Knowledge about animal diet can inform conservation strategy, but this information can be difficult to gather. A new DNA-based method, which analyzes genetic material from feces, could be a useful tool, and researchers have shown its utility to characterize the diet of snow leopards in Mongolia.
The full results are reported Feb. 29 in the open access journal PLoS ONE.
Analysis of DNA from 81 fecal samples showed that the leopards ate mostly Siberian ibex, followed by domestic goats and wild sheep. Most of the animals eaten were wild (79 %), with a relatively low proportion of domestic livestock (19.7 %). The authors, led by Pierre Taberlet of Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in France, write that the results help further the understanding of snow leopard feeding, which can help address related conservation and management issues.
Citation: Shehzad W, McCarthy TM, Pompanon F, Purevjav L, Coissac E, et al. (2012) Prey Preference of Snow Leopard (Panthera uncia) in South Gobi, Mongolia. PLoS ONE 7(2): e32104. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0032104
Contact: Dr. Pierre Taberlet (pierre.taberlet@ujf-grenoble.fr) +33 476 63 54 33 (France), Mobile: +33 680 85 69 26 (France), or Thomas Michael McCarthy (tmccarthy@panthera.org) 206-384-2147 (US)
Financial Disclosure: This work was funded by Laboratoire d'Ecologie Alpine, UMR 5553, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France. Partial funding was provided by Snow Leopard Conservation Grant Program for 2010. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of this manuscript.
Competing Interest: EC, TR and PT are co-inventors of a pending French patent application entitled ''Amorces universelles et leurutilisation pour la de´tection et l'identification d'espe`ces deverte´bre´ s'' which has been submitted in France on 26 May 2011. Reference number: FR 11/54606, on the primer pair named 12SV5F and 12SV5R and on the use of the amplified fragment for identifying vertebrate species from environmental samples. This patent only restricts commercial applications and has no impact on the use of this method by academic researchers. This does not alter the authors' adherence to all the PLoS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.
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