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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.”

A recent study has rfevealed that Lions form prides to defend territory against other lions – not to improve their hunting success.

In doing so, they act much like street gangs, gathering together to protect their turf from interlopers, says a leading lion expert.

The bigger the gang, the more successful the lions are, information that could help conserve wild lions.

The discovery helps explain why lions, uniquely among the cat species, live together in social groups.

Lions stand out amongst all the cat species for their gregarious nature.

Across Africa and Asia, lions form prides of varying sizes comprising one or more males and often numerous females and cubs.

But why they do so has remained a mystery. A long-standing idea is that female lions socialise in order to hunt cooperatively. But despite the common sight of multiple females working together to outflank and bring down large prey, there is no clear link between how many lions hunt together and their hunting success.

Another is that lions gather to protect territory. Indeed, a range of animals from social insects to primates form social groups that defend territories against competitors.

But while there has been anecdotal evidence that bigger groups have a competitive advantage, the idea has never been rigorously tested over long periods of time.

That has now changed with a study analysing the behaviour of 46 lion prides living in the Serengeti National Park, Tanzania.

Conducted by ecologists Anna Mosser and Craig Packer of the University of Minnesota in St Paul, US, the study collated data about the prides’ behaviour over 38 years, including where they ranged, their composition and how they interacted.

Mosser’s and Packer’s key finding was that competition between lion prides significantly affects the mortality and reproductive success of female lions, they report in the journal Animal Behaviour.

Larger prides with more adult females not only produced more cubs, as might be expected, but the females within these prides were less likely to be wounded or killed by other lions.

Prides with more females were also more likely to gain control of areas disputed with neighbouring prides, and those prides that recruited lone females improved the quality of their territory.

“The most important way to think about this is that lion prides are like street gangs,” says Packer.

“They compete for turf. The bigger the gang, the more successful it is at controlling the best areas. The main difference from humans is that these are gangs of female lions.”

Both researchers think the study, alongside other work they have yet to publish, finally confirms that bigger prides form to defend territory.

“The advantage of large group size for group-territorial animals has been suspected for a long time, but had never been proven with data,” says Mosser. “With this paper, we were able to do just that because of the many groups studied over a long period.”

One surprise revealed by the research is that male lions turn out to play a much bigger role in how prides interact than expected.

Large coalitions of female lions are so successful at dominating small neighbouring prides that male lions step in to try to alter the balance of power. Males will often attack and attempt to kill female lions in neighbouring prides to tip the odds in favour of their own pride.

“Males turn out to be playing a greater role than we realised,” says Packer. “Males attack females from neighbouring prides, likely altering the balance of power in favour of ‘their’ females.”

The territorial advantages gained by coming together into larger social groups would have driven the evolution of social behaviour in lions, say the researchers.

“It also confirms a pattern that is probably applicable for many species, including group-territorial ants, birds, and chimpanzees,” says Mosser, who is now at The Jane Goodhall Institute, in Kigoma, Tanzania.

Such insights will help with the conservation of lions, the numbers of which are suspected to have fallen by at least a third across Africa over the past two decades.

The research shows that “the lions are competing for relatively scarce ‘hotspots’ of high value real estate,” says Packer.

So “lion numbers are ultimately limited by the number of hotspots that are safely inside national parks”.

A rare white tiger has mauled to death a New Zealand zoo keeper as horrified tourists looked on, police said.

The attack occurred at the Zion Wildlife Gardens in Whangarei, some 200km (124 miles) north of Auckland.

Police said the tiger grabbed a male zoo keeper who was cleaning an enclosure and would not let go despite the efforts of other staff members.

The zoo – home to some 40 rare lions and tigers – has been closed to visitors, and the tiger destroyed.

Police said the attack was witnessed by a group of eight tourists.

The keeper was named in local media as South African Dalu Mncube who reportedly rescued one of his colleagues from an attack earlier this year.

The zoo is well known in New Zealand as the setting for a reality television programme that starred its founder Craig Busch, known as the “Lion Man”.

Mr Busch was dismissed from his post last year by his mother, who controls the zoo.

The current global economic crisis is threatening the Amur Tiger. Loggers in Russia’s Far East increasingly are cutting down Korean cedar pine, raising concerns that the endangered Amur tiger could lose critical habitat and its prey could lose a major food source.

Under pressure from the ongoing economic crisis, loggers are turning to the more lucrative Korean cedar pine (Pinus korajensis) as commodity prices for other types of wood fall, which in turn has led to large-scale illegal logging operations in the Ussuriiskaya taiga in Primorye, according to WWF-Russia.

“Chinese importers of the Far Eastern wood have sharply dropped prices and demand for oak and ash wood as an answer to the world crisis,” said Denis Smirnov, head of the forest program at WWF-Russia’s Amur branch. “These species were the most desired ones for poachers before, but the demand was reduced after export customs duties for these species of timber had been increased from Feb. 1.”

“At the same time, Korean pine wood is still highly demanded both in domestic and international markets and is sold at rather high prices,” Smirnov said.

Russia’s Far East Korean cedar pine forests were heavily logged during the second half of the 20th century, particularly in the late 1990s, which resulted in a 50 percent reduction and left only around 2.88 million hectares of the forests today.

Although P. koraiensis is not nationally protected in Russia, its logging is either prohibited or regulated in certain provinces of Russia and China. However, loggers typically exploit loopholes in regional regulations to launder illegally logged wood, often taking advantage of lax customs controls or by under-declaring the volume of legal exports.

“This rampant and mindless logging is shocking and disturbs the habitat and prey base of some of the rarest animals in the world including the Amur tiger and Amur leopard,” said Dr. Susan Lieberman, Director of the Species Programme for WWF-International.

In the Amur region, tiger conservation hinges on protecting the Korean cedar pine. Pine nuts from the tree represent an integral food source for the Amur tiger’s prey, such as wild boars. Korean pine-broadleaved forests also provide habitats for the Far Eastern leopard, Asiatic and brown bears, sika deers and many other species. These pine nuts are also sold internationally, benefiting local communities as well.

Awareness of the recently increased demand for Korean cedar pine surfaced after WWF staff, with members of Russia’s Internal Affairs Department, the Primorskii Province Forestry Department and Rosselkhoznadzor — the Federal Service of Veterinary and Phyto-Sanitary Supervision – raided a wood exporter platform in January in the city of Dalnerechensk.

They found about 10 to 15,000 cubic meters of Korean cedar pine originating from illegal logging sites in Dalnerechenskii, Krasnoarmeiskii and Lesozavodskii districts in central and northern Primorye.

Two largest of logging sites, with total volume exceeding 3,000 cubic meters, were found close to the village of Malinovo in an area leased by one of the biggest logging companies in Primorye – JSC “Dalnerechenskles,” which is part of the “Dallesprom” group.

Before enforcement of a new Russian Forest Code in 2007, Korean pine held a special status as a species protected from commercial use, which contributed to its conservation. Korean pine has now lost its protective status and increased demand for Korean pine timber along with the complete inaction of regulators and forest control services to address the need for a new special status for the Korean pine have made it an easy target for illegal logging.

The only way to stop the complete destruction of the Far Eastern Korean pine forests is to impose a moratorium on its harvesting, according to WWF. The conservation organization asks that provincial and federal authorities come up with a proposal to urgently add Korean pine into the list of species forbidden to harvest, and to inform importing countries accordingly.

The Amur tiger, which can weigh up to 300 kg and measure around three metres from its nose to the tip of its tail, has come back from the brink of extinction to its highest population for at least 100 years. Only about 40 were alive in 1950 but nowadays there are around 450, one of the strongest tiger populations in the world.

Regular readers of this blog will know that along with fetching you news about Bengal kitten availability, we also publish ‘big cat’ news – leopards, pumas, tigers, lions, jaguars and the like. Most of the news we publish is current, but this story is a little dated – to be exact it’s 13,000 years old.

Scientists from Oxford University have discovered that Super size giant lions were roaming around North America, the UK and Europe, thirteen thousand years ago.

Remains of giant cats previously discovered were thought to be a species of jaguar or tiger but after DNA analysis they were proved to be lions.

They were 25% bigger than the species of African lion living today, and had longer legs to chase their prey.

They would have lived in icy tundra with mammoth and sabretooth tigers.

It is thought these animals would hunt over longer distances, and their longer legs would help them chase down their prey as opposed to the modern-day species which tends to ambush its victims.

The Oxford team analysed DNA from fossils and other remains gathered from Germany to Siberia, and Alaska to Wyoming.

Dr Ross Barnett, who conducted the research at Oxford University’s department of Zoology, said: “These ancient lions were like a super-sized version of today’s lions and, in the Americas, with longer legs adapted for endurance running.

“What our genetic evidence shows is that these ancient extinct lions and the lions of today were very closely related.

“Cave art also suggests that they formed prides, although the males in the pictures would not have had manes and they are depicted very realistically.”

Lions appear to have been very important to early man with many depictions of them in their cave paintings, as in seen in the pre-historic cave complex at Chauvet in France.

Other archaeological finds in Germany include figurines which are half man, half lion, leading to the theory that lions may even have been worshipped by ancient humans.

The team found that these remains from the Pleistocene Epoch (1.8 million years ago to 10,000 years ago) could be divided into two groups: the American Lion which lived in North America, and the Cave Lion which lived in northern Europe, Russia, Alaska and the Yukon.

These ancient cats would have lived in an environment that was more like an icy tundra and would have shared their habitat with herds of other large animals such as mammoth, woolly rhino, sabre tooth tigers and giant deer.

About 13,000 years ago these species died out in a mass extinction. Figuring out the reason behind this, Dr Barnett said, was one of the last great scientific mysteries.

He said: “There are a couple of different schools of thought. It could have been climate change or something to do with humans. Humans could have been killing off their prey or killing the lions themselves.

“The extinction is a big question that remains unresolved. More research and more advanced genetic analysis may help answer it.”

Fear often seems to begin with a road. Driving into tiger territory, all voices in the jeep gradually fell silent. The only sound was the thick vegetation swishing against the windows as we lurched along the muddy track. The forest in Jambi province, Sumatra, is the site of Indonesia’s newest conflict. Tigers are killing people here at the rate of one a week. As their forests disappear under loggers’ saws or to make way for plantations, Sumatra’s endangered tigers are, quite simply, turning to humans for food.
We were on our way to the site of one attack. Soon, the tell-tale signs of illegal loggers appeared out of the forest – piles of wood, neatly stacked in a small clearing. We pulled up, and started down their tracks into the forest.
For Indonesia’s tiger catchers, this is their daily commute.
In just a few months, these forest rangers have gone from chasing illegal loggers to finding and catching the tigers who are killing them.
And even now, their guns and camaraderie do not completely hide their fear.

The silence was thick with it as we made our way into the forest.
Everything at the illegal logging site was pretty much as Khoiry left it before he was attacked and killed.

Felled trees were piled up ready for transport out of the forest, the ground was thick with sawdust.
There were no footprints left for the team to track, and no sign of a tiger.
But in terms of why these attacks are happening, chief tiger ranger Nurazman Nurdin said this site was right on target.
“The main problem is illegal logging,” he explained. “It’s destroying the tigers’ habitat. This place, for example, they don’t have a permit for what they’re doing here – it’s illegal.”
It might be illegal, but for the people living here the punishment seems disproportionate.

In one village, we found Supari on the front porch of her house. She lost her husband and son in a tiger attack here only a few weeks ago.
She buckled with tears as she told us how they were killed while cutting wood just a short distance from the house.
But Supari’s son-in-law Coko says it is wrong to blame them for what happened.
“We’re victims, not thieves,” he told me. “We go to the forest to put food on the table. You can’t blame us for this conflict with the tigers.”

Hundreds of kilometres away in the provincial capital, district chief Burhanuddin Hanir agreed.He said this latest conflict was probably the result of a new logging company which started operating nearby – with official permission.But why was a logging company given permission to operate in the tigers’ dwindling territory?
“We only found out there were tigers in the area after the investors started chopping down the trees,” he said.
“Now we have more regulations to protect the tigers’ habitat. But the problem is that the tigers are already disturbed and angry.”
As in many parts of Indonesia’s vast territory, regulations are one thing – enforcing them is quite another.
There could be as few as 250 tigers left here, but Sumatra’s forest is now so depleted it is struggling to support even this tiny number.
Back at the attack site, ranger Nurazman Nurdin sounded dejected.
He told me there was no long-term plan – the rangers were just trying to keep the humans and tigers apart.
It is dangerous work – and not a job he enjoys.
But Sumatra’s tiger catchers are up against more than just hungry tigers. They’re battling the world’s demand for Indonesia’s forests, and the timber and paper and palm oil they provide.
These are lucrative exports for Indonesia. The question is whether their tigers are worth any more.

A new piece of software which uses 3D coordinates mapped onto a tiger’s body, is able to identify individual tigers by the unique stripe patterns on their coats, similar to a barcode.

Developers say the software will make it easier to estimate tiger populations and aid conservation efforts.

It is also able to match skins sold on the black market to photographs of the animals taken using camera traps.

The team of scientists based in the UK and India report its invention in the journal Biology Letters.

The program was based on software originally designed to scan the markings of grey seals and identify them from photographs.

The researchers adapted this for tiger stripes, and combined it with a 3D map of the surface of a tiger’s body.

This enabled them effectively to unwrap the pattern of stripes from an image of a live animal and match it to picture of the flat skin.

Dr Ullas Karanth, a researcher from the Wildlife Conservation Society India Program, worked on the project with the UK-based company Conservation Research.

“Tigers are very secretive animals and it is a major challenge to estimate their numbers,” Dr Karanth explained.

Over a decade ago, he came up with the idea of using camera traps – hidden cameras operated by trip wires – to monitor tiger populations.

Since then researchers have used a combination of this automated photography – and tagging and tracking the animals – to monitor their numbers.

But each new photograph of a tiger had to be compared with every animal in a database of images. It is a laborious process, Dr Karanth says.

“No piece of software is as good at discerning shapes as the human brain, but we can use this to shortlist the most likely matches, and then eyeball the photos in that shortlist,” said Dr Karanth, “It’s a very powerful tool.”

While they were testing the software, Dr Karanth and his colleagues found images of three tigers that, it turned out, had later been killed by poachers.

This inspired the designers to build in a forensic tool that could be used to trace the origin of any skin to a photograph of the tiger.

They also adapted it for other species with unique markings, including leopards, zebras and salamanders.

Belinda Wright is executive director of the Wildlife Protection Society of India, an organisation that investigates every tiger death in the country.

She says simplifying the process of identifying tigers from camera trap images would be “very beneficial” to conservation research.

But, she warned, opportunities to find the origin of a confiscated tiger skin are rare.

“Skins are often seized in very remote locations, and we often don’t get decent photographs of them,” Ms Wright explained.

Further, camera trapping is not yet carried out continuously in all of the areas throughout India where tigers live.

This will be necessary, she says, to maintain a census of the tiger population.

“Until camera trapping is a regular and ongoing process,” said Ms Wright, “the usefulness of this amazing software will be limited.”

Jakarta, Indonesia – In the wake of the deaths of six people from tiger attacks in Sumatra’s Jambi Province in less than a month, conservationists are calling for an urgent crackdown on the clearing of natural forest in the province as a matter of public safety.

Tigers killed three illegal loggers over the weekend in Jambi, according to government officials. Three people were killed earlier in the same central Sumatran province. Three juvenile tigers were killed by villagers this month in neighbouring Riau Province, apparently after straying into a village in search of food. And in an unrelated incident, two Riau farmers were hospitalized after being attacked by a tiger last weekend.

“As people encroach into tiger habitat, it’s creating a crisis situation and further threatening this critically endangered sub-species,” said Ian Kosasih, director of WWF’s Forest Program. “In light of these killings, officials have got to make public safety a top concern and put a stop to illegal clearance of forests in Sumatra.”

There is rampant clearing of forests by individuals and corporations in the region for palm oil plantations and pulpwood plantations. This forest loss is one of the leading drivers of human-tiger conflict in the region. About 12 million hectares of Sumatran forest has been cleared in the past 22 years, a loss of nearly 50 percent islandwide. The incidents in Riau occurred in the Kerumutan forest block, a site where many forest fires have been set in the last two months, as well as the location of many plantation developments threatening tiger forests.

Jambi Province is the site of the only two “global priority” tiger conservation landscapes in Sumatra, as identified by a group of leading tiger scientists in 2005. There are estimated to be fewer than 400 Sumatran tigers left in the wild.

Didy Wurjanto, the head of the official Jambi nature conservancy agency, BKSDA, said his team has increased its patrols following the killings. He is also working with local officials to halt the rampant conversion of forests by illegal loggers and palm oil plantations, which is mostly done by people from outside Jambi.

“The shocking news that six people have been killed in less than one month is an extremely sad illustration of how bad the situation has become in Jambi,” Wurjanto said. “It’s a signal that we need to get serious about protecting natural forest and giving tigers their space, and ensure local governments have sustainable economic development policies in place that include long-term protections for our natural resources.”

Canadian company – Wing Quon Enterprises Ltd., which specialised in Chinese traditional medicines is to pay the bulk of a $45,000 fine for trading illegally in tiger parts to TRAFFIC, the wildlife trade monitoring network that helped secure its conviction.

The company pleaded guilty to possessing and attempting to sell medicines containing parts from Tigers and other protected species in a Richmond Provincial Court earlier this week.

TRAFFIC, whose expertise helped secure the conviction, are to receive the bulk of this sum, some $40,000.

The company was also ordered to forfeit seized medicines and products made from other endangered species, including costus root, agarwood, bear, pangolin, musk deer and rhinoceros. All are listed in the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), which imposes strict controls on listed plants, wildlife and their derivatives.

TRAFFIC, which operates globally, was established as a partnership between WWF, the world’s leading conservation organization, and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, a global consortium of government, scientific and civil society organizations.