Study gathers over 4,000 photos to find Bolivia’s rarest Amazonian dog
cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/50686
> It has a fox-like snout, webbed toes and a thick tail. It’s called the short-eared dog (Atelocynus microtis), but also the ghost dog (perro fantasma in Spanish) in Bolivia, and the Amazonian dog. It’s one of the world’s least-known canids and one of the least frequently sighted carnivores in Latin America. Now, though, a study conducted over the course of more than two decades — from 2001 to 2024 — in Bolivia has revealed more than 4,600 camera-trap images that show how it lives, the places it inhabits, and why this species is so dependent on South America’s forests remaining intact to survive. The research underscores that the ghost dog is very much an Amazonian species, and in particular a forest one. In Bolivia, it can be spotted in the country’s continuous Amazonian forests, in the northern portion of the department of La Paz, but also in the department of Pando, in northern and northeastern Beni, and in the far north and northeast of Santa Cruz. It’s also found in the pre-Amazonian forests of the Andes mountain range, also called piedmont forests, at elevations up to 750 meters (2,460 feet). Robert Wallace, a British biologist from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) in Bolivia and a co-author of the new study, said the team conducted a systematic review of published and unpublished distribution records of the species in Bolivia. Throughout the 23 years, they also carried out 34 intensive camera-trap surveys in the lowland areas of the Greater Madidi-Tambopata Landscape (in…This article was originally published on [Mongabay](https://news.mongabay.com/2026/05/study-gathers-over-4000-photos-to-find-bolivias-rarest-amazonian-dog/)
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> It has a fox-like snout, webbed toes and a thick tail. It’s called the short-eared dog (Atelocynus microtis), but also the ghost dog (perro fantasma in Spanish) in Bolivia, and the Amazonian dog. It’s one of the world’s least-known canids and one of the least frequently sighted carnivores in Latin America. Now, though, a study conducted over the course of more than two decades — from 2001 to 2024 — in Bolivia has revealed more than 4,600 camera-trap images that show how it lives, the places it inhabits, and why this species is so dependent on South America’s forests remaining intact to survive. The research underscores that the ghost dog is very much an Amazonian species, and in particular a forest one. In Bolivia, it can be spotted in the country’s continuous Amazonian forests, in the northern portion of the department of La Paz, but also in the department of Pando, in northern and northeastern Beni, and in the far north and northeast of Santa Cruz. It’s also found in the pre-Amazonian forests of the Andes mountain range, also called piedmont forests, at elevations up to 750 meters (2,460 feet). Robert Wallace, a British biologist from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) in Bolivia and a co-author of the new study, said the team conducted a systematic review of published and unpublished distribution records of the species in Bolivia. Throughout the 23 years, they also carried out 34 intensive camera-trap surveys in the lowland areas of the Greater Madidi-Tambopata Landscape (in…This article was originally published on [Mongabay](https://news.mongabay.com/2026/05/study-gathers-over-4000-photos-to-find-bolivias-rarest-amazonian-dog/)
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> **From [Conservation news](https://news.mongabay.com/feed/) via [This RSS Feed](https://news.mongabay.com/feed/).**