Cats love to massacre bugs, and scientists have the videos to prove it
Nearly one in three American homes is home to a cold-hearted killer. These stealthy assassins lurk in the shadows, silently stalking their targets. Some even have a well-known propensity for torture. These sadists aren’t even human: they’re house cats. And while these popular pets are best known for knocking down birds and cornering mice, they’re also adept at hunting all kinds of insects. Host a cat in your home long enough and you’ll probably get used to regular deliveries of amputated legs, insect wings, or sometimes whole carcasses. It’s easy to see that domestic felines have a knack for insect extermination, but understanding exactly which creatures are most likely to end up on the cat’s kill list is a little trickier. To find out, researchers at the University of Campinas in Brazil turned to one of the Internet’s most trusted forms of content: silly cat videos.
Insects Cats Can’t Get Enough of
The team collected 17,000 photos and videos taken from TikTok and photo-sharing platform iStock using search terms related to cats and insects. This initial search was limited to 550 examples of predation events involving domestic cats. They then analyzed each of these recordings for signs of prey and identified 14 distinct arthropod orders.
Orthopterans (think grasshoppers, locusts and crickets) were the most frequently attacked insects, appearing in 20.7% of videos. Insects from the expansive order Hemiptera, which includes bedbugs and cicadas, appeared in 14.5% of cases. Insects of the order Blattodea, which includes cockroaches and termites, come third with 14.4 percent.
The team says the findings highlight the power of leveraging social media for research purposes and shed new light on the cat’s insect diet, which was largely undetected by previous methods. Most notably, cats appeared to target cockroaches more frequently than previous studies suggested. The results are detailed in a study recently published in the journal Conservation and diversity of insects.
“Our results document cases of cats attacking groups of arthropods that have never been identified in academic articles as cat prey,” study co-author Raul Costa-Pereira of the University of Campinas said in a statement.
Evolution’s Perfect Killer
With their sharp, retractable claws and night vision, cats are evolved, perfected assassins. A study on the subject of cat murders published in Natural communications it is estimated that North American domestic cats may be responsible for the deaths of 6.3 to 22.3 billion mammals and 1.3 to 4 billion birds in a single year. They have even wiped out entire species. In 1894, New Zealand domestic cats hunted the rare Stephens Island wren to extinction just a year after it was introduced to the country.
Writing in their 2016 book Cat Wars, Authors Peter P. Marra and Chris Santella argue that these fluffy furballs should be considered among the world’s first true invasive species. They even compare the impact of cat products on biodiversity to the devastating impact of the insecticide DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane).
“Like DDT, they Technology,Animals,Biology,Cats,Environment,Insects,Internet,Pets,Science,Social Media,Spiders,Wildlife can cause serious harm and, once introduced, can be exceptionally difficult to remove from the environment,” they write.
Why dig through cat poop when you can watch TikTok?
Although the impact of felines on birds and mammals is well documented, it is more difficult to determine the role they play as insect hunters. Indeed, most studies analyzing cat diets rely on examining their feces for signs of skeletal remains. While this is useful for detecting vertebrate bones or feathers, signs of invertebrates with exoskeletons can go unnoticed. Researchers say this can potentially lead to an underestimate of the types and total number of bus cats they pray on.
Scat sorting also only takes into account ingested prey, leaving out many cases where a cat kills a creature, apparently for fun, and then abandons the carcass. In other cases, cockroaches or spiders may narrowly escape the clutches of a cat with a missing limb, only to die from their injuries.
Analyzing videos of cats attacking insects on social media offers an alternative approach. The team behind this new study says this constant stream of observational data, provided regularly and by willing volunteers looking for a few quick clicks, offers “unprecedented data” for studying the impact of cats on arthropod populations. There is even a term for this approach of using platform-generated data to quantify biological patterns called iEcology.
“By capturing their daily lives, people provide information that can be used as unprecedented data to study the structure and functioning of ecosystems under human influence,” the researchers write in the paper.
For their experiment, the team of biologists analyzed TikTok and iStock between March and April 2024 using simple search terms such as “cat insects” and “cat-hunting insects.” They selected only samples depicting cats consuming or hunting arthropods, as well as examples of cats attempting to capture or stalk them. To keep the results as natural as possible, they removed any instances where it looked like humans were getting involved or offering the insects to the cats.
Related: [Feral Cats Are A Huge Threat To The Global Ecosystem]
Overall, these results suggest that cats aren’t so picky about what they choose to kill. Crickets and grasshoppers were probably the most commonly targeted insects, simply because their relatively large size made them easy prey. In contrast, spiders made up only four percent of the insects in the videos, likely due to their smaller size and potentially higher risk of injury from the attacking cat.
Although cockroaches were frequently observed in the videos, they were not well detected in previous fecal analysis studies. This result alone highlights the potential opportunity to analyze social media videos for scientific purposes.
“The most interesting aspect of our research is that we were able to use social media data to reveal an impact of domestic cats on biodiversity that has been relatively overlooked by the scientific literature,” said the study’s lead author and undergraduate student, Leticia Alexandre, in a statement.
One thing is certain. When it comes to data, there’s no shortage of cats getting into trouble online.
Holiday Gift Guide 2025
