Wild adult female Bengal tiger, Panthera tigris tigris, Kanha National Park (also known as Kanha Tiger Reserve), MP, India.
(Credit: Charles J Sharp / Sharp Photography / CC BY-SA 4.0)
/ Sharp Photography via a Creative Commons license
The wonderful thing about tiggers
Is tiggers are wonderful things!”
-- Lyrics from The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh
Composed by Richard M. Sherman and Robert B. Sherman.
After coming close to being extinguished from the wild, India’s tiger population has more than doubled in 12 years, according to a summary report that was recently released by Narendra Modi, India’s Prime Minister (PDF). According to this report, wild tiger numbers increased in India from 1,411 in 2006 to an estimated 2,967 in 2018.
In 1900, there were more than 100,000 wild tigers, but by 2010 it was estimated there were just 3,200 -- an all-time low. This steep population decline motivated India and 12 other “tiger countries” to hold the Tiger Summit of St. Petersburg in 2010, where they agreed to double the wild tiger population by 2022. Because most of the wild tigers live in India, this country was responsible for making most of the hard choices. Nevertheless, India achieved this goal four years early.
“Once the people of India decide to do something, there is no force that can prevent them from getting the desired results,” India’s prime minister announced at a press conference. “Today we reaffirm our commitment towards protecting tigers.”
The Prime Minister added that India is “now one of the biggest and most secure habitats of the tiger”.
India’s tigers represent roughly 70% of the global tiger population.
A survey of wild tigers takes place in India every four years. The most recent tiger population numbers are based on a 15-month long census that took place between 2018-2019 across 380,000 km2 (146,000 square miles) of land, coordinated by the Wildlife Institute of India, an autonomous government institution under India’s Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change. This estimate is based on numbers collected using a variety of methods, including dung counts, distance sampling where human volunteers counted tigers spotted along a specific route, satellite imagery, and camera traps (a total of 2,461 individual tigers that were one year of age or older were photographed by 26,000 camera traps in known tiger habitats), and adoption of new statistical methods to make better estimates.
Since 2006, tiger sightings increased at a rate of 6% per year in India.
The newly released report reveals that most states in India saw increases in tiger numbers: Madhya Pradesh (526) had the greatest number, followed by Karnataka (524) and Uttarakhand (442), whilst Chhattisgarh and Odisha reported decreases, and tiger reserves in Buxa, Dampa and Palamau reported no tigers at all.
“The poor and continuing decline in tiger status in the states of Chhattisgarh and Odisha is a matter of concern,” the authors noted in their report.
However, even as the numbers of wild tigers generally increased, the total area that they occupy decreased significantly from 88,000-89,000 km2 (54,680 square miles) in 2014 to 40,000 km2 (24,850 square miles) in 2018. According to the study’s authors, this loss in range was based on a lack of evidence for the presence of tigers, whereas a small portion resulted from a lack of sampling forests known to be occupied by tigers in 2014.
But the report also found that tigers are colonizing areas that were vacant in earlier surveys.
“New areas that were colonized by tigers in 2018 constituted 25,709 (28%) km2,” the authors stated in their report. “This analysis suggests that loss and gain of tiger occupancy was mostly from habitat pockets that support low density populations. Such habitats with low density tigers, though contributing minimally to overall tiger numbers, are crucial links for gene flow and maintaining connectivity between source populations.”
Thanks to the efforts of Project Tiger, which was established in 1973, India has increased the land set aside for tigers from just nine reserves encompassing approximately 18,278 km (11,360 miles) to 502 reserves comprising 72,749 km (45,200 miles) -- a huge improvement, although it is important to realize this represents only 2.21% of India’s total geographical area.
Other conservation actions that India has successfully implemented include connecting tiger source populations through habitat corridors and managing and protecting tiger reserves through incentivized voluntary relocation of humans.
Wild Bengal tigers live in a wide variety of habitat types, ranging from dry and tropical forests, and mangroves to grasslands. They avoid humans whenever possible, which is becoming increasingly difficult because India’s population has more than doubled in the last 20 years, now numbering more than 1.35 billion people.
Yet, despite tigers’ protected status, people and their livestock, roads, canals and railways are increasingly encroaching on tiger habitats and even into tiger reserves. This inevitably leads to conflicts provoked by killings of livestock or attacks on people, making tragedies inevitable, like the one that went viral recently where villagers viciously beat a tigress to death (more here). That lynched tigress attacked people after straying out of the Pilibhit tiger reserve in Uttar Pradesh.
One month prior to that, another tigress and her two cubs died after villagers poisoned the carcass of a cow she had killed a day earlier.
Such conflicts between tigers and humans occur mostly along the edges of protected reserves, forests and plantations, because India still needs to expand its tiger reserves to meet the needs of its tiny tiger population.
Additionally, tiger poaching is still alive and well -- body parts such as whiskers, teeth, the tail and skins are sold on the black market or used in “alternative medicines” in China. For example, of the 657 tigers died between 2010 and 2018, 21% were killed by poachers. But the Indian government is becoming more proactive so poachers photographed by tiger camera traps are now given a seven-year prison sentence.
Other threats includes climate change and rising sea levels, which endangers some of the last remaining tiger habitats (ref).
#News | https://sciencespies.com/news/more-wild-tigers-are-being-squeezed-into-smaller-areas-across-india/
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