How snow leopard selfies and AI can help save the species from extinction Transform

Koustubh Sharma is what you could call a cat scientist with a daunting task, as a wildlife biologist studying one of the world's most magnificent, fluffy-tailed and elusive big cats: snow leopards. Based in Kyrgyzstan, Sharma spends a lot of time trying to solve the riddle of how to study the hard-to-study, threatened species. The alpine cats live in frigid, barren landscapes; roam hundreds of miles and are so adept at solitude that they're dubbed "ghosts of the mountain." In the nearly 11 years that Sharma has studied snow leopards in the highlands of Central Asia, he has seen the thick-furred, rosette-marked feline only twice. His one close encounter was with a large male with a scarred face in southern Mongolia, while standing on a mountain ledge near a freshly killed ibex, a favorite meal for snow leopards.