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Sri Lankan Leopards in Tea Landscape Were Less Active by Day and More Active at Dusk

Adult male Sri Lankan leopard resting on a rock in Sri Lanka
Research: Behaviour, Ecology

Sri Lankan leopards (Panthera pardus kotiya) living in the tea-estate landscape of the Central Highlands were much less active during the day and much more active around dusk than leopards in two protected areas. The authors interpret this as temporal partitioning: people and leopards share much of the same landscape, but reduce encounters by concentrating their activity at different times.

Leopards did not simply avoid human-used places

The study combined several aspects of leopard ecology outside protected areas. Forty remote-camera stations were used around the Moussekelle reservoir to estimate density and investigate space use in a landscape of tea estates, settlements, forest fragments and plantations. Adult density was estimated at 8.82 leopards per 100 km². This was lower than comparable estimates from major Sri Lankan national parks, but the uncertainty was too large to establish a clear difference.

Sites with intermediate levels of human and dog activity were disproportionately used. Male space use was highest at intermediate distances from settlements, while females were more strongly associated with sites where natural prey was common. The authors interpret the female pattern in the context of the energetic demands of provisioning cubs.

Daytime detections fell while dusk detections increased

The activity analysis used 90 independent leopard records from the unprotected tea landscape, compared with 183 from Wilpattu National Park and 214 from Gal Oya National Park. In the tea landscape, 4.4% of independent records were diurnal, compared with 14.2% in Wilpattu and 13.0% in Gal Oya. Dusk accounted for 23.3% of records in the tea landscape, compared with 11.5% and 8.8% in the two parks. Nocturnal records, however, were very similar: 67.8% in the tea landscape, 68.3% in Wilpattu and 72.1% in Gal Oya. These percentages describe the timing of independent camera detections rather than a direct measurement of the proportion of each day that individual leopards were active.

The result is therefore not a simple shift toward greater nocturnality. Daytime activity became almost negligible, while activity increased sharply at dusk as estate workers and other people largely withdrew to settlements. This temporal partitioning appears to be a behavioural mechanism that helps leopards coexist with dense human activity without abandoning the wider agricultural landscape.

Temporal separation does not remove every risk

The authors emphasise that maintaining natural prey is important so that leopards do not become increasingly dependent on domestic animals, and that wire snares are a particular threat because they remain active after people have left. Snares therefore decouple persecution risk from direct human presence and can bypass the protection that temporal partitioning otherwise provides.

Sources and image credit

  1. Kittle, A. M., & Watson, A. C. (2026). Same place, different time: Leopards (Panthera pardus kotiya) employ temporal partitioning as a co-existence mechanism in a human-dominated, unprotected agricultural landscape in Sri Lanka. PLOS ONE, 21(9), e0335296.Primary peer-reviewed open-access article published 9 September 2026. Final PLOS metadata/abstract and the authors’ full-text manuscript were checked. Adult leopard density was estimated at 8.82/100 km² (95% CI 5.21–14.95). In the unprotected tea landscape, 4.4% of activity records were diurnal, 23.3% occurred at dusk and 67.8% at night; leopards were significantly less diurnal and more active at dusk than in Wilpattu and Gal Oya National Parks, while nocturnal activity did not differ significantly.

Image: Adult male Sri Lankan leopard (Panthera pardus kotiya) in Kumana National Park, Sri Lanka, 22 October 2018. Photo: Senaka Silva / Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0. Representative image; not a study animal. · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source

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