Endangered big cats – snow leopard: shy and perfectly camouflaged

At the beginning of May, tourists in the Spiti valley in Himalaya Indian saw a snow leopard walking on a mountain road. The mobile phone video of rare sighting became a hit on social media.

The habitat of the snow leopards is the difficult to access, rocky, snow -covered mountains of the Himalayas and Central Asia. The World Natural Protection Union classifies 4,000 to 6500 existing Panthera Uncia as a endangered species. The harsh conditions of their difficult habitats, their life as a loner, but also political and military barriers in Pakistan, India and China make it difficult for scientists to access snow leopards. In addition, the lonelian cats with their black and gray white are hard to discover in the middle of scree and snow. Snowopards have therefore not been researched, although progress has been made in recent years thanks to modern technologies.

Miha Krofel from the University of Ljubljana investigated the question of how snow leopards communicate. The challenge of recording data in the Altai Mountains in Mongolia mastered his team with the combination of camera traps, the analysis of traces of snow and transic counts of scratch marks. For the latter, lines are drawn in the examination area, counted along which animals are counted or traces are registered. “The combination of all three methods was able to identify seven communication behavior,” says the “Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology” published in February 2025 in February 2025 Study. Most of the visits to marking points have started sniffing before other behaviors such as urine splashes, scratching, sniffing, heading, rubbing, fitting and claw markings were added. The highest marking rates were recorded in gorges. KroFel and colleagues »Recommend “Gorges as preferred habitats” of the cats for the use of camera traps. Such data is not only another piece of the puzzle in the snow leopard research, but also contribute to the optimization of future research.

Snowopards are related to the Eurasian lynx.

In a long-term study, researchers in Mongolia equipped more than 20 snow leopards with GPS neck bands to “explore the behavior of the shy cats”. The project is carried out by Snow Leopard Trust and Mongolian experts together with the Swedish University of Agricultural Science.

The mountains of Central and South Asia warm up twice as quickly as the rest of the northern hemisphere. This lets the habitat of snow leopards shrink, could change prey populations and ride -on cats to search for food to the herds of farmers and shepherds. This increases the risk of human-animal conflicts. The experts of the Snow Leopard Trust emphasize: “Our ongoing research to better understand the effects of global warming on this species living in the mountains is of crucial importance for the development of solutions for the protection of solutions.”

In the early 2000s, a significant paleontological find was made in Portugal: the skull of an extinct subspecies of the snow leopard. The fossils of the Panthera Uncia Lusitana indicated that snow leopards also occurred in parts of Europe during the ice age, it was said in a “Science Advances” journal in January 2025 Study. During the Pleistocene, the snow leopards had adapted to cool, rocky habitats in Europe, which resembled those in Central Asia. “Our study underlines how important the integration of morphology, fossil finds and models for distribution is to understand the evolution and ecology of endangered species and to develop corresponding protection strategies,” said the scientists.

Snowopards are related to the Eurasian lynx with which they share the habitat in parts of Asia. A current study by the Snow Leopard Trust on the coexistence of both species draws the conclusion of how often with relatives: if possible, you avoid.