Rapid Decline in S. African Leopards

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

Illegal killing of leopards in the Soutpansberg Mountains has reduced their numbers by two-thirds in the last 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 Samual Williams, a conservation biologist at Durham University in England, told AFP.

“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 South Africa, said Williams, is about 4,500.

What is certain, however, is that the regions these predators roam has shrunk drastically over the last two centuries, Physorg reported.

The historic range of Panthera pardus, which includes more than half-a-dozen sub-species, 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 sub-species teetering on the brink of extinction, trapped in 1-2% 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.

South Africa recently suspended trophy hunting of leopards, though experts agree this is not a major cause of the population decline. Other factors such as local residents killing leopards to defend their livestock and snaring play more significant roles in the species’ demise.

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 mega fauna are diminishing and getting chopped up into smaller and smaller parcels.