Facial pareidolia or aggressive mimicry: Do you see a bunny on the face of cats?

Abstract

Abstract Felids have evolved different hunting strategies depending on the prey they want to capture. The ambush by “sit and wait” is most effective when the amount or size of prey outweighs the cost of energy spent during waiting time, being advantageous for small cats if they could attract an animal or smaller predators for a lure. The ‘silhouettes’ of prey on the face of felids have been observed in 25 of the 40 species on average and may be associated only with our (human) perception. However, if this is not only a case of ‘facial pareidolia’, these ‘silhouettes’ could be associated with aggressive mimicry. To evaluate this hypothesis, we assembled a species-level data set of biological and ecological characteristics that could be associated with ‘silhouettes’ on the face of felids and combined these data with a dated molecular phylogeny. Next, we tested the association between ‘silhouettes’ and biological and ecological characteristics using a Bayesian implementation of the threshold model. Our results point out that 'silhouettes' on the face of felids are associated with small prey size and small body mass of predators. Taken together, these findings bring a new perspective to ecological, behavioral, and evolutionary studies of predator-prey relationships.