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Panna National Park, one of India’s premier Tiger Parks, has admitted it no longer has any tigers.
The park, in the central state of Madhya Pradesh, was part of the country’s efforts to save the famous Royal Bengal Tiger from extinction.
Rajendra Shukla, the State Minister of Forests, said that the reserve, which 3 years ago had 24 tigers, no longer had any.
A special census was conducted in the park by a premier wildlife institute, after the forest authorities reported no sightings of the animals for a long time.
This is the second tiger reserve in India, after Sariska in Rajasthan, where numbers have dwindled to zero.
Officials from the wildlife department say there is no “explicable” reason for the falling number of tigers.
But a report prepared by the central forest ministry says Panna cannot be compared with Sariska because “warning bells were sounded regularly for the last eight years”.
The report says wildlife authorities failed to see the impending disaster despite repeated warnings, and lost most of Panna’s big cats to poaching.
While this controversy rages, there have been reports that another national park in Madhya Pradesh, Sanjay National Park, which was included in the tiger project three years ago, also has no tigers left.
The park had a population of 15 tigers until the late 1990s.
Of the more than 1,400 tigers in the country, 300 dwell in the state of Madhya Pradesh, which is also called the “tiger state of India”.
But Madhya Pradesh’s forest minister Rajendra Shukla says all the news is not bleak.
“Panna is our only park which has lost on this count,” he says. “Three of state’s reserve forests – Kanha, Bandhavgarh and Pench – have been adjudged among the best managed tiger reserves in the country.”
Mr Shukla has drawn up a seven-member committee comprising the state’s chief conservator of forests and experts, to ascertain why the tigers have disappeared.
The chief conservator, HS Pabla, told the BBC that the report would be submitted some time in August.
The authorities have recently transported two female tigers to Panna from another nearby tiger park, and sought permission from the central administration to bring in four more, two of them males.
India had 40,000 tigers a century ago, but the numbers dwindled fast because of hunting and poaching.
The country banned tiger hunting and launched an ambitious conservation effort named Project Tiger to increase the population of the endangered species.
A number of forest areas were declared national parks and funds allotted for protecting the tigers.
Though the programme bore fruit initially, with the decline in numbers checked because of a hunting ban, recent years have seen a phenomenal rise in poaching, which is now organised almost along the lines of drug-smuggling.
The authorities have not been able to put a stop to it, owing to the ever-changing techniques used by the cartels, and corruption within.
MK Ranjitsingh, a member of National Wildlife Advisory Board, says the authorities must crack down on the poachers by preventing their activities in the parks, and stopping the export of tiger products.
And they must, he adds, lobby for international pressure on the nations of the Far East, which are the main buyers of such goods.
There have been reports that there is a huge demand for tiger bones, claws and skin in countries like China, Taiwan and Korea.
New research has found that the world’s largest cat,- the Amur tiger, is down to an effective wild population of fewer than 35 individuals.
Although up to 500 of the big cats actually survive in the wild, the effective population is a measure of their genetic diversity.
That in turn is a good predictor of the Amur tiger’s chances of survival.
The results come from the most complete genetic survey yet of wild Amur tigers, the rarest subspecies of tiger.
At the start of the 20th Century, nine subspecies of tiger existed, with a total world population of more than 100,000 individuals.
Human impacts have since caused the extinction of three subspecies, the Javan tiger, Bali tiger and Caspian tiger, and world tiger numbers could now have fallen to fewer than 3000.
The Amur tiger, or Siberian tiger as it is also known, is the largest subspecies which once lived across a large portion of northern China, the Korean peninsula, and the southernmost regions of far east Russia. The Amur tiger most likely derived from the Caspian tiger, recent research has shown.
During the early 20th century, the Amur tiger too was almost driven to extinction, as expanding human settlements, habitat loss and poaching wiped out this biggest of cats from over 90% of its range.
By the 1940s just 20 to 30 individuals survived in the wild.
Since then, a ban on hunting and a remarkable conservation effort have slowly helped the Amur tiger recover. Today, up to 500 are thought to survive in the wild, while 421 cats are kept in captivity.
However, the genetic health of the tiger hasn’t improved, according to a new analysis published in Molecular Ecology.
Michael Russello and Philippe Henry of the University of British Columbia, in Kelowna, Canada led a team drawn from universities in Canada, Japan and the US in a bid to analyse the genetic profiles of the remaining wild Amur tigers.
They sampled nuclear DNA found within the scat samples of an estimated 95 individuals found throughout the Amur tiger’s range, likely constituting up to 20% of the remaining population.
The study sampled the amount of variation within the DNA from more tigers, across a broader geographic, than any previous research.
“Although the census population size of Amur tigers is closer to 500 individuals, the population is behaving as if it were the size of 27 to 35 individuals,” says Russello.
That’s the lowest genetic diversity ever recorded for a population of wild tigers.
The effective population of any group of animals will be lower than the number that actually exist, due to factors such as non-breeding individuals or a skewed sex ratio.
“However, what is remarkable about the Amur tiger is how much lower the effective population size is than the census size,” says Russello.
Another important finding to emerge from the study is that the remaining Amur tigers are segregated into two populations that rarely intermingle.
The majority of Amur tigers live among the slopes of the Russian Sikhote-Alin Mountains, with 20 or fewer living separately in Southwest Primorye in Russia.
The two groups are separated by a corridor of development between Vladivostok and Ussurisk, and the genetic analysis showed that perhaps just three tigers had managed to cross the divide, reducing the effective size of the wild population further.
“There is little sharing of genes across the development corridor, suggesting that these two populations are fairly discrete,” says Russello.
“In actuality, it seems that Amur tigers are residing in two, fairly independent populations on either side of the development corridor between Vladivostok and Ussurisk, further lowering the effective size for each from 26 to 28 for Sikhote-Alin and 2.8 to 11 for Southwest Primorye.”
That means more work needs to be done to open up this barrier segregating the tigers.
If that doesn’t happen, then it’s likely that the Southwest Primorye population will continue to dwindle. That could also kill off the prospect of reintroducing Amur tigers to China, as those in Southwest Primorye are living closest to their former Chinese range.
The news is not all bad for the Amur tiger, however. Russello and Henry’s team also analysed the nuclear and mitochondrial DNA of 20 captive Amur tigers, to see if they retained any unique genetic features since lost by the wild tigers.
“There are gene variants found in captivity that no longer persist in the wild,” says Russello, which suggests that the captive program has done a good job of preserving the genetic diversity of the subspecies.
“Now that it is known which individuals possess which gene variants, managers will be able to selectively breed to help preserve the unique and rare gene variants,” says Russello.
“The implication is that this variation may be used to re-infuse the wild population sometime in the future if reintroduction strategies are deemed warranted.”