Persian Leopard (Panthera pardus saxicolor)

[Pckts]

"The rates at which prey are killed and consumed are less well understood. Effective management of predator–prey systems largely depends on reliable estimates of these metrics (Knopff et al. 2010). As well as informing predator–prey dynamics (Wegge et al. 2009), they are likely to indicate the extent of conflict with local stockholders (Farhadinia et al. 2014b; Ghoddousi et al. 2016) and also allow estimation of the nutritional carrying capacity of an area (Hayward et al. 2007; Jooste et al. 2013). Detailed knowledge of predation patterns also can reveal individual dietary specialists, which are increasingly recognized as being widespread in predator populations (Lowrey et al. 2016). These attributes of predation are not straightforward to study. Problems with estimating components of predation in previous studies include tracking sessions that are too short (19 days—Odden and Wegge 2009), inadequate sampling of kill sites (Martins et al. 2011), delays in identifying kill sites due to time lapsing before downloading data (Stein et al. 2015), and failure to verify kill sites identified from clusters of movement fixes (Rozhnov et al. 2015)."

Prey characteristics

"Prey species were allocated to 2 size categories. The “small” prey (< 15 kg) included red foxes (Vulpes vulpes), Indian crested porcupines (Hystrix indica), and birds. The “medium” prey (≥ 15 kg) category included urials, bezoar goats, wild pigs, domestic sheep, and domestic dogs. Young wild ungulates and domestic animals were also included in medium-sized prey."


"We found 130 prey items of 10 species that we assigned to 3 categories (Fig. 1; Table 1): wild ungulates (urials, bezoar goats, and wild pigs), domestic animals (dogs, sheep), and small animals, such as Indian crested porcupines, red foxes, raptors, pigeons (Columba livia), and chukar partridges (Alectoris chukar). Domestic prey were killed exclusively outside the national park, whereas 96.6% of all wild ungulate kills were within the park (Fig. 1). Nondomestic kills outside the park were urials (n = 3), wild pigs (n = 2), small mammals, and birds (Fig. 1). There was no evidence that prey type was influenced by season, the weight of the last prey item, or the search time since last kill (Table 2)."

"The Persian leopard is one of the largest subspecies (Stein and Hayssen 2013), adult males weigh on average 65.8 kg "

https://academic.oup.com/jmammal/article/99/3/713/4996220 Reply