They are also the most versatile and unpredictable of the Panthera crew, at the same time stealthy and bold, antisocial and affiliated. “They have a certain attitude towards them,” said Alan M. Wilson of the Royal Veterinary College, who studied leopard movement patterns and athletic performance. If you irritate leopards, he said, “They will come back for a chat.”
New research on leopards in Tanzania suggests that men and women avoid potentially awkward “conversations” about food by following different hunting styles and plans. Men are night hunters and, being 50 percent taller than women, target large, fleshy quarries such as the gauntlet and kudu. Females are active from morning to night and towards evening, consuming pretty much every lively affair, from antelopes and baboons to lizards, birds, rodents and dung beetles.
Mother leopards have an added incentive to minimize the risk of encountering a stranger. Researchers have found that the infanticide rate among leopards is quite high: up to four in ten leopard cubs die from the mouths of interloping adult males, which by destroying small leopards they encounter may repel native mothers, a state of receptive fertility.
For this and other reasons, leopards are very territorial and constantly roam the neighborhood, keeping an eye on the familiar and quickly identifying strangers. “The way we think about lonely cats is flawed,” said Dr. Hunter. “Leopards don’t like hanging out together, but they have a rich social network that we don’t always watch, and they know as much about their network as lions do.”
Hostility is by no means inevitable. Men are boys who likely fathered them, as accommodating as they can be fatal to those who don’t. “One man assumes the boys in his area are his and he is very protective and even playful with them,” said Dr. Hunter.
One thing leopards don’t do is boast of the size of their kingdom by booming roars. Leopards share the enlarged larynx and bony tongue apparatus with lions, tigers and jaguars that enable the elite Big Four to roar, but the leopard’s roar is emphatically restrained, “more like sawing a tree,” Ms. Bouley said even to make a house cat cough.
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