They are also the most versatile and unpredictable of the Panthera crew, at the same time stealthy and impetuous, antisocial and connected. “They have a little bit of an attitude towards them,” said Alan M. Wilson of Royal Veterinary College, who studied leopard movement patterns and athletic performance. If you irritate the leopards, he said, “they’ll be back to talk to you.”
New research on leopards in Tanzania suggests that males and females avoid potentially unpleasant “conversations” about food by adhering to different hunting styles and times. Males are nocturnal hunters and, being 50% larger than females, target large, fleshy prey such as gemsbok and kudu. Females are active from dawn until mid-morning and again at dusk, and they consume almost any lively matter that appears, from antelopes and baboons to lizards, birds, rodents and dung beetles.
Mother leopards have an added incentive to minimize the risk of encountering an unknown man. The researchers found that the rate of infanticide among leopards is quite high: up to four in 10 leopard cub deaths occur in the mouth of nosy adult males, who, by destroying any leopard they encounter, can only incite local mothers back a state of receptive fertility.
For this and other reasons, leopards are highly territorial, always prowling the neighborhood to maintain control over family members and quickly identify strangers. “The way we think about lone cats is flawed,” said Hunter. “Leopards may not go out together, but they have a rich social network that we don’t always observe, and they know as much about their network as lions do.”
Hostility is by no means inevitable. Males are so accommodating to their young that they have probably spawned as much as they can be lethal to those who are not born. “A male assumes that the puppies in his territory are his, and he is very protective and even playful with them,” said Hunter.
One thing leopards don’t do is brag about the size of their kingdom by roaring roars. Leopards share with lions, tigers and jaguars the extended larynx and the bony hyoid apparatus that allows the elite Big Four to roar, but the leopard’s roar is emphatically discreet, “more like sawing a tree,” said Bouley, or even to the crisis. of a domestic cat’s cough.