2.7.1 Conversion of Prey Biomass
An estimate of biomass consumed by snow leopard was used rather than
occurrence percentage, as diet quantification may be more reliable
(Wegge et al., 2012). Smaller animals, for example, are usually
over-represented in the scat analysis (Floyd et al., 1978). Frequency of
occurrence of individual prey items are converted to biomass and numbers
consumed according to the relationship between scat production and prey
size (Ackerman et al., 1984; Floyd et al., 1978) in the following way: Y
= 1.980 + 0.035 X, where Y is weight of prey consumed per scat, and X is
the live weight of particular prey (in kg).
To quantify the predation rate of a snow leopard, average consumption
rates per day of wild (Naur) and domestic livestock were used following
Oli (1993) and Wegge, et al.
(2012) as follows: Naur 34 kg, Yak 150 kg, horse/cattle 140 kg, goat 25
kg, and sheep 30 kg. Of large prey, predators did not consume the whole
ungulate carcass due to inedible parts such as skeletal pieces,
horns/antlers, rumen content and parts of the skin (Floyd et al., 1978).
It was assumed that snow leopards consumed the following proportional
weights of domestic and wild ungulate as described by Oli et al. (1993)
and Wegge et al. (2012): Naur 75%, yak 50%, horse and cattle
60% and sheep and goat 70%.
A G-Test was employed to determine if snow leopard have a preference for
certain species according to their availability across the study sites
(Manly et al., 2007). To determine if particular species will be
preferred, less preferred or avoided, a 95% confidence interval was
created for each category by applying Bonferroni corrections to the
Z-statistic (Neu et al., 1974).
Results
3.1 Snow Leopard Abundance
Out of 88 putative samples, 73 (83%) were confirmed by genetic analyses
to be from snow leopard. Among snow leopard positive samples, 60% (44)
were successfully genotyped. Fecal DNA analysis identified 19 individual
snow leopards (nine females and ten males) (Table 1; Fig. 2). GPS
locations of individually identified snow leopards were plotted on
digital topographic maps in ArcView 3.1 (Fig. 2) to calculate the survey
area of sample collection. The mean maximum linear distance moved by
individual snow leopards was calculated at 3.3 km (std. error 0.6) with
a buffer strip width of 1.6 km. The program SPACECAP estimated a mean
snow leopard population size of 24 (95% CI: 19-29; SD: 3.04). The mean
density was 3.9 individuals/100 km2 (95% CI: 3.1-
4.8; SD: 0.8; Table 1) for the survey area of 609 km2.
Khambachen block had a higher number of snow leopards, followed by
Ramjer (eastern part of Khambachen), Yagma and Gola (both blocks lies
north-western part of Khambachen).
The encounter probability was 1.73 (95% CI: 0.21-1.19). Detection
probability at trap locations was found to be 0.05 and the Psi, the
ratio of the number of animals actually present within the space to the
maximum allowable number, was 0.08. The number of effective alleles
(Ae) was 2.4
(se±0.18) and observed heterozygosity
(Ho) was 0.57
(se±0.08) in six polymorphic loci.