Classroom lesson 路 Wildlife馃嚫馃嚘 Saudi Arabia

Arabian leopard - the shy mountain ghost

One of the rarest big cats in the world, hiding in the high cliffs

Photo 路 Wikimedia Commons

What is it?

The Arabian leopard is a small, pale type of leopard that lives in the rocky mountains of Saudi Arabia. It is much rarer than the leopards of Africa - there are fewer than 200 Arabian leopards left in the wild. It is so shy that even people who live in the mountains might go years without ever seeing one.

Tell me more

Arabian leopards are smaller than African leopards. An adult male might weigh just 30 kilograms - about the same as a child. Their coats are pale, like the sandstone cliffs they live on. The pattern of spots breaks up their shape so they almost disappear against the rocks.

They live in the high, rocky areas of the south-west of Saudi Arabia - especially the Sarawat Mountains near the Yemen border. They hunt mostly at night and at dawn, going after small mountain animals like ibex (a kind of wild goat), hyrax (which look like fluffy rabbits but are actually distant cousins of elephants!), and birds.

Conservation teams in Saudi Arabia are now working hard to help the Arabian leopard. They use special camera traps - cameras that switch on automatically when an animal walks past. Each leopard has its own pattern of spots, like a fingerprint, so scientists can recognise individual cats from the photos.

There is a big project to create more protected areas for the leopard, and to breed them carefully in a special centre and then return them to the mountains - the same approach that worked for the Arabian oryx. Saving the Arabian leopard is one of Saudi Arabia's biggest conservation challenges.

In the classroom

Walk your class through this in 15 minutes.

Talk together

Discussion prompts

  1. 01How might a camera trap help scientists count animals they almost never see?
  2. 02Why might pale fur be more useful than dark fur in a sandstone landscape?
  3. 03What worked for the Arabian oryx is now being tried for the leopard. What can one rescue story teach the next?
Try this

Classroom activity

Each pupil designs their own leopard's spot pattern on a paper outline of a leopard. Then mix all the cut-out leopards on a desk. Can the class match each pupil to their leopard from the pattern alone? That is what scientists do!