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Feline feces: UD researchers examine scat in effort to protect snow leopards

philadelphiazoo.org

Conservationists are trying to understand how to keep the world’s 7,000 remaining snow leopards from extinction. The current approach involves looking at feces to figure out what the animal is eating.

But new research from the University of Delaware suggests the method used may be flawed.

Recent UD graduate Sarah Weiskopf was curious if using genetics to identify snow leopard scat could improve scientists’ understanding of what the endangered animal is eating.

“When carnivores eat their prey, they also eat hairs and the hairs pass through their digestive system pretty much unchanged,” Weiskopf said. “So we can look at the hairs removed from the scat to identify what prey they were eating.”

What she found was that less than half of the scat collected actually came from snow leopards. In prior studies, researchers only used size and shape to identify snow leopard scat, erroneously including other animals’ scat. Weiskpf said because of that, those studies might have overestimated the amount of small mammals snow leopards were consuming.

The scat samples Weiskopf, Shannon Kachel and Kyle McCarthy used in their paper, What are snow leopards really eating? Identifying bias in food habit studies, came from Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. Weiskopf said the samples reveal that snow leopards are eating more large mammals than what researchers previously thought.

“So one of their main prey species was ibex, which is a type of goat,” Weiskopf said. “So if we know that they’re actually eating more ibex than what we had thought previously, that means we need to conserve more ibex.”

Knowing what snow leopards eat will allow researchers to develop the best conservation plan for the species. Philadelphia Zoo docent BetsyAnn Carter said the zoo’s three snow leopards are fed solid beef and beef bones; in the wild, according to the zoo’s website, the felines are fed larger hoofed mammals that reside in their habitat. Their decline has been caused mostly due to hunting and environmental destruction.

“If they live in the woods, for example, and people put roads in or housing developments, their environment is destroyed,” Carter said. “They can’t get from one place to another and if they try, they can get run over or shot.”

Carter said snow leopards are found in environments that are as cold as -40 degrees: Norther Russia, Northern China, Northern Pakistan, among other locations.

Researchers are developing the best conservation plan for the species. The Philadelphia Zoo and the nonprofit Snow Leopard Trust are working together to assess habitat and diets of snow leopards to make sure these animals survive well into the future.