• DOI:10.1525/BIO.2010.60.11.3
• Corpus ID: 83471382

The Once and Future Tiger

@inproceedings{Dybas2010TheOA,
  title={The Once and Future Tiger},
  author={Cheryl Lyn Dybas},
  year={2010}
}

• C. Dybas
• Published 1 December 2010
• Environmental Science

In reeds tinged red by the Central Asian sun, a tiger once roamed. There, in riparian forests that line rivers like the Vakhsh on the border of the former Soviet country Tajikistan, the Caspian tiger (Panthera tigris virgata) prowled. Until its extinction in the mid1900s, the tiger stalked Bukhara deer along tugai, thicketed watercourses that flow through Central Asia’s otherwise vast, arid deserts. The tiger’s route took it across shaded rivers and onto muddy banks. Peering into shoreline bracken, the tiger crawled through a latticework of tangled low shrubs, finally emerging into the willow and poplar forests favored by its deer prey. And into trouble. In the early 20th century, the Russian government instructed its army to exterminate all tigers as part of an agricultural conversion project across Central Asia. Once Caspian tigers were almost gone, farmers moved in, clearing tugai and planting crops such as cotton. The tigers retreated, first from lowland streams to marshes around larger rivers. Finally, they crept into forested mountain ranges. The Caspian tiger’s last stronghold was a reserve in Tajikistan: Tigrovaya Balka, “tiger former river channel.” The name was given to this first of Central Asia’s protected areas, or In 1947, Russia banned hunting of the Caspian tiger’s close relative, the Siberian, or more properly Amur, tiger (Panthera tigris altaica), still found today near the Amur River in the Russian Far East. But the edict came too late for the Caspian tiger, says Carlos Driscoll, a biologist at the US National Cancer Institute’s Laboratory of Genomic Diversity in Frederick, Maryland. The last tiger in Tigrovaya Balka was glimpsed in 1958. Although still a matter of debate, the legendary final wild Caspian tiger may have been killed in February 1970, in Hakkari Province, Turkey. New DNA evidence, however, reveals that we may not have seen the last of this tugai tiger.