Experience is always the best teacher, and this young leopard was about to get a lot of experience messing about with this mound of termites. Small biting insects might sting, but not enough to end the game.
Kerry Balaam from Kruger Pride Safaris caught the leopard on camera antagonizing the mound, and sent the footage to Latest Sightings. It was an unexpected rivalry, but the leopard was having a good time and that’s what was important.
A Much Bigger Kind Of Predator
Termites are an insect, which obviously means they’re pretty small, much smaller than anything a leopard would normally concern itself with. This drastic size difference might well have come as a bit of a shock to the termites as well.
Termites would be used to dealing with problems like other insects, ants in particular, but also things like lizards and frogs which would treat a termite mound as an all you can eat buffet.
A big cat suddenly jumping up an down on top of their house, even a small one, would definitely have made sure all the termites were awake, and probably rushing to protect their home from one of the bigger problems they’d likely faced.
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Playing With Fire
It was clear that their attacks were not enough to completely repel the leopard, because it was no doubt receiving a lot of bites and it wasn’t doing anything more than shaking its paws occasionally.
At first it wasn’t clear if the leopard was even antagonizing the termites on purpose. It appeared to be playing a game with a small stone it’d found, and was playing with it in the same way that a house cat plays with an expensive bobble for two seconds before going for the box.
But obviously its game had taken it onto the mound, and the termites had started to come out to defend it and that’s when they started distracting the leopard.
Inhospitable Animals
The termites were understandably not very happy with the leopard raking its toys through their roof and responded by attacking the only way they knew how.
A termite’s main defenses involve the spraying of nasty fluids in some species, but there’s always the old reliable biting which tends to work on most other animals that might come close.
Something as big as this leopard might not really be in pain from being bitten by something as small as a termite, but these little insects were able to irritate the skin on the leopard’s paws, causing it to flap them repeatedly to try and shake the termites loose.
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Too Annoying To Stay
It wasn’t clear if the leopard actually understood what was happening at first. It leaped around a little looking at the ground as if it was playing a game of the floor is lava, then appeared to try and attack something.
The termites would have been too small and too numerous for the leopard to effectively fight, and although they might not have caused any true pain, the termites were annoying enough for the leopard to quickly decide it would be better off leaving.
