Twelve in a Row

Mungotictis decemlineata, known locally as boky-boky, is the sole species in its own genus, one of only two small native carnivores found in Madagascar’s western dry deciduous forests. Eight to ten fine rust-red or dark brown stripes run along a beige-grey coat, ending in a distinctive bushy, brush-tipped tail the animal raises the instant it senses danger.

Ten stripes, one genus, and nowhere else on Earth.

Its range does not overlap with that of the ring-tailed mongoose, Galidia elegans, the island’s other small native carnivore, the two species having settled into separate corners of Madagascar’s forest habitats rather than competing directly for the same ground.

Most of Madagascar’s small forest carnivores are nocturnal, solitary, or both. The boky-boky breaks the pattern on nearly every count: it is active by day, and it lives in social groups that can reach twelve individuals, an arrangement genuinely unusual among small carnivores anywhere, let alone on an island known for producing so many strict loners.

It is found specifically in the deciduous forests growing on sandy soils across western and southwestern Madagascar, with the Morondava region, the same country that holds the giant jumping rat’s last stronghold at Kirindy, serving as one of its best-documented population centres.

Built along classic mongoose lines, elongated body, long pointed muzzle, bushy tail, the boky-boky carries a set of physical features that quietly break from the family template: webbed feet that make it a genuinely capable swimmer, and five separate facial scent glands used for marking territory and communicating within its own social group.

That combination, strong swimmer and daytime social forager, sets it apart even among its closest relatives, adapted less for stealth than for covering ground, and water, efficiently in the company of others.

Research conducted in Kirindy on the fossa, Cryptoprocta ferox, has mapped a social structure of its own alongside the boky-boky’s: female fossas hold clear territories, while males range across wider, overlapping home territories and sometimes form loose, stable associations with one another, a social pattern more complex than the solitary-hunter reputation fossas usually carry.

The two species, Madagascar’s most famous predator and one of its least famous small carnivores, share the same stretch of dry forest without directly competing, each occupying a distinct ecological role in a place that, on paper, looks too dry and too narrow to support this much variety at all.