title: 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, a region of ∼100 bp long from mitochondrial 12S rRNA gene was amplified, making use of universal primers for vertebrates and a blocking oligonucleotide specific to snow leopard DNA. The amplicons were then sequenced using a next-generation sequencing platform. We observed a total of five different prey items from 81 fecal samples. Siberian ibex predominated the diet (in 70.4% of the feces), followed by domestic goat (17.3%) and argali sheep (8.6%). The major part of the diet was comprised of large ungulates (in 98.8% of the feces) including wild ungulates (79%) and domestic livestock (19.7%). The findings of the present study will help to understand the feeding ecology of the snow leopard, as well as to address the conservation and management issues pertaining to this wild cat.
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire d'Ecologie Alpine, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Unité Mixte de Recherche 5553, Université Joseph Fourier, Grenoble, France.
authors.forename: Wasim
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Shehzad
authors.forename: Thomas Michael
authors.initials: TM
authors.lastname: McCarthy
authors.forename: Francois
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Pompanon
authors.forename: Lkhagvajav
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Purevjav
authors.forename: Eric
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Coissac
authors.forename: Tiayyba
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Riaz
authors.forename: Pierre
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Taberlet
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001522:Behavior, Animal; D044822:Biodiversity; D003247:Conservation of Natural Resources; D017931:DNA Primers / Q000235:genetics; D004463:Ecology; D017753:Ecosystem; D005243:Feces; D045989:Felidae / Q000502:physiology*; D008954:Models, Biological; D008986:Mongolia; D009841:Oligonucleotides / Q000737:chemistry; D016133:Polymerase Chain Reaction / Q000379:methods; D011235:Predatory Behavior; D017422:Sequence Analysis, DNA; D012756:Sheep
chemical_list: D017931:DNA Primers; D009841:Oligonucleotides