not sharing precious moments in real life, we merely have to turn to our phones to get our fix. Cats, after all, do the funniest things. But what is it about them that we find so adorable?

Cats are distinctive animals: domesticated for centuries, revered and reviled in equal measure throughout history and bred to match our own aesthetic tastes and whims.  From a sensational internet fluffball to his own domestic longhair Loki, renowned animal photographer Tim Flach explores the world of cats in his new book , showing how intertwined our lives have become.

“At the heart of this project was to unmask the essence of feline,” says Flach. Including more than 170 of Flach’s cat images, Feline also sees neuroscientist Morten Kringelbach explore why we find felines so compelling, and evolutionary biologist Jonathan Losos delve into the species and its evolution.

Pictured above is Stella, a Cornish Rex from Montreal, Canada, whose striking appearance is a result of genetic quirks during her embryonic development. Cats with different-coloured eyes almost always have one blue eye, writes Losos. The phenomenon is particularly common in entirely white cats.

Flach also includes shots of feline internet sensations such as Atchoum, below, a long-haired Persian with a rare condition called hypertrichosis, which causes his hair to grow profusely. Currently, Atchoum has more than 900,000 followers on Instagram.

Elsewhere, Zuu, an exotic shorthair, takes cuteness to the extreme – a perfectly round fluffball that’s impossible to resist (below).

Cuteness, writes Kringelbach in Feline, is how mammalian and avian babies elicit care from elders, compensating for their helplessness. Big eyes, rounded features and large heads are typical baby features that humans (and many other species) find irresistible, and have been shown to trigger activity in the orbitofrontal cortex, an emotion-processing region of the brain. The idea is that if our brains reward us for looking at and providing for babies, it makes it easier for our species to survive. But this response is not restricted to our own species. Cats, too, trigger this same reward zone in humans.

By scanning his own brain as it responds to Loki, his domestic longhair, Flach highlights the cuteness effect and how his orbitofrontal cortex lights up within 130 milliseconds, much faster than conscious thought. “In a way, at some fundamental level, you can see how cuteness is unfolding,” he says.

But cuteness is just one of cats’ evolutionary advantages.  They are perfectly adapted for a life of hunting – as demonstrated by this 8-week Sphynx cat Valentine, below, which is leaping for a cat toy just out of sight.

A cat’s nose has as many as 40 times more scent-detecting cells than a human’s. Cats’ whiskers are finely tuned to detect subtle vibrations, helpful for moving in the dark and hunting at close range. Their tongues, too, are uniquely fashioned. Covering the organ are small papillae, or spikes, made of keratin – the same material as in our nails and hair.  This roughness is useful in grooming, eating and drinking. But the tongue also plays a role in cats’ sense of smell, transferring pheromone scents to the vomeronasal, or Jacobson’s, organ at the roof of the mouth.

But it is cats’ eyes that are perhaps their most alluring feature. In the past, superstition suggested that a cat’s bright eyes were indicative of a devil glowing back. In reality, the glowing orbs that shine back at you if you point a light at a cat in the dark are the result of special reflective cells known as tapetum lucidum, which reflect unabsorbed light back to the photoreceptors (rods and cones) in the retina. Cats have a much greater density of rods than humans, and are also able to widely dilate their pupils, enabling them to see at light levels six times lower than humans, writes Losos in his book.

To capture cats’ eyes for Feline, Flach and his team used special lenses and high-speed flash to show them in ways never before seen, to “show it almost like a lighthouse light, like a mirror”, says Flach.

A pair of researchers have visited two snow leopard dens in Mongolia’s Tost mountains, where they studied and photographed five cubs, offering a rare opportunity to gather data on this threatened species.

Prior to this expedition, which took place in June and July, researchers hadn’t been able to visit a snow leopard den anywhere in the world since 2019. “Discovering a den and cubs is amazing; something only a few people have ever experienced,” says at the Snow Leopard Trust. “The dens are in narrow cracks or caves. We only get one chance. If the mother returned before we were able to locate the den, we would have to abandon the search. Going back twice would be too intrusive.”

Johansson and , a local field ranger, established the approximate locations of the dens by tracking GPS collars that had previously been fitted to 20 adult female snow leopards.

“A female snow leopard’s home range in Mongolia’s mountainous South Gobi region is typically about 130 kilometres squared – that’s about 2.5 times the size of Manhattan,” says Johansson. “Without GPS collars, we’d never find their dens.” But even with the collars, areas as large as 60,000 square metres still had to be searched to find their exact locations.

Snow leopards (Panthera uncia) are listed as vulnerable on the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List of Threatened Species, with an estimated 3920 to 6390 left in the wild. They live in the high mountainous terrain of central Asia across a 2-million-square-kilometre range spanning 12 countries, including China, India, Kyrgyzstan and Russia. They face threats such as habitat loss, poaching and killings in retaliation for attacking livestock.

“To be able to model and project the population trajectory of any species reliably, we need to understand key factors like birth rates, mortality and how many animals move in and out of an area,” says Johansson, who worked alongside the Snow Leopard Conservation Foundation on the project.

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“Den visits are crucial because they’re the only way to learn about average litter sizes and cub survival during the first five to six months of life,” he says. “Before this age, cubs stay hidden and don’t travel with their mothers. By visiting dens, researchers can gather this otherwise impossible-to-get data. All this information improves our understanding of snow leopard ecology and helps us make informed conservation decisions to secure their future.”