And If I Meet You, What If I Eat You? Quiz

Answer: Tiger

With its tawny coat and transverse stripes, the tiger (Panthera tigris) is one of the most recognizable of the big cats. It lives in various forests of Asia, once roaming through most of the continent, but now reserved in pockets along the Amur river, in Bengal, in Sumatra, and elsewhere.

In fact, there are now more tigers in captivity than in the wild. The Amur tiger (formerly known as the Siberian tiger), which can be as long as 11 feet (3.3m) and weigh as much as 660 pounds (300kg), is the largest of all cats. Tigers are also among the best swimmers of the cat family, the felids.

Answer: Lion

Lions have the most obvious sexual dimorphism of the big cats, as the males sport a magnificent mane while the females do not. (An exception is the maneless Tsavo lion of Kenya.) Prides consist mostly of lionesses and their cubs, with very few adult males.

The lionesses do most of the hunting, but the adult males eat first. You can hear a lion's roar for 5 miles (8km). Among the felids, lions are second in size only to tigers.

Answer: Leopard

The leopard (Panthera pardus) is recognizable by its tawny coat and brown-black spots. Like the jaguar, has its spots arranged in rosettes, but they are smaller and arranged more densely than a jaguar's. Leopards range through most of Africa and Asia and thrive in rainforests, savannas, mountains, and even deserts. Like the tiger, the leopard is an agile swimmer.

The strong, nimble leopard will carry its prey -- impala, deer, even gnu -- up a tree to eat (and to hide for later). In fact, this ability accounts for its success against competitors like lions, tigers, and hyenas.

They are omnivorous and highly adaptable, but their population is decreasing.

Answer: Jaguar

The jaguars is the largest cat of the Americas, and third-largest of all felids after lions and tigers. The jaguar and the leopard are similar, but there are differences. A jaguar has much larger rosettes than a leopard, and its head is rounder and larger, and its paws are larger than a leopard's.

The jaguar was once classified as Felis onca (same genus as the housecat), but now zoologists call it Panthera onca -- the same genus as the lion, tiger, and leopard. Jaguars are solitary creatures of the forest, and they can bite through the shell of a turtle. Only the lion and the tiger have a greater bite force, and some zoologists contend that the jaguar's bite can be even greater than these!

Answer: Snow leopard

The snow leopard (Panthera uncia) is distinguished among the felids by its long, thick, white-to-grey fur with dark rosettes. It ranges among the highlands of Central and South Asia, from the Himalayas to Siberia. Also called an 'ounce', (from the Old French 'lonce' from the Latin 'lynx') the snow leopard was once thought to be a Eurasian lynx species, but now it is classified as a pantherine species -- a big cat, just like lions, tigers, jaguars, and leopards.

The year 2015 was designated the International Year of the Snow Leopard by conservationists. Snow leopards are quite solitary, and they cannot roar, but chuff instead.

Answer: Civet

A civet is sleek and spotted. The African civet is the largest civet species, and there are smaller ones in India and Malaysia and elsewhere in Eurasia, including Iberia. Civets are nocturnal, solitary, arboreal, and primarily carnivorous. Coffee cherries eaten and then pooped by Asian palm civets are considered a delicacy by some, but animal-rights' groups are horrified, as the animals are terribly confined.

Civets resemble cats (another English name is "toddycat") and exhibit feline behaviors, and they are in the suborder Feliformia ("cat-like"), and some have common names like "palm cat" or even "civet cat". But they are not in the cat family (Felidae). Most civets, including the African civet, are in the family Viverridae, along with the binturong and the fossa.

Other feliforms, by the way, are the mongoose and the hyena. Those may not seem very cat-like to the casual observer, but the classification is based on skeletal properties.

Answer: Cheetah

The swiftest land animal, the cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus) can be distinguished from the leopard and the jaguar by its slenderness, its long legs, and by the dark streaks running from the eyes to the mouth. These "tear lines" protect the eyes from the sun and give the cheetah excellent daytime vision, but its night vision is poor. Also unlike leopard or the jaguar, its spots are not arranged in rosettes.

A cheetah's blunt claws do not retract (or really, one should say "protract", for when cats' paws are rest, the claws are inside the digits).

This condition is excellent for land-running but bad for tree-climbing.

Answer: Cougar

Zoologists classify the cougar as a "small cat" (feline) rather than a big cat (pantherine), but it is the biggest of the small cats! In the New World, the cougar, or Puma concolor, is second only to the jaguar in size, and it is actually about the size of an adult human. Yet it is not always the apex predator, and will yield to the jaguar, the wolf, or the grizzly bear.

Other common names for P. concolor include mountain lion, puma, panther, and catamount, to name a few. The cougar cannot roar, but it can purr. There are few habitats in the Americas that the cougar has not occupied, although the the Florida panther subspecies (P. concolor coryi) is endangered and the Eastern cougar subspecies of North America (P. concolor cougar) is now extinct, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Answer: Bobcat

Found primarily the continental USA, a bobcat is a lynx, and like all lynxes has distinctive tufts of black hair on its ears. It is smaller than the Eurasian lynx and the Iberian lynx; in fact, it is the smallest of all lynx species. The bobcat (Lynx rufus) is most active at dawn and dusk, and it lives out its life in a solitary fashion, hunting rabbits and hares, and sometimes deer. Bobcats are vulnerable to being killed by cougars and by gray wolves who view them as competition.

The bobcat is about twice as large as a housecat, and of course its "bobbed" tail gives the beast its name, which was first used in Maine the 19th century.

Answer: Black panther

If you see an animal called a "black panther", it most likely either a leopard (Panthera pardus) of Africa and Asia or a jaguar (Panthera onca) of Central and South America that has a condition known as 'melanism'. A 'melanistic' leopard or jaguar has so much of the pigment melanin that its fur is so dark that you cannot make out the rosettes except perhaps in the brightest sun. Melanism is associated with lower fertility and higher aggression, but also with higher resistance to viral infection. It's a dominant genotype in jaguars, so black panthers may produce spotted offspring, but a pair of normal-colored jaguars cannot produce black panthers. Black panthers are known as the ghosts of the forest, as their dark coats keep them hidden in the night...until it's too late!