导读：雪豹习惯独居且行踪捉摸不定，因此要搞清这种濒危的亚洲“大猫”到底吃些什么并不是一件易事。一个研究小组在蒙古南部的山区间采用一种新的方法——对88个粪便样本进行DNA分析，终于摸清了它们的食谱。
雪豹并没有邀请科学家参与它们孤独的狩猎行动。
因此搞清这种濒危的亚洲“大猫”到底吃些什么的通常做法是询问当地的居民、发现动物的杀戮场所，或分析它们给人类留下的“小礼物”——也就是雪豹的粪便，并检查穿过其消化道的少量毛发、骨骼和牙齿。
然而大部分毛发看起来都很类似，并且科学家们很难搞清他们所找到的一坨粪便到底来自于一头雪豹，还是当地其他的食肉动物。
因此一个研究小组在蒙古南部的山区间采用了一种新的方法——对88个粪便样本进行了脱氧核糖核酸（DNA）分析。
法国格勒诺布尔约瑟夫大学的Wasim Shehzad和同事日前在《PLoS综合》上报告说，每个粪便样本都仅含有一种猎物留下的遗迹，并且这里只有5种不同的猎物——最常见的西伯利亚野山羊、濒临灭绝的盘羊、家山羊、家绵羊，还有仅在一个样本中出现的石鸡。
研究表明，野生动物构成了雪豹79%的猎物，这要多于其他研究得到的结果——对于当地的畜牧业主来说，这也是一个好消息。
雪豹是一种美丽而濒危的猫科动物。因其活动路线较为固定，易捕获，加之豹骨与豹皮价格昂贵，导致人类不断捕杀雪豹，使雪豹的数量急剧下降。人类的活动给这种大型猫科动物带来了巨大的生存压力，估计种群数量仅有几千只。目前雪豹数量最多的国家是哈萨克斯坦。
Prey Preference of Snow Leopard (Panthera uncia) in South Gobi, Mongolia
Wasim Shehzad, Thomas Michael McCarthy, Francois Pompanon, Lkhagvajav Purevjav, Eric Coissac, Tiayyba Riaz, Pierre Taberlet
Accurate information about the diet of large carnivores that are elusive and inhabit inaccessible terrain, is required to properly design conservation strategies. Predation on livestock and retaliatory killing of predators have become serious issues throughout the range of the snow leopard. Several feeding ecology studies of snow leopards have been conducted using classical approaches. These techniques have inherent limitations in their ability to properly identify both snow leopard feces and prey taxa. To examine the frequency of livestock prey and nearly-threatened argali in the diet of the snow leopard, we employed the recently developed DNA-based diet approach to study a snow leopard population located in the Tost Mountains, South Gobi, Mongolia. After DNA was extracted from the feces, a region of ~100 bp long from mitochondrial 12S rRNA gene was amplified, making use of universal primers for vertebrates and a blocking oligonucleotide specific to snow leopard DNA. The amplicons were then sequenced using a next-generation sequencing platform. We observed a total of five different prey items from 81 fecal samples. Siberian ibex predominated the diet (in 70.4% of the feces), followed by domestic goat (17.3%) and argali sheep (8.6%). The major part of the diet was comprised of large ungulates (in 98.8% of the feces) including wild ungulates (79%) and domestic livestock (19.7%). The findings of the present study will help to understand the feeding ecology of the snow leopard, as well as to address the conservation and management issues pertaining to this wild cat.
文献下载：https://www.biodiscover.com/news/phylogeny/library/11216
