DNA plans to help boost Snow Leopard population

Fantastic read over at Scientific American where scientists at the College of Veterinary Medicine at Western University of Health Sciences have announced plans to develop a strategy for using genetic analysis to maximize the breeding of snow leopards to enhance species diversity and robustness.

Now that might sound a little bit on the technical side, but basically what they want to do is stop using the studbook which is currently used for breeding snow leopards in captivity and do DNA comparisons to see what pairings would produce the best offspring.

This is more important than you would think because the species’s currently has  a limited genetic range which has weakened the animals’ immune systems and left them susceptible to a variety of diseases, such as pneumonia, enteritis from salmonella, and two different papillomaviruses.

The group are going to be working on this for a year, so no doubt we’ll drop in from time to time to see how they are getting on.