Camera Traps Finally Catch the Amazon’s Mysterious ‘Ghost Dog’

Camera traps reveal a hidden predator that depends on intact Amazon forest.

The Amazon has a way of swallowing animals whole, but even for the dense rainforest, the short-eared dog is particularly elusive. For years, this wild canine with small rounded ears, a heavy dark coat and a long tail brushing the ground, seemed less like an animal than a rumor moving through the Amazon. Biologists saw it so rarely that the animal earned a fitting nickname: the ghost dog.

Now, after nearly 25 years of camera-trap work, the ghost has begun to take its true shape.

Researchers assembled 500 records of the short-eared dog in Bolivia and analyzed 594 independent camera-trap events from Bolivia and southeastern Peru. The work suggests that Amazon’s “ghost dog” (Atelocynus microtis) is thankfully less vanishingly rare than scientists once feared.

It is also not mainly a creature of the night, as previously presumed. It is, in fact, a daylight hunter that’s mostly hidden because it lives deep in the intact Amazon forest, especially in the upland terra firme forest away from rivers and people.

The Forest Finally Snaps a Picture

The short-eared dog does not look much like the foxes or domestic dogs most people know. It has short legs, a large head, dense fur that ranges from blackish gray to reddish brown. It also has partially webbed paws — a trait unusual among Amazonian canids. Previous research suggests it eats fish, insects and small mammals, and sometimes scavenges the carcasses of larger animals.

But knowing what it looks like has never meant knowing much about how it lives. Until recently, Bolivia had only a few confirmed localities, four museum specimens and very few direct sightings by experienced field biologists.

It seems like the short-eared dog is either extremely rare or stays very well hidden from humans on purpose. To find out, researchers left cameras where people could not go.

Many of the camera traps in the new study were originally set for jaguars. They ran through the dry season, sometimes with two cameras facing each other. In later years, they were baited with various scents, including Chanel No. 5 or Calvin Klein Obsession. Carnivores often stop to investigate strong, unfamiliar smells, and the pause gives a camera trap a better chance of getting a clear image. Obsession, in particular, has become a minor legend in field biology for its ability to draw the attention of wild cats.

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Over time, the traps gathered thousands of photographs of Amazon mammals, including 4,635 images of short-eared dogs.

Robert Wallace, the study’s lead author, said the work was a “wonderful example of how conservation technology and remote sensing — in this case the intensive use of camera traps — can provide substantial data on one of the least known species of the Amazonian rainforests.”

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The cameras also helped overturn a long-standing assumption. A secretive animal is easy to imagine as nocturnal. But 72 percent of the short-eared dog events happened during the day, with activity peaking between 6 a.m. and noon. The animal may avoid people, but it does not do so simply by waiting for darkness.

Hard To Find, But Still Not Safe

“The most surprising aspect of the results was that despite being an almost mythical beast, short-eared dogs are much more abundant than we had imagined,” the researchers noted.

That sentence needs careful reading, but the researchers don’t mean to say this is a common animal. Instead, the study places the ghost dog somewhere in a middle ground. By comparing its camera-trap rates with those of ocelots — a similarly sized predator that can be individually recognized by its markings — the researchers estimated an average density of about 15 short-eared dogs per 100 square kilometers.

That makes it less abundant than ocelots, but more abundant than larger carnivores such as jaguars.

Short-eared dogs appeared overwhelmingly in forest camera stations. They never showed up on open beaches or savannas. Occupancy models pointed to intact forest, especially terra firme — upland forest away from rivers — as prime habitat. Edge-heavy landscapes seemed less favorable.

Although learning so much about the ghost dog is inspiring, the Amazon’s hidden species often disappear before they are counted or even described. Camera traps often reveal that elusive animals were not imaginary, extinct or hopelessly rare. They were simply living in places people rarely enter. But those same records can also reveal just how narrow a wild animal’s habitat can be.

Ecosystem Management

In practice, many species depend on a particular kind of forest structure, which may include continuous canopy, low disturbance, enough prey and enough space to move without crossing farms, roads or settlements.

In the case of the short-eared dog, this matters because the Amazon is not being lost evenly. The rainforest is becoming thinner, more fragmented or easier for hunters, loggers and fires to penetrate. The new study suggests the ghost dog is not as rare as feared, but it also suggests why no one saw it clearly for so long: its refuge is the same old-growth forest now under pressure.

The study found higher relative abundance in national protected areas and in places where protected areas overlap with Indigenous territories. The researchers did not record the species with camera traps outside conservation management units.

“The most important management strategy is the protection of Amazonian forest canopy for which the creation and effective management of protected areas is the most important element, in combination with the sustainable management of Indigenous territories,” the researchers explained.

The new study appeared in the journal Neotropical Biology and Conservation.