Leopard - Panthera pardus

[Deinobrontornis]

[a href="Leopard - Panthera pardus"]Leopard - Panthera pardus[/a]


Latin Name: Panthera pardus
Conservation Status: Least Concern
Location: Africa & Asia
Colour: See Below
Length: 0.9-1.9 m (3 - 6.25 ft)
Tail: 60-110 cm (24-43 inches)
Weight: 37-91 kg (82-200 lbs)
Life Expectancy:
10-15 Years (Wild)
20 Years (in Captivity)

Main Characteristics:
The Leopard is the fifth largest feline in the world behind the tiger, lion, jaguar and mountain lion. They have a body length between 0.9 and 1.9 m (3 - 6.25 ft), a tail length between 60 and 110 cm (24 - 43 inches) and they weigh between 82 and 200 lbs).

There can be considerable variations in the size of Leopards due to their distribution and available resources, for example Leopards that live in mountainous regions are smaller than those that live on savannahs due to their prey being smaller. Also typically female Leopards are 20 - 40 % smaller than males.

Leopards are strongly built and have a large head with extremely strong jaw muscles. They are graceful, stealthy animals and they are well known for their ability to go undetected. They are very agile climbers, good swimmers and probably the most accomplished stalker of all the big cats.


Leopards have a light tan base colored coat with a black rosette pattern and a lighter coloured underside. The shade of their base coat depends on their location.

Melanistic or black Leopards are far less common than the spotted form. They are known as Panthers (as are black Jaguars). They appear to be entirely black, but their markings can be seen if examined closely.

Darker colored individuals tend to be found in the dense forest areas of India and south east Asia as this helps them to stay hidden, and lighter coloured, larger animals tend to be found in the open plains.

Habitat:
Leopards are the most widespread feline and they can be found in Africa, India, China, Korea and Siberia. They are very adaptable and live in open savannah, forests, jungles and mountainous areas.

They are solitary animals and males have territories between 5 and 40 sq. Km (3-25 sq. miles). They mark the boundaries with urine and are very defensive of them. Their territory will overlap those of several females.


Diet:
Leopards are opportunistic hunters and feed on a wide variety of prey. Their diet consists of monkeys, antelopes, gazelles, duiker, eland, impala, wildebeest, jackals, rodents, hyraxes, insects, hares, snakes, birds, sheep and goats.

Leopards stalk up to their prey and launch an ambush, killing with a quick bite to the neck. They are extremely strong and can drag prey up to 3 times their own body weight up into a tree to consume it.

They can live without water for long periods of time, getting all the moisture they need from their prey.


Breeding:
After a gestation period of 90-105 days, 2-4 cubs are born in a den. They are born blind but have their eyes open within 10 days. At 3 months old they are weaned and begin to follow their mother when she goes out to hunt.

The cubs stay with their mother for 13-18 months then they leave to find their own territories. Males take no part in the rearing of cubs and 40-50 % of cubs do not reach adulthood.

Breeding takes place all year round in the tropical areas but it is seasonal in the savannahs and Leopards have a birthing interval of approximately 2-3 years.


Predators:
Humans are the main predators of Leopards.

Subspecies:
Due to Leopards having such a wide range, they have many subspecies. Some of them are listed below:

African Leopard
Panthera pardus pardus - Africa

Persian Leopard
Panthera pardus saxicolor - Central Asia. Listed as endangered. They are also known as the Iranian Leopard.

Indian Leopard
Panthera pardus fusca - India

Sri Lanka Leopard
Panthera pardus kotiya - Sri Lanka. Listed as endangered.

Indo-Chinese Leopard
Panthera pardus delacouri - Indochina

North China Leopard
Panthera pardus japonensis - China. Listed as endangered.

Amur Leopard
Panthera pardus orientalis or amurensis - Amur Region, border Russia, China, North Korea. Listed as critically endangered. Less than 50 left in the wild. They are also known as the Far East Leopard and the Siberian Leopard.

Javan Leopard
Panthera pardus melas - Java. Listed as endangered. It is a small Leopard and melanism is very common.

Arabian Leopard
Panthera pardus nimr - Arabia. Listed as critically endangered.

Anatolian Leopard
Panthera pardus tulliana - Turkey, Syria and Lebanon. Listed as critically endangered, possibly extinct.

Barbary Leopard
Panthera pardus panthera - Algeria and Egypt. Listed as critically endangered, possibly extinct.

Caucasus Leopard
Panthera pardus ciscaucasica. Listed as critically endangered.

Sinai Leopard
Panthera pardus jarvisi - Sinai Peninsula. Listed as critically endangered, possibly extinct. They are also known as the Eilat Desert Leopard.

Zanzibar Leopard
Panthera pardus adersi - Unguja Island. Listed as critically endangered, possibly extinct.

Panthera pardus millardi - Kashmir

Panthera pardus nanopardus - Somalia & Ethiopia

Panthera pardus suahelica - Eastern Africa

Panthera pardus melanotica - Southern Africa

Panthera pardus sindica - South West Africa

Panthera pardus pernigra - Nepal & Kashmir


Interesting Facts:
Leopards can drag up to 3 times their own body weight into a tree and place it on branches over 6 m (19.7 ft) high.

[LeopJag]

Some really impressive male leopards:

[LeopJag]

"Strawberry" Leopard Discovered—A First
Rare animal likely has genetic condition that changes
The pink-hued leopard wanders South Africa's Madikwe Game Reserve.

Christine Dell'Amore
National Geographic News
Published April 12, 2012

A leopard can't change its spots, but apparently it can change its color.

African leopards normally have tawny coats with black spots. But a male leopard with a strawberry-colored coat has been spotted in South Africa's Madikwe Game Reserve, conservationists announced this week.

Tourists in the reserve had occasionally seen the unusual animal. But it wasn't until recently that photographer and safari guide Deon De Villiers sent a photograph to experts at Panthera, a U.S.-based wild cat-conservation group, to ask them about the leopard's odd coloration.

Panthera President Luke Hunter suspects the pale leopard has erythrism, a little-understood genetic condition that's thought to cause either an overproduction of red pigments or an underproduction of dark pigments.

"It's really rare—I don't know of another credible example in leopards," said Hunter, whose group collaborates with National Geographic's Big Cats Initiative.

Hunter added, "it's surprising that didn't come out sooner, because he's relatively used to vehicles."

Strawberry Leopard Still Successful

Erythrism is very unusual in carnivores, and the condition appears most often in raccoons, Eurasian badgers, and coyotes, Hunter noted.

"There are some spotted leopard skins and melanistic specimens—black panthers—in museums with red undertones, but fading probably contributes to that," he said.

Melanism is an unusual development of black or nearly black color in an animal's skin, fur, or plumage.

The strawberry leopard seems healthy and likely suffers no ill consequences from his pinkish hue, Hunter said: "He's obviously a successful animal."

For instance, the leopard's coat still offers him some camouflage—leopards rely on their spotted fur to sneak up on prey and ambush them from as close as 13 feet (4 meters) away.

More worrisome for the strawberry leopard are the game farms that surround the Madikwe reserve, Hunter said.

If the animal were to leave the reserve, he'd lose the strict protection offered by Madikwe and become fair game for legal trophy hunting, Hunter said.

"It's the fate of a lot of leopards."

news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/04/120412-strawberry-leopard-south-africa-animals-science/

This leopard makes me think of what the transitional species between leopard and lion, might have looked like...lion is the leopard's nearest living relative btw - they are even closer to eachother than the jaguar.

[LeopJag]

Amur Leopard: The Cat That Should Have Died



© RIA Novosti.
14:54 18/09/2012
BARABASH/MOSCOW, September 18 (Alexey Eremenko, RIA Novosti)


It all began when then-Russian Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov saw a movie about leopards.
“We’d be nowhere without him,” said Yury Darman of World Wildlife Fund Russia, who spent a decade trying to save the Amur leopard, the rarest of leopard subspecies.
“It’s really about Ivanov, not the leopard,” Darman said. “The leopard was here forever, but then Ivanov came along.”
The educational film, Save Each of the Survivors!, which Ivanov saw in 2010, prompted the man once tipped to be President Vladimir Putin’s successor to lobby for the creation of the world’s only nature reserve for the near-extinct big cat.
Now the leopards, which reside in a less than ideal location for an endangered species to live in, have a shot at surviving, ecologists say.
But they still face plenty of dangers, including wildfires, hungry tigers, a shrinking gene pool and marines with hunting rifles.
Also threatening their survival are things that big cats usually do not have to deal with, like rural poverty, the state of Russian exports and even the shortcomings of the country’s youth policy.
At least there were 13 leopard cubs born last year, up from zero in 2001, Darman said.

The Last of the Leopards

“In theory, the Amur leopard should have died out a decade ago,” said Sergei Khokhryakov, deputy director of the Land of the Leopard national park which is home to the last 40 to 50 Amur leopards. “There is some factor we underestimate or don’t understand about it.”
The far eastern leopard, one of nine subspecies of Panthera pardus across the globe, once ranged as far as Beijing in the west and the coast of the Sea of Japan in the east, as well as throughout the Korean peninsula.
Now all it has left is an area some 400 square kilometers wide, mostly in Russia’s Primorye region – a tiny blotch on the world map.
The Amur leopard was placed on a protected species list as early as 1956, but the ban was hard to enforce. Border guard officers wanting to transfer from the Far East to some less remote place were rumored to be charged two leopard skins by their superiors, environmentalists say.
By the early 2000’s, only some 30 leopards remained in the wild, including only five fertile females. Some 200 Amur leopards live in captivity, but most are descendants of only two males, which increases the risks of inbreeding and its inherent health problems.
“When I first came here, I didn’t want to work on the leopard at all,” Darman said. “I thought it was a lost cause.”
Khokhryakov said he felt the same, but then national pride kicked in. “How come we can send stuff to Mars but not save a species at home?” he asked.

Bad Neighborhood

The Khasan district, the last refuge of the Amur leopard, is not really a good place for a far-ranging reclusive cat thriving on roe deer and the occasional dog.
A closed military zone in Soviet times, the district saw its economy virtually ruined when the army pulled out after the USSR’s perestroika reforms, leaving kilometers of empty barracks.
Left unemployed, many locals turned to poaching just to feed their families. Professional poachers also emerged, butchering salmon for caviar, boiling frogs for fat, a precious commodity in China, and inflicting other damage on local food chains that are topped by leopards and tigers.
Some poachers specifically targeted leopards, though they are now “over and done with,” Darman said with a scowl.
The locals also use fire as a primary means of clearing stubble in fields, not bothering too much if it spreads to the forest afterwards, threatening the cats’ habitat.
Even the Ivanov-backed nature reserve burned unhindered for days this spring, said WWF employee Andrei Fereferov.
He saved the day back then by raising a media fuss, which prompted the regional authorities to dispatch enough people and equipment to swiftly put out the fire. That was despite earlier claims that they had no resources for the job.
In some places, the local economy actually thrived: a railway and a federal highway pass through the area, serving both a stream of tourists heading for the beaches in the district's south and an inflow of goods to local ports.
At its peak, the traffic is 11 cars per minute, which makes it almost impossible for animals to safely cross the road. Even a tigress died under the wheels three years ago, and though no leopards have been hit, a lot of their prey is becoming roadkill, diminishing the food base.
Construction of a gas pipeline to China across the district is also underway. And that's not to mention the three firing ranges and the legal hunting grounds that the military, including the marines of the Pacific Fleet, has kept here and puts to active use.
“The fleet petitioned to not include the hunting grounds in the reserve because it's needed for the 5,000 sailors and their wives and children,” said Svetlana Titova, who oversees protected areas at WWF Russia’s far eastern branch.
“They claimed that otherwise the combat efficiency of the Pacific Fleet will be compromised,” she said.
Another threat is the Amur tiger, also an endangered species, which is not above killing or maiming a leopard in a territorial dispute.
“The job would have been a thousand times easier had the leopard been anywhere else in the region,” said Khokhryakov, who himself previously worked to save the Amur tiger in the Lazovsky nature reserve elsewhere in Primorye.

Cat Man to the Rescue

The original nature reserve in the area, Kedrovaya Pad, spanned a mere 18,000 hectares and had a budget of just 7 million rubles ($230,000).
Environmentalists have spent years campaigning to have it expanded. “I've made enemies of everyone in these parts,” said Darman, himself a native of Irkutsk in eastern Siberia.
Indeed, the local press is full of stories vehemently attacking the leopard backers, who are accused of seeking to obtain land for personal gain, and squeezing out longtime residents – a claim they indignantly dismiss.
Only the interference of Ivanov, now the chief of Kremlin staff, made it possible to overrule the resistance of local authorities and communities and set up a national park spanning 262,000 hectares.
“Putin's protecting tigers, so Ivanov showed subordination and picked a smaller animal!” an environmental activist quipped, referring to President Vladimir Putin's much-publicized involvement in saving the Amur tigers, some 500 of whom now live in the wild.
There is an alternative explanation. “He's just a cat person!” said Titova of WWF.
The total protected area is set to span 370,000 hectares by the year's end. Combined with 320,000 hectares of nature reserves on the Chinese side of the border, this will provide enough land for some 100 to 120 leopards – enough to ensure the immediate survival of the subspecies, experts say.
But a separate reserve population is needed to ensure the leopards are not wiped out by some epidemics, nature park deputy director Khokhryakov said. Work is underway, with a program awaiting sanction from Moscow.
Gun Under the Pillow
The Land of the Leopard houses more than 80 landowners, including several rural settlements and the Pacific Fleet marines and their firing range. Most of the inhabitants are armed, and unhappy at finding themselves residents of a national park.
“I've slept with a handgun under my pillow for three years,” said Khokhryakov, who used to head the nature reserve until a Moscow-ordered reshuffle this month.
More than 430 administrative offences have been recorded in connection with violations of the park in its first year alone, he said.
The WWF has launched an extensive education campaign for locals, printing out leaflets for each of the 30,000-plus district residents and making schools choose a leopard to “adopt.”
In the mid-2000’s, most locals polled by the WWF said they would shoot a leopard upon meeting it, but now the only deaths are accidental, with cats shot when mistaken for other game, Titova said.
The district has formidable potential for eco-tourism, but all it has to offer for now is an improvised “eco-track” complete with faded laminated photographs of plants and taiga wildlife, and wooden animals carved by inmates of a local prison.
Khokhryakov, who now oversees tourism at the reserve, is dismissive of regional officials’ attention to tourism development, which does not make his job any easier. “All they care about is how to stock the bar,” he says.



Money Doesn't Save Leopards

Anatoly Belov, declared the world’s best ranger by none other than Britain’s Prince Philip in 2010, works in the Land of the Leopard.
Working on a nature reserve is not lucrative. Khokhryakov recalled how he used to feed his family in Soviet times on tiger meat confiscated from poachers (“tastes like veal,” he said).
Rangers at the Land of the Leopard earn an average 17,000-18,000 rubles ($550-580) a month, a reasonable income for the Russian countryside.
They also get various monetary bonuses and are granted overseas trips, said Sergei Bereznyuk of the Phoenix fund, a local charity that supports the reserve with money and the occasional quad bike.
Still, most of the personnel are enthusiastic professionals who are not in for the money, both Darman and Khokhryakov said.
But enthusiasm for the mission is in short supply outside the Land of the Leopard.
The WWF used to run seven “leopard's friends groups” stocked with local teens and college students, but now, there are only enough people for three, said Titova.
“The kids just don't care anymore,” she said.
The adults are not much better. The annual budget of the nature reserve stands at 90 million rubles – under $3 million, a fraction of the $22 billion price tag for the recent Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Primorye.
About 40 million rubles comes from the state, thanks to Ivanov's lobbying. Otherwise, most prominent donors are not Russian citizens or companies, but Britons and Germans, Darman said.
“Only the government can save a species,” he said. “Public groups can only do odd jobs.”
Titova pointed that the WWF has been doing the government's job for years.
Creating a second leopard population will cost an estimated $10 million, experts estimate. Nobody can say where the money will come from.
There are five more nature reserves and two national parks in the region, many of them bigger than the Land of the Leopard, but also underfunded and understaffed. Unfortunately for the animals there, they have no films to show to big beasts in government.

en.ria.ru/analysis/20120918/176033761.html

[Godzillasaurus]

They have been known to actually take down full-grown male gorillas before. So no, a gorilla would not necessarily win in a fight with a leopard.