Himalayan catfight looms as tigers, leopards venture into snow leopard land
- Conventional wisdom says tigers prevail in the country’s southern plains, leopards in the mid-country hill region, and snow leopards in the Himalayas.
- A warming climate threatens to push Nepal’s three big cat species tigers, leopards and snow leopards into closer proximity to each other, with unknown consequences for the survival of each.
- A complicating factor is the role of humans, with human settlements also moving up in altitude in search of more suitable conditions and putting all four apex species in direct competition.
- A tiger sits quietly surrounded by trees, observing something in the distance. It then roars and darts toward its target: a leopard that jumps down from a tree. The two big cats confront one another, but with the leopard taking the submissive stance of lying on the ground, the standoff doesn’t escalate into a catfight, and both back off.
- There’s no easy answer, conservationists say. “We don’t have enough research to answer the question clearly,” says conservationist Bikram Shrestha. “But we have seen that whenever the habitats of big cats overlap, they tend to avoid each other, and the stronger one displaces the weaker one.”
- Little is known about how tigers interact with snow leopards, Shrestha says, given that there’s not as much overlap between their ranges. “However, we can say that as the snow leopard is weaker than the tiger, [the tiger] is likely to displace snow leopards if they do share a common habitat,” he says. He adds it would be the same scenario for leopards and snow leopards: The odds are stacked in favor of leopards because they’re a more generalist species, Shrestha says.
- Researchers studying tigers say there’s no evidence yet suggesting that tigers may prefer living at higher altitudes. Kanchan Thapa, a conservation biologist at WWF, says he believes this is an unlikely scenario. “I believe that most of the tigers we have found in high altitudes are transient tigers that are exploring the habitat after separating from their mothers,” he says. “The grasslands in the south are going to be the home for the core population.”