Prey preference of snow leopard (Panthera uncia) in South Gobi, Mongolia.

ABSTRACT: Accurate information about the diet of large carnivores that are elusive and inhabit inaccessible terrain, is required to properly design conservation strategies. Predation on livestock and retaliatory killing of predators have become serious issues throughout the range of the snow leopard. Several feeding ecology studies of snow leopards have been conducted using classical approaches. These techniques have inherent limitations in their ability to properly identify both snow leopard feces and prey taxa. To examine the frequency of livestock prey and nearly-threatened argali in the diet of the snow leopard, we employed the recently developed DNA-based diet approach to study a snow leopard population located in the Tost Mountains, South Gobi, Mongolia. After DNA was extracted from the feces,

SUBMITTER: Shehzad W 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3290533 | biostudies-literature | 2012

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature