Serval

Name and taxonomy

The name serval comes through Portuguese lobo-cerval, a word for the lynx. Buffon used it in 1765 for a spotted cat kept in the royal menagerie at Versailles. Behind the Portuguese lies the Latin lupus cervarius, the deer wolf. The genus name Leptailurus joins two Greek words that mean fine or delicate and cat. Schreber described the species as Felis serval in 1776. Nikolai Severtzov proposed the genus Leptailurus in 1858, and the serval is its only member.

Naturalists of the 19th and early 20th centuries named many local forms from single skins. Forster's Felis constantina of 1780 came from Algeria, and later names came from Sierra Leone, Togo, Uganda, Kenya and Sudan. Since 2017 only three subspecies are accepted. They are the nominate form of southern Africa, constantina of Central and West Africa, and lipostictus of East Africa.

Evolution and relatives

The serval's place in the cat family was argued over for decades. Some authors treated Leptailurus as a subgenus of Felis, and others grouped it with Felis, Lynx and Caracal. Gene studies of the 2000s and 2010s settled the question. The serval, the caracal and the African golden cat form one of the eight lineages of the cat family. A 2006 study dated the caracal lineage to 8.5 million years ago. Its ancestor reached Africa between 8.5 and 5.6 million years ago.

The serval and the caracal share the savanna, but they are easy to tell apart. The serval has a rounder skull, a narrower track and no ear tufts. In 1986 a serval tom and a domestic queen produced the first savannah cat. That hybrid is now a pet breed, and it seems to inherit the serval's leap and coat with the house cat's tameness.

Appearance

The serval is built for height rather than bulk. It stands 54 to 62 centimetres at the shoulder and weighs 9 to 18 kilograms. Females are lighter, at 9 to 13 kg, and males are sturdier. The head and body run 67 to 100 cm, and the tail adds about 30 cm. Long metatarsal bones in the feet make the serval's legs longer, for its body size, than those of any other cat. The toes are long and unusually mobile. The head is small, and the ears are the largest in the cat family for the size of the animal.

The coat is golden-yellow to buff, marked with black spots that vary a great deal in size. Three or four black stripes start behind the head, cross the shoulders and then break up into rows of spots. Toward the rump the spots stretch out and join to form rings on the tail, which ends in a black tip. The chin, throat and belly are white, and each ear is black behind with a white bar across it. Grassland servals tend to have bigger spots than forest ones. Black servals occur, most often in Kenya, and pale leucistic animals have been born in captivity. The guard hairs are 5 to 10 centimetres long on the belly and only 1 cm on the face.

Habitat and range

The serval lives across sub-Saharan Africa, from the Sahel to South Africa. It is common in the south, with strongholds in Zimbabwe and the province of Natal. In North Africa it survives only in Morocco, and it has been returned to Tunisia. It is feared extinct in Algeria. GBIF holds occurrence records from 43 countries.

The serval needs cover and water more than any one kind of country. Reed beds, tall grassland, wetland edges and savanna near rivers suit it best. It also uses moorland, bamboo thickets and forest brush, and it climbs to 3,800 metres on Mount Kilimanjaro. Rainforest and desert it avoids. Around the Mediterranean it lives in semi-arid scrub and cork oak forest. In the Ngorongoro Crater it lives at 1400 to 2200 metres, where winters are mild and snow sometimes falls.

Numbers are low even in good habitat. Luambe National Park in Zambia held about 0.1 servals per square kilometre in 2011. Surveys of the Dinder and Alatash reserves on the Sudan and Ethiopia border recorded it between 2015 and 2018. In South Africa it turns up in the Free State, the eastern Northern Cape and the southern North West province.

Diet and hunting

The serval is a rodent specialist. Vlei rats are its favourite prey, joined by grass rats, pygmy mice and multimammate mice. Rodents make up 80 to 97 percent of the diet, and up to 90 percent of prey weighs under 200 grams. One study put small mammals at 93.5 percent of the food and birds at 5 percent. Shrews, frogs, insects, lizards and snakes fill out the menu. Now and then it takes a hare, a duiker, a young antelope or a flamingo. It also eats grass, which probably helps digestion or brings up fur.

The serval hunts by ear. It walks along a trail, stops, and stands still for up to 15 minutes to listen. When it hears a rat, the ears swing to fix the spot and the cat creeps forward. Then it springs, up to 4 metres through the air, and drops on the prey with both forefeet. A bite to the head or neck follows, and a small rodent is swallowed at once. A leap can carry it more than 2 metres high and 3.6 metres forward. If it hears a rodent under the ground, it digs and sniffs until the animal bolts.

Birds are harder, and the serval jumps at flamingos, spoonbills and ducks with mixed results. It plucks a bird before eating it and pulls the guts out of a rat. Snakes get more blows and bites, and the cat may eat them while they still move. Large kills are sometimes hidden under leaves and grass for later. In Ngorongoro about half of all hunts succeeded, and one mother reached 62 percent. Morning hunts yield about 10 prey items and evening hunts about 6.

Behaviour and social life

The serval lives alone. Adults meet only to mate, to raise kittens or to argue over ground. In one four-year study only 7.8 percent of sightings involved two servals together, and most of those were a mother and her young. A male and a female sometimes travel, hunt and rest together for a short spell. Females are more active than males.

The serval is active by day and by night, with peaks at dawn, dusk and midnight. On cool or rainy days it stays out longer, and in the midday heat it rests in the shade. Near villages it turns nocturnal. It walks 2 to 4 kilometres a night along set trails, often on roads or paths where it can hear well. Home ranges cover 10 to 32 square kilometres and overlap widely, though neighbours avoid each other. Prey, cover and people all affect the size of a range.

Fights are rare. When two adults meet over territory, one may lay a paw on the other's chest and stare, and that usually ends it. A threatened serval bobs its head up and down, raises its fur and tail, bares its teeth and shows the white bars on its ears. It marks its range with sprayed urine, droppings and saliva rubbed onto grass. One male following a female marked 566 times in four hours. Servals stay put, and even a cat that leaves its range moves only a few kilometres.

Communication and senses

Hearing is the serval's main sense. Each ear turns up to 180 degrees on its own, so the cat can fix a sound without moving its head. It can hear a rodent moving under the soil. Sight and smell are good too. Like other cats, it probably sees well in dim light, which suits its dusk and night hunting.

The serval purrs like a house cat. It also chirps at a high pitch, and it can hiss, cackle, growl, grunt and meow. A female in heat gives short, sharp miaows that carry a long way. Scent does most of the talking between adults, through urine, droppings and glands in the cheeks. A mother calls to her kittens as she nears the den with food.

Reproduction and life cycle

Servals breed at any time of year, and the timing shifts from place to place. Births peak in winter in Botswana and at the end of the dry season in Ngorongoro. Across the range, kittens tend to arrive just before the rodents breed. A female is in heat for one to four days, once or twice a year, or more often if she loses a litter. She roams, sprays with her tail held up and quivering, and rubs her face on a male who approaches. Males take no part in raising the young.

Pregnancy lasts 65 to 75 days. The mother gives birth in dense vegetation or in a burrow left by an aardvark or a porcupine. A litter holds one to four kittens, usually two or three, each about 250 grams and blind. Their eyes open after nine to thirteen days, and they double their weight in the first 11 days. Weaning begins at a month, and the mother brings small kills to the den. If disturbed, she carries the kittens one by one to a new den.

A mother with kittens rests less and hunts almost twice as much as other servals. At about six months the kittens have their adult canines and start to hunt. They leave their mother at about a year old. Sexual maturity comes between one and two years, and a young male may need up to two years to win a territory. A wild serval lives about 10 years, and one was thought to have reached 23. The record in captivity is 22.4 years.

Predators and threats

Hyenas and African wild dogs are the serval's main enemies. Leopards and lions may kill it too, and leopards compete with it for food and ground. When a predator appears, the serval slips into cover and out of sight. If the danger is close, it flees in long leaps with its tail up, changing direction again and again. It climbs when it must, and one serval went more than 9 metres up a tree to escape dogs.

People are the greater threat. Drained wetlands and ploughed grassland remove both the serval and its rats. Its skin is still traded in Benin and Senegal, though less than before. Herders shoot or trap it to protect stock, even though it rarely takes livestock. It does kill poultry and, on rare occasions, a dog. Servals carry antibodies to the parasite Toxoplasma gondii.

Population and conservation

The IUCN lists the serval as Least Concern, with a stable trend. No global count exists, but the cat is widespread and lives in many protected areas. CITES places it on Appendix II, which controls trade in skins and live animals. The northern subspecies, constantina, is rated Endangered by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. It is nearly gone from North Africa.

Hunting servals is banned in Algeria, Botswana, Congo, Kenya, Liberia, Morocco, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, Tunisia and South Africa's Cape Province. Twelve other countries, from Angola to Zambia, regulate it. Captive-bred servals have been released back into the wild with mixed results. Radio tracking shows that releases work best at least 10 kilometres from people, where prey is plentiful. Released cats hold ranges of about 6.2 square kilometres, much smaller than wild ones.

Relationship with humans

The link between servals and people goes back to Ancient Egypt. Egyptian art shows servals arriving from Nubia as gifts or trade goods. In parts of Africa, chiefs wore mantles made from serval skins. In West Africa the cat has a place in traditional medicine. Tourists in Tanzania pay to see servals, which helps protect them.

Servals are kept as pets, and the trade is regulated in many countries. Sanctuaries warn that a serval bites hard, defends its space and copes badly with stress. Many pet servals end up surrendered to rescue centres. The savannah cat, a serval crossed with a domestic cat, offers the look with less of the risk. Near farms and roads the cat has grown used to people and vehicles. It is probably no danger to people, and the sources here record no attack on a person.

In culture and myth

The serval left a mark on Egyptian art, where it appears among the tribute of Nubia. It may have been kept at court, as the cheetah was, but the sources do not say what the Egyptians made of it. In 1765 a serval in the French royal menagerie gave the species its European name. Serval-skin mantles marked the rank of chiefs in some African societies.

Beyond that, the serval has little folklore of its own, and most African cat tales belong to the lion and the leopard. National Geographic Kids nicknames it the cat of spare parts because of its long neck, stilt legs and outsized ears. Spirit-animal blogs read it as grace, alertness and independence, but those readings are probably modern inventions. Its real fame today seems to come from the savannah cat and from videos of its leaps.