subspecies – YLoveBigCats https://www.ylovebigcats.com/en Big cats from the world,<br>a world of big cats Thu, 22 Aug 2019 13:42:37 +0000 en-US hourly 1 The asiatic lion is not a species https://www.ylovebigcats.com/en/2019/08/22/the-asiatic-lion-is-not-a-species/ Thu, 22 Aug 2019 13:41:35 +0000 https://www.ylovebigcats.com/en/?p=1107 For a very long time, we have been believing that there were two lion species surviving (the African lion and the Asiatic lion). The Asiatic lion was represented by this small group of lions in the Gir forest of India.

  • Panthera leo leo (the African lion)
  • Panthera leo persica (the Asiatic lion)

You have to admit that this was relatively well understood and scientists were discussing the differences between African populations of lions. Where there actual sub-species or independent populations of the same species.

Now, this is challenged very seriously by the most recent scientific studies (as usual in science, it’s still a bit early to settle this into the official theory; but it’s getting more interesting). Recent studies (mostly genetic ones) have shown that the Asiatic lions are more similar to East-Africa lions. And there are more differences than initially expected between African lions.

So, the latest proposal from the Cat Specialist Group (at the Species Survival Commission SSC of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)) is to define two species:

  • Panthera leo leo (also called the Northern subspecies)
  • Panthera leo melanochaita (the Southern subspecies)

This is a good example of science progress: New data forces to revise the existing understanding to integrate the old facts, the new facts into a better theory. In the case at hand, it is admitted that external physical characteristics and behaviors (and Asiatic lions and North-Eastern African lions are different from these points of view) would be less important to define species. In the past, genetic information was not available and scientists from the past had to rely on available information.

Source: A revised taxonomy of the Felidae, in CATnews Special Issue 11, Winter 2017.

]]> Snow leopard: Three new subspecies https://www.ylovebigcats.com/en/2017/11/17/snow-leopard-new-subspecies/ Fri, 17 Nov 2017 16:11:49 +0000 https://ylovebigcats.com/en/?p=1046 Up to now, the snow leopard was considered as a single species (Panthera uncia, in Latin), what most scientists would call a “monotypic” species or a single species: All the animals in the world were considered part of a single species with no significant difference. But this may change soon after a study by researchers, including Dr. Rodney Jackson, Director-Founder of the Snow Leopard Conservancy in Sonoma, California, Tshewang Wangchuk, Executive Director of the Bhutan Foundation, who also serves on the Snow Leopard Conservancy’s Board of Directors, and Dr. Jan E. Janecka, Duquesne University, and up to 20 other institutions working to protect the snow leopard.

They believe that their work identifies three different subspecies of the elusive snow leopard:

  1. A Northern subspecies (Panthera uncia irbis), found in the Altai region.
  2. A Central subspecies (Panthera uncia uncioides), found in the core Himalaya and Tibetan Plateau.
  3. A Western subspecies (Panthera uncia uncia), found in the Tian Shan, Pamir and trans-Himalaya mountain ranges.

They worked DNA analysis from animal scat collected around the places where the cats are living and they sequenced it in order to identify genetic groupings that clearly define subspecies.

This is important because it means that actions to protect the snow leopard have to take this into account in order to preserve the full subspecies range (snow leopards are rare but spread over a huge expanse of territory in a large part of Central Asia).

Source: I initially missed this May’17 information from the Snow Leopard Conservancy.

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