Kinkajou

Name and taxonomy

The word kinkajou comes from the French quincajou, which itself came from an Algonquian name for the wolverine. The name is close to the Ojibwe word gwiingwa'aage. English speakers also call it the honey bear, the night ape and the night walker. Spanish and Portuguese speakers say jupará, cuchi cuchi, leoncillo, marta or perro de monte, and many of these words come from Old Tupi. In Suriname the Dutch names nachtaap and rolstaartbeer mean night monkey and curl-tail bear.

Schreber described the animal in 1774 as Lemur flavus, a lemur, which shows how monkey-like it looks. The description mixed a real lemur with Pennant's account of a kinkajou said to come from the mountains of Jamaica. Oldfield Thomas corrected the type locality to Suriname in 1902 and fixed the name Potos flavus. Saint-Hilaire and Cuvier had set up the genus Potos in 1795. Eight subspecies have been proposed, and a 2016 study of mitochondrial DNA found five clades that may deserve species rank.

Evolution and relatives

The kinkajou is the sister group to every other living procyonid. Its line split from the rest of the family 24 to 21.6 million years ago, at the end of the Oligocene. The remaining procyonids then divided into two branches. One led to the olingos and the coatis, the other to the ringtail, the cacomistle and the raccoons.

The species probably arose in North America. They crossed into South America after the Isthmus of Panama formed, as part of the Great American Interchange. The prehensile tail evolved on its own, because no other tree-dwelling mammal group is a close relative. Only one other carnivoran, the much larger binturong of South-east Asia, has a tail that can grip.

Appearance

The kinkajou has a round head, a short pointed snout, large eyes and small rounded ears of 3.6 to 5.4 centimetres. Its body is long and its legs are short. Head, body and tail together measure 82 to 133 cm, and the tail alone is 39 to 57 cm. Adults weigh 1.4 to 4.6 kilograms, and males are a little larger than females. The eyes shine green or bright yellow in a torch beam.

The fur is short, woolly and dense. The upper coat runs from tawny olive through wood brown to yellowish tawny, and the belly is buff or brownish yellow. Some animals carry a dark stripe down the spine, and some in central Panama have a white tail tip. Two kinds of hair, pale and brown-tipped, reflect light differently and give a false look of spots and lines. Colour grows paler from south to north across the range.

The tail is muscular, furred to the tip and fully prehensile. The tongue is long and thick and can extend about 13 cm. The claws are short and sharp, and the soles of the feet are heavily furred. An olingo looks similar but is smaller, has a fluffy tail that cannot grip, and has a longer muzzle.

Habitat and range

The range runs from southern Tamaulipas in Mexico, east and south of the Sierra Madre, down through Central America. In South America it covers the Amazon basin east of the Andes, the Guianas, and the Atlantic Forest of Brazil. It lives from sea level up to about 2,500 metres. GBIF holds records from 28 countries.

The kinkajou needs closed-canopy forest that produces fruit all year. That includes lowland rainforest, cloud forest, dry forest, gallery forest along rivers and regrown secondary forest. It is rare in palm swamp and thorn forest. It uses every layer of the canopy and hardly ever comes to the ground. Clearing of forest is the main threat to its habitat.

Diet and feeding

The kinkajou has the sharp teeth of a carnivore and the diet of a fruit bat. Fruit makes up about 90% of its food, and in one Panama study 90 to 99%. It prefers ripe fruit, and figs can be half of everything it eats. The Panama animals took 78 plant species from 29 families. It picks a fruit by how common and how easy it is to reach, not by colour or size.

To eat a soft fruit it holds it in its forepaws and scoops out the pulp with its tongue. It often hangs by the tail and hind feet and handles the fruit with both hands. Leaves, flowers and nectar make up most of the other 10%. In Bolivia, six kinkajous had ants of nine species in their stomachs, so insects matter in some places and seasons. It may take a bird's egg or a small animal now and then.

Captive kinkajous eat honey eagerly, but honey is rarely recorded in wild diets. It usually feeds alone, but several gather in a big fruiting tree where there is plenty for all. It follows known routes back to favourite fruit trees. Where food is short, the larger kinkajou drives olingos away.

Behaviour and social life

The kinkajou is one of the most nocturnal of all mammals. It leaves its den about 15 minutes after sunset and returns 15 to 30 minutes before sunrise. Activity is highest from about 7 pm until midnight, with a second burst in the hour before dawn. By day it sleeps in a tree hole or a shaded tangle of leaves, out of direct sun. One group in Panama used 44 different dens in a year.

Biologists once thought the kinkajou solitary, but radio tracking revealed a social life. A typical group holds two grown males, a single grown female, one subadult and one juvenile. Young males stay with their birth group or move next door, while young females leave. Group members sleep together in the day den at least 55% of the time. At dusk they groom each other and socialise, then split up to forage alone.

A home range covers 10 to 50 hectares, and a male uses a little more than a female. An animal travels about 2 kilometres a night, and moving between trees takes 50 to 65% of its time. Groups defend a territory by scent, and the second male helps with marking and threat calls. Density varies with fruit supply, from 12 to 74 animals per square kilometre. It can turn its ankles 180 degrees, so it runs backwards along a limb and climbs down a trunk head first.

Communication and senses

Scent glands lie beside the mouth, under the chin and along the belly. The kinkajou rubs them on branches to mark its territory and its regular routes. Scent also plays a part in courtship. Unlike olingos, kinkajous have no anal scent glands.

The species is noisy for its size. The commonest call is a snort followed by a run of whistling notes, which researchers call the snort-weedle. Group members call for under 30 seconds when they meet at night. Hisses and screams mean a fight, and barks, chirps, squeaks, grunts and whistles have all been recorded. Like other nocturnal mammals, it probably relies on hearing and smell more than on sight, though its eyes are large.

Reproduction and life cycle

The mating system is unusual, both polygynous and polyandrous. The dominant male mates with the group female and with any lone females on the edge of his range. The second male sometimes mates with the group female too, but genetic tests show the dominant male fathers nearly all pups. A female is in season for up to 17 days and receptive for about two. Breeding can happen in any month, but local peaks follow the fruit crop.

Pregnancy lasts 112 to 118 days, and the female bears one pup, rarely two. The pup takes no solid food until eight weeks and cannot move well in the branches until three months. Pregnancy and nursing together take about eight months, a long investment for a small mammal. The mother parks the pup alone in a tree while she feeds. Males give no care but tolerate the young, share dens and sometimes play with them.

A pup is independent at about four months. Males mature at about a year and a half, and females at a little over two years. Captive kinkajous usually live about 23 years, and the record is 42. Wild lifespan is poorly known, but the slow breeding suggests a long life.

Predators and threats

Living high in the trees and moving only at night keeps the kinkajou fairly safe. Most attacks probably come by day, while it sleeps in its den. Harpy eagles and Isidor's eagles have been seen eating kinkajous. Jaguars take one now and then.

People are the main predator. Kinkajous are caught for the pet trade, shot for meat, and skinned for wallets and horse saddles. Hundreds of live animals and skins leave Peru each year. The meat is not a favourite food, and the fur has no large market, so hunting pressure is patchy. Honduras has placed the species on CITES Appendix III, which controls exports from that country.

Population and conservation

The IUCN lists the kinkajou as Least Concern. It is common over much of its range, and it is hard to count, so no good population estimate exists. It copes with fragmented forest only moderately well. Deforestation is the main reason its range and numbers have shrunk.

Local hunting and the pet trade add pressure in some regions. Because it breeds slowly, one pup a year at most, a hunted population recovers slowly. Some of the five genetic clades may turn out to be separate species, which would change how each is assessed. For now, protecting fruit-rich forest appears to be the whole conservation plan.

Relationship with humans

Kinkajous are sold as exotic pets. They are playful, quiet and nearly odourless, but they hate noise, sudden movement and being woken by day. An upset animal screams, claws and can bite deeply. In 2011 the US Centers for Disease Control warned that pet kinkajous can carry raccoon roundworm, which can be fatal to people. By 2023 escaped pets were living wild in Florida.

In El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras a pet kinkajou is a micoleón, a lion monkey. In Peru it is a lirón, a dormouse, and people describe it as a bear-monkey. It does little harm to farms, though it eats young coconuts on plantations. Local people eat the meat and sell the skins. In return, the animal spreads the seeds of the forest trees that people also depend on.

In culture and myth

The kinkajou is so seldom seen that it seems to have left little mark on myth. Its many local names show that forest peoples knew it well, from the Tupi jupará to the Ojibwe-derived kinkajou. Many native cultures do not tell it apart from the olingo. In villages of Central America and the Amazon, people blame night-time rustling in the canopy on kinkajous, the quiet sweet thieves. Beekeepers and orchard growers tell stories that the animal can find sweetness, and they blame it for emptied hives.

Modern spirit-animal writers make the kinkajou a symbol of adaptability, intuition and the moon, but these appear to be recent inventions. One such blog claims an African folk role for the animal, which seems impossible, because it does not live in Africa. The name honey bear links it in popular imagination to bees and hives, even though wild kinkajous rarely eat honey.