They shouldn’t get along, yet somehow, they do. Apex predators in the Himalayas manage to coexist because they target different prey species, a study in the Public Library of Science has found.
Apex predators are animals that sit at the top of the food chain. With no natural predators of their own, they regulate ecosystems by controlling populations of the prey that they eat. In Nepal’s Lapchi Valley, there are three main apex predators. Snow leopards have been there for a while, but in recent years, Himalayan wolves and leopards have started to appear more frequently.
“Understanding how apex predators coexist in resource-limited mountain ecosystems is central to both ecological theory and conservation practice,” say Narayan Prasad Koju from Pokhara University, and colleagues in the paper.
To find out how these potential competitors are able to coexist, the researchers studied footage captured by 26 camera traps, left out for more than 9,500 trap days. DNA analyses were performed on scat samples too.
The three species came out mainly at night when they prowled the same high-elevation terrain. Snow leopards and wolves occupied more or less the same range, between 3,500–4,500m above sea level. This overlapped with leopards, which were detected between 2,200–4,200m above sea level.
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Instead of targeting the same mid-sized prey, however, the different species opted for different meals.
Snow leopards consumed mainly wild ungulates, including the goat-like blue sheep, which made up around half of their diet. Leopards relied more on domestic species, such as sheep, horses and dogs. Meanwhile, Himalayan wolves exhibited a mixed feeding pattern, including blue sheep, musk deer, goats and yak.
The findings fit with an ecological model known as ‘niche partitioning’, where predators target different prey species to reduce direct competition with each other. Fewer fights means more food, and less energy expended along the way.
“The Lapchi Valley illustrates both the resilience and fragility of apex predator coexistence,” Koju and colleagues say. The findings emphasize the need for long-term monitoring of this remote mountain landscape, and management strategies that blend ecology with the needs of the people that live there.
For example, if populations of wild ungulates, such as blue sheep, musk deer and Himalayan serow, could be conserved, the predators should rely less on domestic livestock. And if there were more strategies to mitigate conflict between predators and people, such as predator-proof corrals and better compensation schemes, perhaps the predators could be left to get on with their lives.
Top image: camera trap photograph of a leopard at 4,200m above sea level, recorded during the study in Lapchi Valley, Central Himalaya, Nepal. Credit: Narayan Prasad Koju / Nepal Engineering College, CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
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