At best, just 2,500 Indochinese
leopards survive today across Southeast Asia. They have been eradicated from
93% of their historic habitat by snares, poachers, deforestation and declines
in prey. Can conservationists stop the bleeding before its too late?
Wednesday 31 August
2016 07.15 BSTLast modified on Wednesday 31 August 201615.44 BST
Conservationists have long known
that it’s hard – and in some cases – nearly impossible to survive as a tiger in
Southeast Asia. Burning forests, high human populations and unflagging demand
for tiger blood, tiger skin and crushed tiger bone means the big cats have to
tread a daily gauntlet of snares, guns and desperate poachers. Now,
conservationists are discovering, belatedly, that the same is largely true for
leopards.
A sobering new study in
Biological Conservation has found that the Indochinese leopard – a distinct
subspecies – may be down to less than 1,000 individuals. And in the best-case
scenario only 2,500 animals survive – less than the human population of
Farmsfield village in Nottinghamshire.
“Most people assume that leopards
are still common everywhere, whereas everybody probably knows by now that
tigers and lions have become very rare in the wild,” said co-author of the
study, Jan Kamler with Panthera.
This has been in part due to the
fact that leopards have been less rigorously studied than tigers and lions, but
also the longtime assumption that leopards are more adaptable than many other
big cats and therefore able to survive in more degraded habitats, on a wider
variety of prey and closer to human dwellings. But even the leopard’s supposed
plasticity has not been enough to save them across most of Southeast Asia.
Indochinese leopards (Panthera
pardus delacouri) have lost 93% of their historic territory, according to the
new survey. They are extinct in Singapore and are potentially extinct in Laos
and Vietnam. Meanwhile, the few individuals hanging on in China are not
expected to survive.
Kamler said the illegal wildlife
trade is the biggest factor behind this massive decline.
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