The snow leopard is a felid within the order Carnivora. But the study of the feces of several specimens has identified dozens of plant remains in them. It could be thought that it is due to accidental ingestion: when hunting an ibex or an argali, the two goat species that represent the bulk of their diet, they could swallow plant remains present in their stomachs while they devour them. But when analyzing the depositions of the herbivores, they did not find the same varieties of leaves as those of the felines. There are only two options left. Either they eat them to combat hunger or they fulfill some type of medicinal function as has been observed in primates. The authors of the research do not know what explanation to choose.
The Sarychat-Ertash reserve, in the Tian Mountains, which forms the border between Kyrgyzstan and China, is home to around twenty snow leopards. This felid occupies the top of the food chain in areas of Central Asia, where it survives surrounded by recent threats. Researchers from several Japanese universities and the organization Snow Leopard Trust They have dedicated the spring and autumn months from 2017 to 2023 (the winter snow and the summer thaw complicate the work the rest of the year) to collect feces from a dozen species. In addition to the leopard samples, they also collected those of two other predators—wolves and foxes—several herbivores such as the argali, a ram with imposing antlers, and also Asian ibexes. The analysis in the laboratory also identified depositions of brown bear and marmot, a rodent that is also a prey of the three carnivores analyzed. In total they collected 150 fecal samples, 90 of them from leopards.
In his work, published in Royal Society Open Science, managed to identify the genetic presence of prey in eight of the leopards’ feces. But what is striking is that they found plant DNA in 77 of them. They are vegetarian? Professor Kodzue Kinoshita of the Wildlife Research Center at Kyoto University (Japan) immediately denies this. “There is no doubt that the snow leopard is a carnivore,” says the co-author of this study. What happens is that a good part of the plant genetic trace in its feces actually comes from one of the herbivores that it hunted and ate. When they found plants in the feces, sometimes they did not find the DNA of any prey, “but in general we detected animal DNA in them,” explains the researcher.
What was intriguing were the times when this was not the case. To rule out that everything was due to accidental ingestion of the prey’s intestinal contents, they carried out an analysis to see what types of plants were present simultaneously in the same fecal sample. They found genetic material from three large families, the Poaceae, Asteraceae and Tamaraceae. While the first two were in the same samples with animal remains, the same does not happen with the third. “The analysis showed that Myricaria sp., which is a dominant plant genus in snow leopard feces, negatively coexisted with prey DNA.” That remains of these deciduous plants typical of the cold continental climate tend to be detected in samples without the presence of animal remains “suggests that they frequently consume this shrub intentionally, particularly when their digestive tract is empty,” details the Japanese scientist. .
But that’s as far as Kinoshita goes: they admit they don’t know why the largest carnivore in Central Asia eats grass and leaves. In general, plants are not very digestible, unlike animal tissues. The cellulose present in plant cells requires specialized digestive systems, such as those of ruminants. On the other hand, the snow leopard has evolved morphologically, physiologically and behaviorally as a carnivore: its dentition is designed to tear and cut, its taste buds are very sensitive to amino acids (proteins), little sensitive to the sugars present in fruit and poor tolerance to bitter compounds, common in plants. Additionally, it has a very short digestive tract. Nothing makes it easier for you to have a minimally vegetarian diet.
“We don’t know why snow leopards eat plants. But based on our previously published articles, we believe that eating them does not help them excrete or vomit up the hairballs that all felines accumulate in their stomach,” says Kinoshita. There is another possibility, also related to health. Some animals, especially primates, use medicinal plants or insects to purge intestinal parasites or heal wounds. Although the technique used in the analysis of the feces did not allow us to lower the level of the genus, among the 13 species that make up the Myricaria spone of them, the M. bracteatais part of traditional Tibetan medicine and contains elements with anti-inflammatory capacity. “In the future, this could be clarified, for example, by investigating the medicinal properties and nutritional value of plants, the adaptability to their chemical compounds, the relationship with intestinal bacteria or the relationship between plant-eating behavior with other behaviors,” finishes the Japanese scientist.
Together, the feces of all the animals analyzed allowed us to understand the Sarychat-Ertash ecosystem in detail. In the leopard droppings they found DNA from argali, ibex and, to a lesser extent, marmots. The presence is reversed in the case of wolves, which have the large rodent as their main prey. Meanwhile, in the droppings of a middle-class predator like the fox, they saw the traces of several species of small rodents and hares. They found no traces of any argali in the feces of the female leopards. For the authors of the work, this could be due to the fact that this ungulate is too large for them, since this species presents a marked sexual dimorphism in favor of males.
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