Is the Zanzibar Leopard Still Alive?

The Zanzibar leopard is almost certainly gone. No confirmed, verified sighting of a living individual has been documented in decades, and most wildlife researchers consider the population functionally extinct since the mid-1990s. A brief flare of hope came in 2018 when camera trap footage from Unguja Island appeared to show a leopard-like animal moving through the forest at night, but the clip was never conclusively authenticated, and no follow-up evidence materialized. What makes this story more than a simple tale of extinction is the unusual combination of forces that drove it: not just habitat loss or hunting for pelts, but a deep cultural entanglement with witchcraft beliefs that turned the leopard into something communities actively wanted erased.

What Made the Zanzibar Leopard Distinct

The Zanzibar leopard lived exclusively on Unguja, the larger of the two main islands in the Zanzibar archipelago off the coast of Tanzania. It was smaller than its mainland relatives and reportedly had denser rosette patterns on its coat, features that led early taxonomists to classify it as a separate subspecies, Panthera pardus adersi. For a long time, its evolutionary origins were unclear. A 2024 genomic analysis resolved much of the mystery: the Zanzibar population diverged from other African leopards roughly 200,000 years ago, around the same time that different mainland African leopard populations were splitting from each other. Genetically, it was closest to leopards from northeastern Africa and Tanzania.¹

The study also found something that reframes how we think about the leopard’s distinctiveness. Genes linked to body size (like SMOC2 and LCORL) and coat color patterns (MC1R) did show homozygous variants in the Zanzibar specimen, which could explain its smaller frame and unusual markings. But none of those variants were unique to the island population. They exist at varying frequencies in mainland leopards too. The Zanzibar leopard’s look was likely shaped by island isolation and small population dynamics rather than by truly novel genetic mutations.¹

Leopards have been on Unguja for a very long time. Archaeological excavation at Kuumbi Cave on the island turned up leopard remains in layers dating to the late and terminal Pleistocene, alongside bones of zebra, buffalo, waterbuck, and other large fauna. The leopards appear to have been a minor presence even then, with breakage patterns on the larger animal bones suggesting humans, not leopards, were the primary predators bringing kills back to the cave.²

Witchcraft, Fear, and Extermination

What happened to the Zanzibar leopard cannot be understood without understanding the cultural beliefs that surrounded it. On Unguja, leopards became deeply entangled with local ideas about sorcery. Many communities came to believe that certain people, typically accused witches, kept and controlled leopards, sending them to attack enemies’ livestock or even people. When a leopard killed a goat or appeared near a village, the response was not simply practical pest control. It was an accusation: someone in the community was believed to have commanded the attack.

Martin Walsh, an anthropologist who spent years documenting these beliefs, found that villagers in areas like Uroa described not a single rogue animal but the “depredations of multiple kept leopards, sent to do the bidding of the witches who owned and controlled them.”³ This framing made co-existence nearly impossible. If leopards were tools of evil people rather than wild animals behaving according to their nature, there was no reason to tolerate their presence. Government-backed eradication campaigns in the mid-twentieth century tapped into and amplified these attitudes. By the time outside conservationists began paying attention in the 1990s, the population had already collapsed beyond recovery.

The tragedy is compounded by timing. International awareness of the Zanzibar leopard’s plight grew just as the animal was vanishing. By the time researchers attempted serious surveys, the leopards were already so rare that finding one became almost impossible, and the absence of sightings only hardened the assumption that they were gone.

Can Unguja Still Support a Leopard Population?

Even if a handful of leopards somehow persisted in the island’s forests, the habitat picture is grim. Unguja is not large to begin with, roughly 1,660 square kilometers, and it has undergone dramatic land-use change. A recent analysis of the island’s landscape found significant declines in forest cover paired with expanding bushland, agricultural fields, and built-up areas. Outside the boundaries of Jozani-Chwaka Bay National Park, the island’s only national park, land-use pressures have been particularly intense, converting forest to bushland and farmland at a steady clip.⁴

Leopards are famously adaptable. On the mainland, they thrive in habitats ranging from dense rainforest to semi-arid scrubland and even the fringes of cities. But adaptability has limits. A leopard on a small island needs prey, cover, and enough space to avoid constant contact with people. Unguja’s remaining forest fragments, increasingly surrounded by farmland and settlements, offer diminishing amounts of all three. The Zanzibar red colobus monkey, the island’s flagship species, is already struggling with this same fragmentation. A large predator that needs far more territory than a monkey faces an even steeper challenge.

Researchers looking at the island’s coral rag forests, a distinctive habitat type growing on ancient raised coral, have proposed a twin strategy: better protection of the remaining high-quality forest inside protected areas alongside restoration and rewilding efforts in degraded coral rag zones outside them.⁵ That kind of landscape-level intervention could benefit many species, but the honest assessment is that it was designed with the island’s remaining biodiversity in mind, not with leopard recovery as a realistic goal.

Why Island Leopards Are Especially Vulnerable

The Zanzibar leopard’s story fits a broader and somewhat counterintuitive pattern. When researchers modeled extinction dynamics for big cats on Indonesian islands, they found that leopard populations were actually more extinction-prone than tiger populations, despite tigers having smaller population sizes and being the larger, seemingly more vulnerable species.⁶ The mechanism relates to population ecology: how social structure, breeding rates, and territorial behavior interact with shrinking island habitats. Leopards are solitary and space-hungry in ways that make small, isolated populations fragile.

Compounding this is a genetic reality. A broad study of leopard subspecies found that island populations consistently showed lower molecular genetic diversity than their continental counterparts.⁷ Lower diversity means less raw material for adapting to changing conditions and a higher risk that inbreeding will drag down the population’s health. For a leopard population that was already small, isolated on an island with no gene flow from the mainland, and under active persecution, the genetic deck was stacked from the start.

The 2018 Footage and the Problem of Proof

In 2018, camera traps deployed in a forested area of Unguja captured a few seconds of nighttime footage showing a large, spotted, cat-like animal walking past the lens. The video went viral, and headlines proclaimed the Zanzibar leopard alive. But the reaction from the scientific community was cautious. The footage was grainy, the animal appeared only briefly, and no follow-up captures ever produced a second sighting. Without clearer images, physical evidence like scat or hair samples, or repeated detections at the same or nearby sites, one blurry video clip falls well short of confirming survival.

There is also a fundamental issue with identifying animals from camera trap images, even under good conditions. A study testing how well trained observers could identify individual wild cats from camera trap photos found a startling error rate: observers misclassified about one in eight capture events, and this inflated apparent population counts by roughly a third on average. Even experts made mistakes about 10% of the time, sometimes creating “ghost individuals” that did not actually exist in the population.⁸ That research dealt with individual identification rather than species identification, but it underscores a broader point: our eyes and brains are eager to find what we are looking for in ambiguous visual data. A single, low-resolution night video of a spotted animal on an island where leopards once lived is exactly the kind of evidence most prone to wishful interpretation.

The animal in the footage could have been a leopard. It could also have been a large African civet, which is present on Unguja and can appear confusingly cat-like in poor-quality night footage. Without corroborating evidence, the clip remains an unresolved curiosity rather than proof of persistence.

What Would Confirmation Actually Require?

If researchers wanted to genuinely settle the question, several approaches could provide compelling evidence. Environmental DNA sampling from water sources could detect leopard genetic material even without seeing the animal itself. Scat surveys combined with DNA analysis could confirm species identity from droppings found on trails. Systematic camera trap grids deployed across large areas of remaining forest for extended periods would either produce clear, repeated images or provide strong negative evidence after sufficient effort.

The barrier is not really technology. Modern wildlife survey methods are sophisticated enough to detect extremely rare, elusive animals. The barrier is resources and priorities. Unguja is a developing island economy dependent on tourism and agriculture. Mounting a multi-year, systematic survey for a single predator that is almost certainly gone would require significant funding and institutional commitment. Conservation organizations working on Zanzibar have focused, reasonably, on species that are confirmed alive and in need of help, like the red colobus monkey and the island’s marine ecosystems. A leopard search would be scientifically interesting but is hard to justify when so many confirmed species need attention.

There is also a paradox embedded in the search. If a small number of leopards did somehow survive undetected for three decades, any announcement of their discovery would create enormous pressure on whatever tiny habitat they occupied. Tourism interest, media attention, and even well-meaning conservation efforts could disrupt the very conditions that allowed them to persist in secrecy. Some researchers have quietly suggested that if a remnant population exists, the best thing for the animals might be continued obscurity.

How the Story Compares to Other “Rediscoveries”

The Zanzibar leopard sits in a growing category of animals that hover between confirmed extinction and lingering hope. A few high-profile cases have ended happily. The coelacanth, a fish thought to have gone extinct with the dinosaurs, turned up alive in 1938. The black-footed ferret was declared extinct in 1979, then a ranch dog brought one home in Wyoming in 1981, leading to a captive breeding program that still sustains the species. More recently, several bird species once written off have been rediscovered in remote forests after decades without sightings.

But for every genuine rediscovery, there are dozens of cases where hope proved unfounded. The thylacine (Tasmanian tiger) has been “sighted” repeatedly since its last confirmed individual died in 1936, yet no verifiable evidence has ever emerged despite trail cameras, thermal drones, and organized search efforts across Tasmania. The pattern is familiar: occasional blurry images, excited media coverage, and then silence. The lesson is not that rediscoveries never happen, but that they are far rarer than the hopeful narratives suggest, and the quality of evidence matters enormously.

For the Zanzibar leopard, the odds are particularly long. Unguja is a small, densely populated island. It lacks the vast, trackless wilderness where other “Lazarus species” hid for decades. Every patch of forest is within walking distance of a village. The idea that a population of large cats could persist for thirty years without producing a single confirmed photograph, a kill, a clear track, or a recovered body strains credulity, even accounting for the leopard’s legendary stealth.

What the Genomic Research Means for “De-Extirpation”

The 2024 genomic study that clarified the Zanzibar leopard’s evolutionary origins also raised a provocative idea. Because the Zanzibar population was genetically very close to mainland Tanzanian leopards, and because the traits that made it look distinctive were not caused by unique mutations but by shifts in the frequency of alleles that already exist on the mainland, the study suggested exploring what it called “de-extirpation.” In plain terms: could mainland leopards be introduced to Unguja to fill the ecological role the Zanzibar leopard once occupied?¹

The concept is controversial. Introducing mainland leopards to an island where the original population was persecuted to extinction would require resolving the same human-wildlife conflicts that drove the extinction in the first place. The cultural attitudes documented by Walsh and others have not disappeared. And the habitat challenges described above have only intensified. A reintroduction without addressing community fears and land-use pressures would likely replay the same tragedy on a faster timeline.

Still, the genomic finding matters beyond any practical reintroduction debate. It reframes the Zanzibar leopard not as an ancient, deeply divergent lineage whose loss represents an irreplaceable branch of the evolutionary tree, but as a recently isolated island variant of a widespread species. That does not make its loss less real or less regrettable. But it does change the conservation calculus. The unique genes are not actually gone from the planet; they still circulate at low frequencies in mainland populations. What is gone is the particular ecological community that existed on Unguja with a top predator in it, and that loss has cascading effects on the island’s remaining wildlife that no amount of genomic analysis can undo.

Living with the Ghost

On Unguja today, the leopard persists mainly as a cultural figure. It appears in local folklore, in the names of places and businesses, and in the narratives that tour guides share with visitors to Jozani forest. For some older residents, the leopard remains entangled with memories of witchcraft accusations and community conflict. For younger Zanzibaris and for the conservation community, it has become something different: a cautionary symbol of what happens when a species falls through the gap between local fear and outside indifference.

The witchcraft beliefs that fueled the leopard’s persecution were not irrational in the way outside observers sometimes portray them. They were a framework through which communities interpreted real livestock losses and real danger. Dismissing those beliefs as superstition misses the point and, more practically, makes it harder to build the kind of community-level trust that any future large carnivore conservation on the island would require. Researchers who have worked on Zanzibar emphasize that any serious conservation effort, whether for the leopard’s ghost or for other threatened species, has to begin with local concerns rather than outside agendas.

The coral rag forests of Unguja still harbor an unusual assemblage of plants and animals adapted to a landscape unlike anything on the nearby mainland. Whether or not a leopard still pads through those forests at night, the forests themselves are worth protecting, and the ongoing loss of tree cover outside protected areas is the more immediate crisis. The leopard question makes for a compelling headline, but the quieter story of shrinking habitat and biodiversity erosion on a small tropical island is, in many ways, the more consequential one.