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Soutpansberg’s leopards could be wiped out within three years

19 APRIL 2017 - 13:47 PM AGENCY STAFF


Paris — The leopard population in a region of SA once thick with the big cats is crashing, and could be wiped out within a few years, scientists warned on Wednesday.

The illegal killing of leopards in the Soutpansberg has reduced their numbers by two-thirds in the past decade, the researchers reported in the Royal Society Open Science journal.

"If things don’t change, we predict leopards will essentially disappear from the area by about 2020," lead author Sam Williams, a conservation biologist at Durham University in England, said.

"This is especially alarming given that, in 2008, this area had one of the highest leopard densities in Africa." The number of leopards in the wild worldwide is not known, but is diminishing elsewhere as well. The "best estimate" for all of SA, said Williams, was about 4,500.

What is certain, however, is that the regions in which these predators roam has shrunk drastically over the past two centuries.

The historic range of Panthera pardus, which includes more than half-a-dozen subspecies, covered large swathes of Africa and Asia, and extended well into the Arabian Peninsula. Leopards once roamed the forests of Sri Lanka and Java unchallenged.

Today, they occupy barely a quarter of this territory, with some subspecies teetering on the brink of extinction, trapped in one or 2% of their original habitat.

Leopards were classified last year as "vulnerable" to extinction on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Red List of endangered species, which tracks the survival status of animals and plants.

SA recently suspended trophy hunting of leopards, though experts agree this is not a major cause of the population decline.

A 2008 census of leopards in the 6,800km² Soutpansberg Mountains found a robust population of nearly 11 adult cats for each 100km².

To find out how the carnivores had fared since then, Williams and his team set up 48 motion-triggered camera traps across the area, and left them in place from 2012 to 2016. The cameras captured a total of 65 individual leopards during the four-year period: 16 adult males, 28 adult females and 21 younger cats. They also fitted eight adults with GPS collars to track their movements — or lack thereof.

Only two of the GPS-tagged leopards survived the monitoring period. Three were done in by snares, one was shot by a local resident whose cattle had been attacked, and two went missing, probably killed since they also disappeared from camera surveillance.

A statistical analysis of the results showed "a 66% decline over a period just over 7.5 years," the study concluded. Ironically, the bleak findings helped conservationists and local officials raise money to hire a "community engagement officer".

"One of the things he does is help local people adopt nonlethal techniques" to prevent leopards from attacking cattle and other livestock, including the use of guard dogs, Williams added.

But the clash between humans and big carnivores, experts agree, is mostly due to humanity’s expanding footprint, especially in Africa, whose population is set to expand by more than a billion before mid-century.

As a result, the habitats of most wild megafauna are diminishing, and getting chopped up into smaller and smaller parcels. "It is extremely alarming that the trends that we are reporting exemplify trends in large carnivores globally," Williams said.

Studies in Africa of lions, black-backed jackals and bat-eared foxes have showed similar rates of decline.

AFP

If no one is legally hunting them and there is no management or responsible presence then this is what happens.