Antarctica: Save the Snow Leopard

No, they wouln't survive. Antarctica is a lot more hostile than the Eurasian homeland of the snow leopard. You can't just take an animal and ship it out to a foreign environment and expect it to survive, even if they both have snow. I would guess that snow leopards would be able to easily eat penguins while the penguins are stuck in their rookeries but that would be about the only food source the snow leopards will have. They are not aquatic so they won't be able to predate most of the Antarctic wildlife which is marine based. What do the snow leopards live on when the penguins are off fishing, which is a significant part of the year when they are not forming breeding colonies? If the cold doesn't kill them, starvation will finish off the snow leopards within one year.

But that's all theoretical anyway. There is no way anyone would grant approval for releasing a non-native predator like a snow leopard into Antarctica.
 
No, they wouln't survive. Antarctica is a lot more hostile than the Eurasian homeland of the snow leopard. You can't just take an animal and ship it out to a foreign environment and expect it to survive, even if they both have snow. I would guess that snow leopards would be able to easily eat penguins while the penguins are stuck in their rookeries but that would be about the only food source the snow leopards will have. They are not aquatic so they won't be able to predate most of the Antarctic wildlife which is marine based. What do the snow leopards live on when the penguins are off fishing, which is a significant part of the year when they are not forming breeding colonies?

Other snow leopards!

Assuming they survive for a while, and don't wipe out the penguins, it would form an interesting if horrific ethological dynamic.

Snow leopards eat penguins, but then need to producing as much storable protein as possible to last until next penguin season.

They do this by (a) fattening themselves up, and (b) producing as many delicious leopard cubs as possible.

Probably the math doesn't work for a warm blooded animal, so maybe we need to try this with snow crocodiles. Of course crocodiles would probably have trouble moving at all in this climate, so we need to move the experiment to a warmer locale....
 
No.

Snow leopards are adapted to mountain ranges. Which are vastly different from the frozen tundra ice of Antartica. Plus the ecological disaster that other posters have already detailed.
 
The notion of introducing an apex predator into the Antarctic ecosystem just seems.... daft.

If you wanted to make a serious effort to build a 'roided up' Antarctic ecosystem, I would say your best bet would probably be to go to siberia and the canadian artic, and start collecting and transplanting various sorts of artic plant species. You would probably do better with siberia, consider that it's arctic wasn't under an ice cap and you've got better and more advanced species diversity. On the other hand with the Canadian species suite, while probably less diverse are more effective colonizers and pioneers as a whole.

Only when you've managed to kluge together a much more diverse and robust flora would you think of starting to throw in land animals. Given the vulnerability of antarctic species DON'T THROW IN PREDATORS.

If you want a large land mammal, and you've actually managed to kluge a floral complex, introduce the musk ox.

Even then, it seems like a fools errand.

Basically, we have to recognize that there was an entire continent full of Antarctic flora and fauna that had 20 million years to adapt to and survive the glaciation of their continent.

I'm not sure that the superior diversity and greater sophistication that emerged in the EurAfircAsiaNorthAmerica northern supercontinent produced an arctic suite that could bear up under Antarctic conditions.

It might be a notion worth trying sometime. We've got some maybes there. Take Bouvet Island and make it a laboratory for this kind of thing.

But my own assessment is that anything we could introduce and build up on the few viable lips of Antarctica would be a temporary phenomenon. A bad spell... all the musk ox die.
 

yourworstnightmare

Banned
Donor
Snow Leopards are adapted to mountains, all the prey lived by the coast

either
a) the Snow Leopards quickly die, due to not being able to adapt to hunting strategies for coastal animals

or

b) they are able to adapt, and the penguins and seals are threatened by their inability to adapt to a land predator.
 

Cook

Banned
Does this work?
Hopefully not, because the only way that they could survive is by wreaking havoc on the native animals of the Antarctic; just imagine the impact of leopards locating an emperor penguin colony just prior to the commencement of winter.


If animals are to be saved, it is in conjunction with their natural ecosystem. It isn’t by devastating another.
 
Instead of Antarctica, why not transplant Siberian tigers and snow leopards in the Alaskan/Canadian Arctic, say around the Yukon?
The flora and fauna wouldn't be as much of a shock, there'd be richer biomes to work with as Antarctica's basically a frozen desert.
 
Svalbard has mountains and reindeer, so that might just work. Northern Canada and Patagonia would still be more suitable spots for these kind of wacky experiments IMO.
 

yourworstnightmare

Banned
Donor
Instead of Antarctica, why not transplant Siberian tigers and snow leopards in the Alaskan/Canadian Arctic, say around the Yukon?
The flora and fauna wouldn't be as much of a shock, there'd be richer biomes to work with as Antarctica's basically a frozen desert.
Don't forget the Amur Leopard, it's more threatened than both of them, and Amur Leopards and Siberian Tigers are used to live in the same places, and used to rivalry with each other and with wolves and bears over prey.
 
A Snow Leopard would be very unlikely to survive the Antarctic Winter. Polar bears are powerful predators but have to go through a similar winter in the Arctic, so they hibernate (sorta). Unlike polar bears, I'm pretty sure the Leopards wouldn't be able to dig dens in the snow. So they'd be mostly killed off by the winter, and probably wouldn't be all that happy about attacking the giant groups of penguins. They'd have no idea what penguins were and a a key rule of being a predator is not to attack a giant group. So the fear of the unknown would probably starve 'em too.
 
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