Leopards: Solitary, Cryptic, and Out of Sight

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Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Abony Money and I'm Rich Schwartz. Welcome to Amazing Wildlife, where we explore unique stories of wildlife from around the world and uncovered fashionating animal facts. This podcast is a production of I Heeart Radio and San Diego Zoo Wildlife Allions, an international nonprofit conservation organization behind the San Diego Zoo and Safari Park. There possibly the most elusive of the big cats. Today, we're learning more about leopards, like what makes them so unique, and we're chatting with the San Diego Zoo Wildlife a lions scientist who works in Kenya about the method he is to learn the cats out in front of the camera to have their pictures taken, and we'll ask about his once in a lifetime discovery Rick. When we talk about big cats that includes tigers, lions, j aguars, and today's focus leopards. Well, and here's the thing, eviany. In general, when we think of big cats, so many people overlooked a leopard. Do you know why that is? I'm guilty. Um, what's your theory? Well, it hasn't been scientifically proven, but I personally believe it's because they are hard to spot. Oh my goodness you and you're silly jokes. I should have saw that one coming. But seriously, what are some of the things that make leopards stand out? Well, okay, honestly, right away, it is the spots, of course, but here's the fun fact for you. They aren't true spots like we see on the cheetah. Leopard spots are more like a cluster sometimes called rosettes. And I also think you know, it's worth pointing out leopards are on the smaller side of the scale when we talk about big cats. So, for instance, the lion, which the leopard does share habitat with those guys, can weigh three hundred five hundred pounds, and when we look at a male leopard, they average five pounds. Females even lighter at sixty five to about and thirty pounds. But being smaller than those big lions also gives them ability to quickly climb trees, pounds on prey from rocky outcroppings and trees, run quickly, and I love this. They love too, because they're very strong at it swim, so they're the little guys of the big guys. Yeah, you can say that that works well. Now, of those traits that you mentioned. The one that surprises me the most is the ability to swim. Do leopards tend to even live near water? Well? Yes and no. I mean leopards can be found in a wide variety of different habitats, from arid deserts, forests, grasslands, mountains, you know, the list goes on and in all these different habitats, some may have rivers and streams all year round, others maybe very little when it comes to water. Some of the areas in Africa seasonal rainy seasons. So although they are strong swimmers, not all leopards live in areas where swimming is something they can do often. You also mentioned be just how fast are leopards? How fast can they run? Oh? Yeah, leopards. It's not just they're fast runner, they're quick when they are leaping and pouncing it. It's amazing how fast it is. But you know that said, they aren't as fast as the cheetah, but they could easily outrun you and I. For example, at their absolute quickest fast burst, we're talking around fifty miles an hour. But on average, if they're kind of just you know, loping around, it's closer to thirty ftur. But for reference, that's still a lot faster than you and I. You know, the average human usually runs at a pace of ten to fourteen miles an hour. So let's settle this. Enquiring minds want to know if there was a race, how would it go, Which at the large cats other than Cheatah might have a chance to beat the leopard. Well, I mean, if we're talking about a short sprint, yes, absolutely it's going to be the cheata. Their blazing speed is seventy miles an hour. But if we take the cheata out of the equation, that's a really good question, because all big cats can do a short burst fairly quick. Plea. The leopard has that ability for that short purse of quick running, but so do lions, so do tigers, and even the jaguar. So Rick I have an embarrassing confession. I cannot tell the difference between a leopard and a jaguar. What sets them apart? Well, I'm glad you asked that, because you're not the only person to ask that question. Honestly, it's nothing to be embarrassed about. When people want to find out about animals, I always say, please ask, even if you think it's going to be a silly question, and honestly, it is challenging to be able to tell them apart at a glance. Especially of course, if you're at the zoo, your giveaway is going to be to look for the sign. That's always the best way to identify any species at the zoo. But if you're out on an adventure in the wilds of Africa, Asia, or even the Middle East, you're going to be seeing a spotted cat. That means if it's not a cheetah, which has those true spots, then it's definitely a leopard. That's because jaguars don't live in those regions. And if you are seeing a big spotted cat in the southern parts of North America, a Central America, or South America, well then that's gonna be a jaguar because leopards don't live in that region, but jaguars do. And now, if you want to really get good at here we go spotting the difference between a leopard and the jaguar. Remember those rosettes I was telling you about that cluster of spots those leopards have no of course, jaguars have them too, But if you can look closely, the jaguar is the species with a spot inside the rosette. Leopards don't have that. The inner part of the rosette does not have that spot. But of course there's an exception to every rule. Here's something to make it even more confusing for everybody. Both species can have an all black coat. That's right. The black panther is really just a leopard or a jaguar with a full black coat. And to be honest, it was just today as I was preparing for this podcast that I realized a black panther is not its own species, but it's actually a black colored leopard or jaguar, as you just mentioned. Can you tell us a bit about the different types of leopards, including ones people can observe at the San Diego Zoo. You know, we do have different species of leopards at the San Diego Zoo. But when it comes to talking about all the different species of leopards, this is where one of those answers it gets kind of tricky. So when scientists first started classifying animals, we're talking hundreds of years ago, they used bone structure, skull structured dentition, which is just a fancy w had to say tooth composition and placement within the skull, and other structures of anatomy to kind of classify who's related to whom and what families scientifically, and today we have the ability, of course to look at the d NA. These are the building blocks really of what makes a species of species. So with this now we've seen some changes to some species becoming subspecies. Others aren't considered related to the leopard but still have leopards in their names, or the snow leopard and cloud of leopard, or are no longer believed to be directly related to the African leopard that we see throughout Africa and parts of Asia. So why aren't they ficially leopards? Won't remember I talked about that we now have access to looking at the DNA building block, so it's all genetics. When we look at the differences between the snow leopard and cloud of leopard versus the African leopard, then it's considered to be too far apart to be considered a true leopard of that kind. Makes sense now. Being elusive is a characteristic that comes up a lot with these big cats, and it also seems to be a characteristic that is valuable in the wild to avoid detection by predators. How good are leopards at staying out of sight? Well? Everything, Like I said before, they are hard to spot. I had to go there. Sorry. They are naturally solitary and prefer to stay away from confrontation. You know, you have a lion pride. You're talking anywhere from four or five up to fifteen individuals and leopard is gonna see that and go not today. And hyenas also they live in large groups as well, so you know when you talk about needing to avoid lions and hyenas and even people, honestly, whenever possible, they do very well at staying away from confrontation and not being detected. They understand the which way that the breeze is blowing, so they stay down. When did they understand what path they can take to be undetected? And I have to share I had an opportunity to go to Boutswana. We were there because of our elephant conservation work, and I start out ten days there I think about half that actually in a tent out in the bush, and we would wake up some mornings and there would be leopard prints as in footprints right by our tent, I never detect them. You you can hear the hippos, you can hear the the all the other lions and the hyenas. You can hear so many animals all night long. Never did we hear or know a leopard was walking through camp, and it happened multiple nights, So they are incredibly stealthy. I would be happy to know that. I would rather I would rather not know. I think I would what I should say, I would rather I would rather not know. This is what's it tent. So leopard subspecies are either endangered or threatened. What's being done to increase the number of leopards in the wild. Well, that's another one of those questions, eveny that has multiple answers, because each subspecies of cat with leopard in the name has different things being done for their conservation. With some subspecies, population surveys are being done to better understand how many live in certain areas. Other subspecies have reintroduction programs being worked on, while others have breeding programs in place to help create safe populations. Those all sound like great ideas. In speaking of a great idea, it's time for the San Diego Zoo minute, an opportunity for you to learn what's new at the zoo. We have just welcomed a baby squirrel monkey to the San Diego Zoo family. This adorable infant is already a big hid and rides chalky style on mama's back instead of cleaning to her chests like other primates do. Sounds adorable. Well, It's too soon to tell if the baby is male or female yet, but wildlife care specialists will have a better idea as it continues to develop more distinguishing features. Now, our squirrel monkeys are currently off habitat, meaning not available for the public deceit, but they will live in our new Wildlife Explorers base Camp habitat opening later this year. Now at base Camp, Wildlife explorers will have the opportunity to interact, climb, scramble and jump on innovative nature play areas, including in wildwoods, alongside the squirrel monkeys. African leopards are one of the most elusive and difficult large carnivores to track in the wild. Solitary and cryptic. Little is no about the population size or conservation status of leopards over much of their African range, but one project is trying to help change that. San Diego Zoo Wildlife Aliance scientists Dr Nicholas Pilfold, along with Dr Kirsty Rupert, started the Ufati wat Chewy project in you foti wa Chewi means leopard conservation and Swahili, and the program aims to learn more about leopards so that we can protect their future. Today we're speaking to Nicholas. Hi. Nicholas, Hello, Ebony, Nicholas take us back to why did you need to track and count leopards in Kenya? Thank you very much for having me. Yeah. So in seventeen we started a small pilot study after one of our other studies, the Twigo W. Lindsay Project and Articulated Giraffe, had done some community interviews and from those community interviews they were asking for help with leopard conservations. Particularly the community was concerned that leopards were raiding their livestock and killing their sheeps and goats as leopards can do. We started out with a small study and looked at establishing ourselves in the region and looked at the conservation priorities that we needed to work on for African leopard. Can you tell us a bit about tracking leopards? What was your strategy, how did you go about it? Yeah, so, one of the conservation priorities for leopards, as you said in the introduction, is there's not a lot known about their population sizes or their trends. And so one of the reasons for this is that leopards are very cryptic, they're very elusive, they're hard to track. Their difficult species to work on, and a lot of myth has sort of followed their conservation. A lot of people feel that leopards, because they can live in many different environments, they can live in environments such as city streets right out to very remote deserts mountains, that leopards are going to be fine. And so what we found when we set up the study is that we didn't really know much about the population dynamics, and so we had to start to track them. To track a leopard, it's a difficult task. You start with trying to understand where people had seen leopard in the past. So we did a lot of interviews with rangers and communities uh to get information on basics about where they had seen leopards. Although leopards are not seen very often in our area where we're working, they stay in the mind of people, so they do remember the places that they've seen them from there, we had to focus in very closely on the areas that we wanted to set up cameras. So we use remote cameras to track the population, and we had to find specific sites in which we could set those cameras up so that we could capture leopards on film. So, Nicholas, I understand you're using a special technique to learn the leopards in front of the camera. Can you talk to us about that, Yeah, that's right. How many you know? It's not easy to track leopards in the wild. They're very cryptic, they're elusive species, highly adaptable to their environment, and they could disappear right in front of your eyes. I've seen leopards disappear a hundred yards off the truck and they're just gone in the wilderness. So to get them on camera, we've been employing a few different techniques. One is we use a little bit of perfume around the trails where the cameras are placed, and this is just to convince the leopard that there's something interesting near our camera that they should come by and sniff and check out and that has worked out really well for us because when they do come from the camera and they check out that perfume, they actually stay in front of the camera long enough for us to get what we need, which is their rosette patterns. So all leopards have these unique coats of rosettes up and down both flanks of their body, and they act a lot like human fingerprint. Every leopard is unique and every rosette pattern is unique. So this perfume is great because the leapora will come by and hang out for a little bit and we get some really nice pictures so we can identify individuals so that we can count the population and determine how well leopards are doing in the region where we're working. And I understand there's two cents in particular that work well a hint. One is made by a famous fashion design house and the other is from an American fashion staple. How does you come to find out that these two particular sense would work well. Yeah, So perfumes have been used for a long time and zoos as a type of enrichment for big cats. And there was a study about twenty years ago from the Bronx Suit where they took a number of perfumes and put them with big cats to see what their response would be. And what we found is that leopards seem to like a couple of those types of perfumes, and so that's what we've been using the field. The key ingredient inside those perfumes as a compound called sieve tone, which is what civic cats make during the breeding season to attract other cats to them, and it seems that that also works for leopards and brings them into where we want them in front of the camera. So how quickly we're able to see that this method was effective, Yeah, we saw changes in leopard behavior right away. As soon as we put that perfume out. We saw a lot more detections of leopards on our cameras. We saw a little bit of a change in the way they were behaving in front of the camera, spending a bit more time as I previously referenced. So right now we're currently working up the results, but yeah, gets safe to say that leopards really do like perfume and that it's a cost effective way of increasing detection of a very cryptic species. And during this research and in gathering process, I understand that there was an exciting, exciting Can you talk about when the black panther appeared. Yeah, So when we started the study in TV, the first thing that we did is we went to the communities to interview them about leopards and gather a bit more information and look to understand where we could track leopards in the environment. And we were told that there were some melanistic leopards living in the population. And so what I did is I went back into the scientific literature and what I found was that there wasn't really any good information available about the occurrence of these black leopards living in Africa, and they're very rare in the African savannah. So we heard about these particular leopards and we set up a much more dense set of cameras in a given area to try to capture the information that would confirm to us that, yes, there are melanistic individuals living in this population. And what was your reaction to being able to scientifically confirm the melanistic individuals. I was very exciting him and he's very exciting. I do remember when we got the first images back. It's almost hard to believe what you're looking at a little bit, because you think about it, leopards are already very hard to track, and then you're looking for a couple of rare individuals. So getting that image back was very exciting, and then we were able to increase our accuracy with what we were doing once we've got the initial images back. And one of the key findings for us is if you look at black leopard in the middle of the day, their coats are jet black. So the thing that we wanted to do to be absolutely that we were looking at a black leopard was captured these cats at night, and what we use in our cameras is infred imagery at night, and when those cats walk by the cameras in infrared, the rosette patterns that key signature that you know you're looking at a leopard that really stands out at nighttime. So getting all that imagery together was very exciting and the results I think speak for themselves. You mentioned that black leopards are a rare sighting in Africa, but they're from what I understand, found in greater numbers in Southeast Asia. Why is that so? Melanism? It's a recessive trait on the gene. Essentially it's a mutation where the coat pigment overcolors the coat. There's no control over the pigment. And so if we look at all the leopard subspecies all the way from Africa all the way to Russia, you know a five percent of the population has it, but you're very right. In some areas it's much much higher. If you go to the Malay Plantla of the leopards they are black and only five percent or golden. So what we think is going on there is that leopards that live in forested environments, very shady, dense environments, lots of trees, it's better to be black. As a leopard, you're an ambush predator. You're trying to sneak up on your prey, and so if you're dark in a shady environment, you've got better cryptic coverage and you can sneak up on animals easier. So in Africa, a lot of the leopards are living in open savannahs without heavy forest. So that's why it's so rare to see the black trade expressed. And for us, it's it's a bit of a surprising result because in the area that we work, we're actually in a semi arid area. We're not in dense, heavy forests. So we're following up on this now to see if there's any other mechanisms that may allow for melanism to be expressed in a in a population of leopards. So when people refer to black panthers, can you clarify exactly what species are they actually referring to? Is a black leopard or Yeah, it's a common question. Yeah, So black panthers as a generic term usually for black leopards or jaguars, So panther is sort of referring to a cat term. Overall, panthera is the species Latin, so black leopard or a black jaguar, both of those can be referred to as a black panther. You also study bear species. How does tracking bear compared to trying to track and draw out a leopard? Totally different. So when you're tracking a polar bear, you're out over the sea ice and there's no trees, there's nothing for polar bears really to hide behind. The way we track a bear is that when we're out on a helicopter, we're looking for the footprints that they've left in the snow and trying to find a fresh snow track, and then once we get on that snow track, we follow it in the helicopter and try to find the bear that's making the track at the front end of it. With leopards, it's different. Tracking them live like that is very difficult to do, especially in an arid environment, because their footprints don't remain in the environment for very long. So what we're looking for is actually post scenes of where leopards have been and hopefully will they'll come back to. So one of the ways that we have set our cameras is we look for trees that leopards like to use. Leopards are somewhat are boreal. They need to use other structures in their environment to keep their food to themselves. So one of the things will do is they'll take their food up into trees. They'll also rest in trees. They're very good climbers and that keeps them away from the other competitors. So what we do have we've gone around to specific areas and looked at trees and looked for their claw marks. In the trees, we can tell how fresh those claw marks are. We know of leopard has been there and likely will return and that's where we set our camera. So it's a little bit kind of like got Live tracking with boiler bears versus sort of looking for past signs with leopards and hoping that they come back to the same area. And you spoke about when you started your research talking to people in the community there in Kenya, and the testimony is about the conflict between livestock and the leopards. Has your research given any inside of how to deal with that problem or what did you find on on that front? Yeah, I mean, so the two major conservation challenges that we're looking at with leopard. The first is the population assessment, which we've talked about, and that not being there so we can't really develop plans and so we know more about the population dynamics and how they're doing. The second major challenges this conflict with humans. So when leopards go into community and kill sheeps and go primarily sometimes what happens is that the community will retaliatorily kill that leopard to prevent it from coming back, or put out poison or snare. One of the things that we wanted to do was try to improve upon the protection of that livestock so that people would have a better relationship with leopards. So we've done a lot of work where initially we started to track just record the number of conflicts that were happening. We hired a number of community representatives to go out and tell us when livestock were either being injured or killed by any large carnivore, just so we could understand the overall dynamic and what leopards were contributing to that in that picture. And then we've been testing out livestock to terrence or predation to terrence for leopards. So what we've done is we put out these lights that go around the livestock corrals or what we call Boma's and Kenya where they keep their livestock at night, and these lights and they charge during the day with a solar panel and then as soon as it goes dark at night, they blink and that just gives the Russian that there's human activity. And we've seen that these lights have been very effective in lowering the amount of livestock that are being predated upon by leopard. Just be giving the signal that this is a human area seems to deter them a bit more. And this research it seems obvious that a lot has gone into this program. It's very expansive. Can you talk to us about what all it has taken to do research like this and tell us more about your partnerships. Yeah. So when we went to Kenya to establish a leopard program, we quickly realized that there wasn't a lot of research on leopards occurring on the ground, and so we created a network of partners to work with us because it is very difficult to track this species and they arrange quite broadly. So we have partners on the ground conservancies that we work with, and Pala Research Center and their conservancy and Loysaba Conservancies where we're currently based, the Nature Conservancies and another critical partner of ours, and then we also work with the government, So ken You Wildlife Service and the Wildlife Research and Training Institute are very important partners for us because what we want to do is when we do this conservation work, we want to make sure it's utilized by the government so that the best possible outcomes occur for leopards in the country. So, when it comes to researching a species, what's the benefit of working with partners. Partners are essential to what we do on the ground. We are experts in wildlife care and wildlife research, but we need to partner with people who understand the land and manage the land and work collaborately together so that we can tell them a little bit what's going on with the species that inhabit that land, like leopards, how many of there are and how well they're doing. So these partnerships are crucial in order to understand the health of the landscape and how well the wildlife species are doing. We also are working collaboratively with the Kenyan government and their scientists so that we can come together and create management plans so that the species can be conserved into the future. So what's next for your research and helping to and how it hopefully helps you increase leopard populations in the future. We're working very closely with the Kenyan government. They just finished their national Wildlife Survey, the first one they've ever done for the country, which is a huge achievement for them, And one of the things that they found is when they looked at the large carnivores, they could provide national estimates for lion, hyena, for cheetah, and wild dog. All those large carnivores had national population estimates around the but leopard did not. So our next major challenge in front of us is actually scaling up. So we have the study areas about four d square kilometers in size, and we have these cameras that are out in that area doing a very good job of telling us about those leopards in that area. But what we need to be able to do is a better job at a regional assessment trying to figure out how many leopards are living in our a larger area. And it's difficult to do that with cameras. Cameras are somewhat expensive to operate, they produced a lot of data that needs to be sorted and so that's a huge challenge for us. So what we're doing now, our big future push here is to use DNA to try to track leopards. So we've talked about perfume. Sometimes that perfume entices a leopard to rub on the area where the perfume has been sprayed. So they rub their cheek or the side of their body against the tree. And if you put the material there, like a little bit of a velcrow or something that has a bit of adhesive material, you can pick up some hair and as soon as you have that hair, you can then run the genetics on that hair and identify the individual that way. And so that's sort of the next stage. We want to move to doing larger regional accounts, more rapid assessments using DNA because it's a lot quicker, a lot more efficient to getting those population numbers together. And was it like for you to do this type of work and for your work too, hopefully one day help to expand the leopard population in save leopards. You feel very lucky to have the job that I do. I feel a great attachment to the work that I do, and it's not an easy task. Conservation is a long game. You have to take it bit by bit over time. But I think I'm very very happy to have a role like this in my life where I get to try to help us figure out solutions so that future generations can go to African sea leopards or go to the art to can see polar bears. We've been speaking to San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance scientist Dr Nicholas Pilfold. Thanks so much for talking with us. Thank you having me. It's been a pleasure. And that's our show for Today, I'm Ebony Money and I'm Rich Schwartz. Thanks for listening. Be sure to subscribe and tune into next week's episode, in which we share with you the story of an animal so big just its head alone weighs as much as for full sized refrigerators. For more information about the San Diego Zoo and San Diego Zoo Safari Park, go to stz w a dot org. Amazing Wildlife is a production of My Heart Radio. Our producer is Mikia Swinton, Our executive producer is Marcy de Pina. Our audio engineer and editor is Amita Ganatra. For more shows from my heart Radio, check out the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.