Northeast African cheetah
| Northeast African cheetah | |
|---|---|
| A female cheetah in Zoo Landau, Germany | |
| Scientific classification | |
| Domain: | Eukaryota |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Class: | Mammalia |
| Order: | Carnivora |
| Suborder: | Feliformia |
| Family: | Felidae |
| Subfamily: | Felinae |
| Genus: | Acinonyx |
| Species: | |
| Subspecies: | A. j. soemmeringii |
| Trinomial name | |
| Acinonyx jubatus soemmeringii (Fitzinger, 1855) | |
| A. j. soemmeringii range (brown) | |
| Synonyms | |
|
A. j. megabalica (Heuglin), 1863
| |
The Northeast African cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus soemmeringii) is a cheetah subspecies occurring in Northeast Africa. Contemporary records are known in South Sudan, Uganda, and Ethiopia, but population status in Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia, Kenya, and Sudan is unknown.
It was first described under the scientific name Cynailurus soemmeringii by the Austrian zoologist Leopold Fitzinger in 1855 on the basis of a specimen from Sudan’s Bayuda Desert brought to the Tiergarten Schönbrunn in Vienna. It is also known as the Sudan cheetah.
In the 1970s, the cheetah population in Ethiopia, Sudan and Somalia was roughly estimated at 1,150 to 4,500 individuals. In 2024, it was estimated that 533 individuals live inside protected areas in this region; the number of individuals living outside protected areas is unknown.
This subspecies is more closely related to the Southern African cheetah than to Saharan cheetah populations. Results of a phylogeographic analysis indicate that the two subspecies diverged between 16,000 and 72,000 years ago.