Lions in West-Africa

[BorneanTiger]

(09-04-2019, 06:26 PM)chui_ Wrote:

(09-02-2019, 10:40 PM)Luipaard Wrote: @chui_ Philipp Henschel also stated this:

Quote:We also have a genetic study underway, and there seems to be a clear distinction, genetically, from East and Southern African leopards.

The African leopard is seen as one subspecies but in reality, they could (and even were) be divided in multiple subspecies becouse of numerous reasons.

Yes, I saw that you had posted Dr Henschel's statement about Gabon leopards in the other thread. He was one of the co-authors of the above study I linked and it's nice to know more studies are underway. One of the most surprising finding of the latest research is the uniqueness of the Gabon leopards - it seems they may actually be genetically distinct from leopards from the rest of the Congo Basin which group with East African leopards. I wasn't expecting that, very interesting.

The grouping of all African leopards as one was never conclusively demonstrated. It doesn't make much sense when you consider the various natural barriers to gene flow which exist on the continent. In any case, even if there were no distinct genetic groupings the fact remains that African leopards are highly variable morphologically, having adapted to various different habitats. For example, you can easily distinguish a male leopard from Gabon vs one from South Africa. Or even a Kenyan leopard from a South African leopard.

So this is another genetic / taxonomic headache for the Cat Specialist Group, which published a revision of subspecies in 2017, which treats African leopards as 1 subspecies. I made this thread to detail all these headaches, including what that study shows about African leopards: https://wildfact.com/forum/newthread.php?fid=111 Reply