Prey Soaking: A Truly Unexpected Behavior Observed in Iberian Lynxes

In central Spain, camera-trap imagery reveals a troubling behavior among lynxes: females soaking their future meals for extended periods in water troughs.

Eight Documented Cases

Food washing is common in certain omnivorous species. If such a ceremony had previously been documented among primates, birds, and raccoons, it largely involved captive animals. Recently, researchers reported the first confirmed cases in a wild carnivore, involving the Iberian lynx (Lynx pardinus) and freshly killed rabbits.

As the authors of the new study, published in the journal Ecology, explain, predators typically consume their prey soon after death. Postmortem manipulations are usually aimed at facilitating consumption or storing them for later meals.

Strikingly, since 2020, the team has documented this behavior on several occasions among wild lynxes in the Montes de Toledo region, across multiple years. The eight cases involved five different females, and as many troughs.

It turns out they shared overlapping territories and, in several instances, a high degree of relatedness, which suggests a possible form of learning and transmission unique to this population, unexpected in animals long regarded as solitary.

Reasons Still Murky

At this stage, the reasons for these prey-soaking behaviors remain unclear, but they do not appear to be linked to warmer or drier conditions.

The team notably advances the hypothesis that they could aid the weaning of offspring, transitioning from milk to solid food toward the end of summer. Experiments have shown that dipping a rabbit carcass for 30 seconds significantly slows its dehydration.

In any case, this kind of research once again highlights the value of camera traps for our understanding of wildlife and the conservation of threatened species.

Previously, such devices had revealed a rebound of Sumatran tigers, critically endangered.