Snow sheep [2] [3] , or chubuk [2] [3] , or rhino [2] [3] ( Latin Ovis nivicola - “sheep living in the snow”) is a species of artiodactyls from the genus of rams . Distributed in Eastern Siberia .
| Snow ram |
blank300.png | 1px]] [[file: blank300.png
Kamchatka snow sheep |
| Scientific classification |
|---|
| No rank : | Bilateral symmetrical |
|
| International scientific name |
|---|
Ovis nivicola Eschscholtz , 1829 |
| Synonyms |
|---|
- Ovis borealis Severtzov, 1873 [1]
- Ovis storcki J. Allen, 1904 [1]
- Ovis alleni Matschie, 1907 [1]
- Ovis middendorfi Kowarzik, 1913 [1]
- Ovis lenaensis Kowarzik, 1914 [1]
|
| Area |
|---|
|
| Security status |
|---|
Least ConcernedIUCN 3.1 Least Concern : 15740 |
|
Some authors do not distinguish the bighorn sheep as a separate species, but classify it as bighorn sheep ( Ovis canadensis ) as a subspecies of Ovis canadensis nivicola [4] .
Content
Snow ram on a postage stamp
A ram of medium size and a dense physique. The head is small, with short ears (up to 11 cm long), the neck is short and thick. The limbs are also quite short and thick [5] . In adult males, the body length is 140-188 cm, the height at the withers is 76-112 cm, and the mass is 56-150 kg. Females are somewhat smaller, their body length 126-179 cm, height at the withers 76-100 cm, weight 33-68 kg. The largest representatives of the species are found in Kamchatka and Chukotka [6] .
In diploid cells in representatives of this species contains 52 chromosomes . This is less than other modern sheep species [7] .
Snow sheep feed mainly on higher plants , mainly grassy ones , and also eat lichens and mushrooms . According to the calculations of A.A. Danilkin, based on data from scientific literature, snow sheep eat more than 320 species of vegetation. From spring to early autumn, the basis of the diet is made up of various herbs ( cereals , legumes , sedge , buckwheat, and Asteraceae ), including vaginal cotton grass nutritional and biomass-dominant. Since the beginning of autumn, the diet has been supplemented by berries, lichens and mushrooms ( brown boletus , oily , russula ). Old mushrooms teeming with parasitic larvae serve as an additional source of proteins and vitamins. In the snowy period, rams get their food by digging snow with their front legs. At this time, lichens and dried grass become the basis of their diet. They eat grasses that remain green under snow cover, as well as wormwood , horsetail , plunders , mosses , shrubs and shrubs (dwarf willows, birches, etc.), rhizomes and roots of a number of plants, needles of larch and cedar dwarf pine [8] .
An important factor is the availability of food in the winter, which depends on the nature of the snow cover. Locations with dense snow cover or with a snow cover height of more than 40 cm are unsuitable for representatives of this species [9] .
A few fossil remains of a ram were found in the Pleistocene and Holocene sediments ; their age reaches 40, and possibly 100 thousand years. As far as these findings can be judged, in the Pleistocene the range of this species was more extensive than the modern one and extended from the Kuril and Aleutian islands, Kamchatka and Sakhalin in the east to the Kuznetsk hollow in the west [4] . It covered not only mid- and high-mountain regions, but also plateaus. The subsequent reduction in the range is associated with an increase in the height of snow cover on the plateaus as a result of warming and humidification of the climate at the beginning of the Holocene. Large predators and hunters also contributed to the reduction of range [9] . So, in the Kuril and Aleutian islands, a ram was destroyed by people several centuries ago [10] .
The area of modern range is about 1.4 million km 2 [11] . It is focal and confined to mountainous areas. Snow sheep is found in the mountains of Kamchatka, on the Koryak upland , in Chukotka , in the mountains of the Verkhoyansk mountain system , in the vicinity of the Stanovoy ridge , on the Stanovoy upland and in the north of the Yablonovy ridge . A separate western part of the range, located 1300 km from the eastern parts, is located in the Putorana plateau region. In the XIX century, the boundaries of this site could reach the lower reaches of the Yenisei and the Byrranga mountains in Taimyr . The penetration of a snow sheep into Taimyr in the 20th century is not excluded [12] .
In the list of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, the bighorn sheep is classified as the most endangered species [13] .
According to various researchers, in the 1960-1990s, the number of bighorn sheep was in the range of 30-97 thousand individuals. According to official data of the Glavokhot of the RSFSR in the mid-1970s, it amounted to no more than 25-40 thousand. In 2014, the State Service for Accounting for Hunting Resources estimated the population at 73.6 thousand [14] .
In the 1970s, there were about 1–1.5 thousand individuals on the Putorana plateau, in the 1980s the population increased to 3.5 thousand, and at the beginning of the 21st century it reached 6–6.5 thousand [15] .
