Mumbai's leopard population up due to prey availability

Easy prey availability — both domestic and wild — has increased the leopard density in the Sanjay Gandhi National Park (SGNP) and Tungareshwar Wildlife Sanctuary (TWLS) in the Mumbai metropolitan region.

Leopards in India have a country-wide distribution and are found from dense forest patches in plains and mountain ranges right up to the Himalayan region. However, research studies in the past decade have also documented leopards using human-dominated landscapes across the country, including agricultural land and edges of Indian cities like Jaipur, Bengaluru and Mumbai.

Incidentally, about 83 per cent of the leopard population exists outside protected areas in India.

A recent research study conducted by our colleagues at Wildlife Conservation Society-India (WCSI), along with collaborators from Wildlife Institute of India (WII) and Maharashtra Forest Department (MFD) covered areas of SGNP and TWLS.

This study revealed a very high leopard density (26.34 ± 4.96 leopards/100 sq km) in SGNP, despite extremely high human density (over 20,000 people/sq km) along the periphery of the park.

In contrast, the rural landscape of TWLS showed a much lower leopard density (5.40 ± 2.99 leopards/100 sq km) despite having a lower human density (1,700 people /sq km) along its periphery.

This is very different compared to other Protected Areas (PAs) in the world where a large carnivore occurs at a high density in PAs situated in a metropolis.

A diet study conducted by examining hair samples from leopard scats revealed that domestic dogs constituted 66.76 per cent of it. This was higher than SGNP which had 32.01 per cent of domestic dogs in the leopard’s diet.

Results from the leopard-prey estimation study indicate that food availability (both in the form of domestic and wild prey) could be an important factor contributing to the high leopard density in SGNP compared to TWLS.

The differences in leopard densities, dog densities, wild prey densities as well as the contribution of domestic dogs to the leopard diet in the two PAs present a discrepancy that wasn't fully resolved.

Dr S Sathyakumar from WII said: “Leopard as a versatile carnivore has always fascinated us, but results of this study have opened up new avenues for research on resource selection by leopards in such a challenging landscape.”

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