Data from: Prey preference of snow leopard (Panthera uncia) in South Gobi, Mongolia

Accurate information about the diet of large carnivores that are elusive
and inhabit inaccessible terrain, is required to properly design
conservation strategies. Predation on livestock and retaliatory killing of
predators have become serious issues throughout the range of the snow
leopard. Several feeding ecology studies of snow leopards have been
conducted using classical approaches. These techniques have inherent
limitations in their ability to properly identify both snow leopard feces
and prey taxa. To examine the frequency of livestock prey and
nearly-threatened argali in the diet of the snow leopard, we employed the
recently developed DNA-based diet approach to study a snow leopard
population located in the Tost Mountains, South Gobi, Mongolia. After DNA
was extracted from the feces, a region of ~100 bp long from mitochondrial
12S rRNA gene was amplified, making use of universal primers for
vertebrates and a blocking oligonucleotide specific to snow leopard DNA.
The amplicons were then sequenced using a next-generation sequencing
platform. We observed a total of five different prey items from 81 fecal
samples. Siberian ibex predominated the diet (in 70.4 % of the feces),
followed by domestic goat (17.3 %) and argali sheep (8.6 %). The major
part of the diet was comprised of large ungulates (in 98.8 % of the feces)
including wild ungulates (79 %) and domestic livestock (19.7 %). The
findings of the present study will help to understand the feeding ecology
of the snow leopard, as well as to address the conservation and management
issues pertaining to this wild cat.