His Mongolian name is Angarag, which means Mars. To our researchers, he’s simply M24. But simple is the wrong word for this cat. He’s the 24th male snow leopard collared in our long-term ecological study in the mountains of Tost, Mongolia. He was about 2.5 to 3.5 years old when our scientists first collared him in 2025. Since then, his movements have intrigued our team, so we wanted to share a short update on what he’s been up to.
Today, protecting the cat means ensuring that communities have the agency, tools, and benefits to continue living alongside it. Coexistence is no longer an idea but a lived reality.
In January 2008, Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi was 23 when he encountered three snow leopards in Spiti: a mother, her cub, and a sub-adult male beginning to make his way on his own. That night, Kullu bought livestock for a feast because the entire village wanted to celebrate.
With a range spanning some of the planet’s harshest mountain terrain, the snow leopard is one of nature’s most elusive big cats. It lives at densities of roughly one to three animals per 100 square kilometers, earning its reputation as the ghost of the mountains.
As a teenager in Mongolia, Dr. Tserennadmid (Nadia) Mijiddorj watched herders come to her family home after snow leopards had taken their livestock. Those early conversations shaped more than twenty years of work building trust between communities and conservationists.
Snow leopards are built to hunt prey far larger than themselves. Long-term research in Mongolia is revealing what they eat, how often they hunt, which prey they target, and how those choices shape both snow leopard survival and coexistence with people.
Sue Heim’s love of snow leopards began at the zoo and grew into a lifelong commitment to protect them. By including Snow Leopard Trust in her estate, she found a way to support the research, people, and conservation work she could not carry out in the field herself.
Test your knowledge about the threats snow leopards face and spread the word to help support our conservation efforts to protect the endangered ghost of the mountains. Answers will be revealed when you complete the quiz. You can retake the quiz as many times as you’d like!
When Ranger Aibek* received a tip that someone was planning to sell a snow leopard skin at a local market in Kyrgyzstan’s Talas region, he knew time was of the essence. Snow leopards are among the world’s most endangered big cats, and a tip like this does not stay useful for long. Sellers move fast, and evidence disappears.
At dawn, in winter, a snow leopard moves along a ridge above Kibber, in Spiti Valley, India. It picks its way across the rock the way it always has, unhurried, indifferent to the village below. Watching from the village is Tanzin Chhoyi. “I have seen the cat many times before,” she says, “but the enchantment of such a majestic creature living among us never dies down.”
