Self-described pop-tart enthusiast Anya Ratnayaka is a woman of many talents: she is a wildlife conservationist, a powerlifter and an artist. Anya lives in Colombo, Sri Lanka with her husband and two large dogs named after distant stars in our galaxy: Sirius and Vega, both beautiful rottweiler mixes, who seem to adore Anya as much as she adores them. 

“They are my everything,” Anya says, “I think the only things I would give up my conservation work for would be these two.” 

As a child, Anya always knew she would end up working with wildlife in some capacity one day. She was more comfortable with animals than people, she says, and during visits to other homes often gravitated toward the family pet, or the garden pond in the yard, where she could watch the fish flicker by under the water. 

Today, Anya is a Re:wild Associate,  the co-founder of the NGO Small Cat Advocacy & Research and the founder of the Urban Fishing Cat Conservation Project, which she started in 2013 after a chance encounter with an orphaned Fishing Cat in 2012. Before that experience, Anya had had no idea Fishing Cats even existed. When she returned home from Australia with a BSc. in Wildlife and Conservation Management, Anya intended to work with Leopards. All of that changed after she met her first Fishing Cat. 

There are 41 species of wildcats worldwide. Most of the world only knows about seven of them: the big cats. Small wildcat species make up the other 34. 

“There’s this public perception that large charismatic species require more attention than the smaller, more elusive species. There’s this perception that by protecting these larger species, you protect all species, but that’s not necessarily the case. Each species has its own niche within habitats.”

Anya hopes her art project, Project Felidae, will help raise the profile of small cats on a global scale by inspiring more people both to learn about them and to support funding of small cat conservation initiatives. Project Felidae is ongoing; Anya draws when she has time, with the ultimate goal of finishing illustrations of all 41 wildcat species and featuring them in a gallery where portraits of the big cats and small cats would be divided into two rooms. 

“I want people to walk into the small cat area and just be overwhelmed by what they’re seeing,” Anya says. “I want people to know that there are more small wild cats than Leopards and Tigers in the wild.” 

Colombo is a coastal city in Sri Lanka. Anya says that many people don’t know Colombo, where Anya’s Urban Fishing Cat Conservation Project operates, is also a network of wetland habitats that spread out through the city like pulmonary veins. Anya and her team learned that Fishing Cats in Colombo use the few green spaces that remain in the city for shelter and food. They are also known to visit gardens with fish ponds. 

“The landlord of this office where I worked in 2013 had this little outdoor pond. I remember him talking to a colleague and telling them that his fish were going missing,” Anya says. The Japanese Koi were expensive and the landlord was proud of them; he set up a security camera to figure out who was stealing his fish. 

The next morning at 5 a.m. Anya had a text message from her colleague with a screen grab from the security camera: the thief in the night was, unmistakably, a Fishing Cat. 

Like Anya, local people did not know there were Fishing Cats in the city. Through the Urban Fishing Cat Conservation Project, Anya has worked to raise awareness about the importance of studying and conserving this Vulnerable species, which lived for so long like a secret in Colombo’s forgotten wetland network. 

Anya Ratnayaka is a graduate in Wildlife and Conservation Management from the University of Queensland, Australia. A Wildlife Conservation Network (WCN) Scholar for 2017, she has a strong interest in Sri Lankan wildlife and in particular small wild cat conservation. She is the co-founder of the NGO Small Cat Advocacy & Research, and is currently conducting research on Fishing Cats found in Colombo’s urban wetland habitats. A chance encounter with an orphaned Fishing Cat in 2012 made Anya pivot from studying the Sri Lankan Leopard, and focus solely on this elusive, amphibious feline. She started the Urban Fishing Cat Project in 2013, and her research focuses on studying how the species is adapting to the the rapid clearing of their urban wetland habitat, while raising the species profile among stakeholders and the public. Her project was the first in the world to use GPS collars to track these animals. A member of the Fishing Cat Working Group, Anya is currently working closely with the Sri Lanka Land Reclamation & Development Corporation and the Department of Wildlife Conservation to uncover the secret life of this vulnerable species, and understand how we can better protect it.