Key leopard population ‘crashing’, study warns

The leopard population in a region of South Africa once thick with the big cats is crashing, and could be wiped out within a few years, scientists warned Wednesday. Illegal killing of leopards in the Soutpansberg Mountains has reduced their numbers by two-thirds in the last decade, the researchers reported in the Royal Society Open Science journal. “If things don’t change, we predict leopards will essentially disappear from the area by about 2020,” lead author Samual Williams, a conservation biologist at Durham University in England, said. — AFP