Digestion and nutrition
The digestive system of the snow leopard is much the same as the digestive tract of other carnivores. The gastrointestinal tract consists of: mouth; esophagus; stomach; small intestine and large intestine. (Figure 7)
Fig 8. Snow Leopard Skull Kitchener, Andrew & Driscoll, Carlos & Yamaguchi, Nobuyuki. (2016). What is a Snow Leopard? Taxonomy, Morphology, and Phylogeny. 10.1016/B978-0-12-802213-9.00001-8.
Figure 7. Digestive Tract projects, Contributors to Wikimedia. “Wikibook Chapter.” Wikibooks, open books for an open world. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., December 11, 2020. http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Anatomy_and_Physiology_of_Animals/The_Gut_and_Digestion.
Like all other big cat species, the snow leopard's mouth is composed of 32 teeth that can be separated into three types: canine teeth, molars, and incisors. The canine teeth are the long, pointed teeth that are used for subduing and killing prey, while the six incisors in both upper and lower jaws cooperate with the cannier to tear off the meat and skin, and the molars are responsible for crushing the food into smaller particles.(Figure 8) (Hunter and Turner, 1997)
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After the intake of food from the mouth, the food would go into the esophagus. The esophagus is a tube that connects the mouth to the stomach. The esophagus undergoes an unidirectional movement, pushing the food into the stomach. The snow leopards have a single-chambered stomach. The stomach is the main site for food digestion in snow leopards, in which the stomach juice combined with the enzymes to break down the proteins and fat. The stomach juice is mainly composed of hydrochloric acid, which creates the acidic environment that can kill the bacteria. The snow leopard stomach contains about 10 times amount of hydrochloric acid than humans, thus enable them to digest raw materials safely.(Carnivore digestive system, 2020)The chief cells inside the stomach produce pepsin, which works in a positive feedback loop to break down proteins into polypeptides, and the lipase enzyme breaks down fat into fatty acid. At this point, the mixture of the food particles and the stomach juice is called chyme. The chyme then moved forward to the small intestine for absorption into the blood stream. The snow leopard's small intestine is around five times the length of their bodies, which is much shorter than that of the herbivore and omnivores for faster food elimination. The microvilli on the surface of the small intestine increase the surface area, which enhance the efficiency of the absorption. The leftover then go to the large intestine, where most of the water is reabsorbed and the waster is stored until eliminated(Molnar, 2019)