Saving Wild Tigers

John Seidensticker

I have been working in Asia for a long time now. I think about the challenge we face in saving tigers and other wildlife this way: What I have always found thrilling about working on conservation issues in Asia is that there is a good bit of tolerance on the part of the people who live and work in the places where these splendid great animals still live and where we would like to see them live in the future. This commitment is as important an assumption in endangered species recovery as the issue of ecological amnesia (forgetting the environmental conditions of the past). From a North American’s perspective, with our limited understanding of our own environmental history, and our myth of nature untouched, we look at the Asian situation and the prospects looks bleak. We see little hope that the restoration of endangered species is possible. I think we are overwhelmed by the heavy human footprint; we don’t usually see people as part of the solutions to ecological restorations even though people dominate the landscape. But Asian conservation colleagues, on the other hand, would point out that we—people– have always lived here. People are a fact of life. Change happens. Now let’s get on with what we are trying to do and ask: “What useful ideas and tools do you bring to help us keep our wonderful wildlife?”

John Seidensticker

A 2006 report from WWF, WCS, and the Smithsonian identified about 1.1 million sq km of actual or potential tiger habitat that was fractionating into what these scientist called tiger conservation landscapes (TCLs). This constituted only 7% of the tiger’s historical range. More alarming was the finding that this actual and potential habitat had declined by 41% from the decade previous. Roughly half of the TCL are large enough to support 100 or more tigers with the 7 largest offering the potential to support 500 or more tigers. This 500 figure is significant because it is the estimated minimum population size for genetic stability over the long-term. The 2006 analysis was based on on-the-ground observations gathered in the decade before the 2006 study. This analysis also reported that poaching pressure on both tigers and prey had depressed tiger populations in most of these landscapes, even in protected areas, to far below carrying capacity when compared to historical information. Since this analysis was done in 2004-2006, further observation and consultation with range countries have led to the horrific realization that there may be no remaining ecologically functional tiger populations (tiger populations that may no longer be viable) in as many as 33% of the tiger landscapes. Further, if you just consider the core protected areas that support breeding tiger populations, there are only about~100,000 sq km protected that can support roughly 3,000 tigers. If the sites are fully recovered they probably could support 4000-4500 tigers. Doubling the number of tigers – getting back to the 1998 level – requires protection of tiger and prey over the larger landscapes. There is no one silver bullet in recovering the tiger. The overarching challenge of tiger conservation and the conservation of biodiversity generally is one of valuation. There is insufficient demand for the survival of wild tigers living in natural landscapes. This allows criminal activity of poaching wild tigers and trafficking in their derivatives to flourish and tiger landscapes to be diminished. There is no silver bullet but we can scale up practices that have proven effective and develop transnational actions that enhance the effectiveness of each tiger range country’s actions.

John Seidensticker

You are correct. The Amur and Sumatran tigers have very mature global zoo-based management systems that are designed to promote demographic and genetic stability in the zoo poplations. Indeed, the zoo based
Amur tiger population has more genetic diversity than there is in the wild population. The Malay sub species was only identified as a distinct sub species from the rest of the tigers in SE Asia in the last few years. Before that the efforts to manage the subspecies were mostly based on tigers from Malaysia. As a result the zoo poopulation of the Malay subspecies can progress. The management of the zoo based tigers in Vietnam, Lao and Thailand is under developed. As part of the Global Tiger Recovery Program, Vietnam is proposing to bring its captive tigers under management control. Also there are genetic tools now avaiable to check to see if a tiger is one one species or another or a hybred. One last point, no reputable zoo accepts any wild caught tigers these days, with the except of conflict animals as very special cases.