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The For­mosan clouded leop­ard, a sub­species of this beau­ti­ful feline car­ni­vore endemic to Tai­wan, should now be con­sid­ered extinct, accord­ing to a team of zool­o­gists from Tai­wan and the United States. The team tried to find the elu­sive ani­mal for 13 years. This quest started in 2000 with the work of zool­o­gist Chi­ang Po-​jen for his dis­ser­ta­tion on the sub­species (Vir­ginia Poly­tech­nic Insti­tute and State University).

Dur­ing 2000 – 2004 when Chi­ang and his team stud­ied the pop­u­la­tion sta­tus of the For­mosan clouded leop­ard (Neo­fe­lis neb­u­losa brachyu­rus) and the ecol­ogy of its prey in South­ern Tai­wan, not a sin­gle clouded leop­ard had been found. No clouded leop­ards were pho­tographed in a total of 13,354 cam­era trap days, and the hair snares sta­tions that were set up, did not trap any clouded leop­ard hairs either.

The work con­tin­ued after Chi­ang finalised his dis­ser­ta­tion enti­tled ‘Ecol­ogy and con­ser­va­tion of For­mosan clouded leop­ard, its prey, and other sym­patric car­ni­vores in south­ern Tai­wan’, which he defended on 14 Novem­ber 2007. But no evi­dence has been found to sug­gest that the endemic clouded leop­ard still exist.

Last week, sev­eral media reported about the dis­s­a­point­ing results of the study and Chi­ang Po-​jen told media reporters Monday:

So, either there are no spec­i­mens of this sub­species of clouded leop­ard left at all in the forests of Tai­wan, or there will be no viable pop­u­la­tion size for this sub­species to survive.

The extinc­tion of the clouded leop­ards in Taiwan’s pri­mary forests is most likely due to prey deple­tion and habi­tat destruc­tion, plus his­tor­i­cal pelt trade. These major causes are all man­made — hunt­ing and development.

The absence of the leop­ards came as no sur­prise. Already in 1988 researcher Alan Rabi­nowitz, now CEO of the big-​cat con­ser­va­tion organ­i­sa­tion Pan­thera, had a paper pub­lished in Oryx — The inter­na­tional Jour­nal of Con­ser­va­tion, in which he described the neg­a­tive out­come of his search for the clouded leop­ard in Tai­wan. The last sight­ing of the sub­species was reported in 1983 accord­ing to Rabinowitz.

It appears that the only For­mosan clouded leop­ard left in Tai­wan is the stuffed spec­i­men at National Tai­wan Museum as the two live clouded leop­ards at Taipei Zoo are imported species from South­east Asia.

The research find­ings have been sub­mit­ted to the jour­nal Oryx and are expected to be pub­lished in the next six months. After the report is pub­lished the Tai­wan Coun­cil of Agriculture’s Wildlife Con­ser­va­tion Advi­sory Com­mit­tee will seek to ver­ify the infor­ma­tion and will decide whether the For­mosan clouded leop­ard should be taken off the government’s list of pro­tected ani­mals in Tai­wan, accord­ing Kuan Li-​hao, a divi­sion chief at the COA Forestry Bureau.

When the For­mosan clouded leop­ard will be declared offi­cially extinct, there still will exist two other sub­species in the wild. The clouded leop­ard has recently (2006) been divided into two species based on DNA analy­sis. Those two species can also be divided geo­graph­i­cally into main­land cats, Neo­fe­lis neb­u­losa, and island cats, Neo­fe­lis diardi. In addi­tion based on genetic analy­sis these island cats can be split into two sub­species — found in Suma­tra and Bor­neo respec­tively. Unfor­tu­nately these two remain­ing sub­species are con­sid­ered Vul­ner­a­ble by the IUCN Red List of Threat­ened Species™ with a decreas­ing pop­u­la­tion trend.

(Source: Focus Tai­wan, 30.04.2013; Moth­er­board, 02.05.2013; Sci­en­tific Amer­i­can, 03.05.2013; Pan­thera, 03.05.2013; IUCN Red List of Threat­ened Species™)