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IN G
TI GERS
C O N S E R VAT I O N
By K. Ullas Karanth
tiger monitoring is the exception rather than the rule. As a result, scientists have a poor understanding of how wild tigers are
actually faring. The traditional methods for surveying tigers are
at best sufficient for determining where in Asia they still roam;
they cannot reliably estimate how many individuals remain. Indeed, many of the tiger numbers bandied around by conservationists in the media have little solid evidence to back them up.
In recent years my colleagues and I have made significant inroads into the problem of how to count these elusive felines. By
combining camera-trap technology that snaps shots of animals
as they pass by with software that identifies specific individuals
and sophisticated statistical analyses that can estimate full population sizes from samples of tiger photographs, we have painted a far more accurate picture of several tiger populations. The
challenge going forward is getting conservation agencies to apply these improved surveillance methods to track the fate of the
source populations across their range.
AN ELUSIVE SUBJECT
IN BRIEF
40 to 50 populations that have a reasonable chance of recovery. These populations need careful monitoring.
But many conservation agencies use
SPYING ON TIGERS: The author sets up a camera trap in a forest in India to automatically photograph the creatures that pass by (1).
Tigers may become curious or wary of the traps after the first shot, influencing the probability of subsequent detection (2).
COURTESY OF KALYAN VARMA (left); COURTESY OF K. ULLAS KARANTH AND WILDLIFE CONSERVATION SOCIETY (right)
scats I collected, these data showed that tigers typically kill one
large prey animal a week, consuming two thirds of it over a period of three to four days before moving on. Ultimately the diet
findings implied that depletion of wild prey by human hunters
was a decisive factor in driving historical tiger decline and suggested ideas for how best to recover the species now.
By 1993 I had also figured out how to estimate numbers of
the tigers chief preydeer, wild pigs and wild cattlein a given
area. I started with a sampling method, developed by American
wildlife biologists, that involves two surveyors walking stealthily along transectsstraight, narrow, 3.2-kilometer-long trails
that I cut through the forest. The surveyors count all the prey
animals they see on their walk and measure a given animals
distance from the transect line using a range finder. From these
counts and distance measurements, one can estimate the total
number of prey animals, accounting even for animals that were
missed during the count.
Looking at my resultsthe first such data from AsiaI was
astonished by the abundance of prey in the protected reserves of
Malenad. These forests now harbored 16 to 68 wild ungulates
(the mammal group that includes deer, pigs and cows) per
square kilometer, densities higher than those in the richest East
African savannas. This was good news for tigers: Indias reserves,
though relatively small compared with the parks of North America or Africa, could still support a lot of big cats. From such estimates of prey availability, biologists could begin to guess how
many tigers any forest in Asia could potentially support.
But by the mid-1990s tigers in Indias reserves came under
intensified poaching pressure from organized criminals catering to burgeoning demand for tiger body parts from newly rich
Chinese consumers. Conservationists needed to assess the scope
of their impact by getting accurate counts of tigers in key populations. How many tigers actually remained? How many were
predicted ratio of one tiger to 500 prey animals. They also supported my hunch that overhunting of prey animals by local
hunters, not tiger poaching for international markets, was the
primary driver behind the historical collapse of the tiger range
over the past 200 years. Determining the main cause of the decline was essential because it suggested that the key to combating the decline was preventing villagers from hunting the tigers
preferred prey through effective local patrolling, as opposed to
catching tiger traders in faraway places.
Building on those density data, I expanded the annual monitoring of tiger populations from Nagarahole to other important
reserves in Malenad in 2004. When camera-trap surveys are repeated year after year, they can capture population increases or
mates of tiger numbers across even wider regions and countries. We hope the work will provide new insights into how to
enhance tiger survival across the species range.
DANGEROUS SPECULATION
Photographic capture-recapture and large-scale occupancy modeling are now used to estimate tiger numbers and range in several
countries across Asia. (Scientists who study other elusive carnivores with unique body markings, including African wild dogs
and wolverines, are also employing these approaches.) Yet on the
whole, although the science of tiger population assessment has
rapidly progressed, its adoption by governmental and nongovernmental conservation agencies has not, whether because of a lack
of understanding of or comfort with the new methods or because
the old methods cast a more flattering light on their efforts.
A recent example illustrates just how insidious reliance on
outdated tools is. In April the WWF and the Global Tiger Forum
announced to great fanfare that the planets wild tiger population
was at last on the rise, numbering 3,890 individuals. These groups
aim to increase the number of tigers to 6,000 by 2022. But their
tally, based on official estimates, relied on flawed methodologies,
including the use of statistically weak extrapolations from tiger
photographs and field counts of spoor. And their goal for population growth far exceeds what one would expect to realize on the
basis of studies carried out using the rigorous techniques described here. Furthermore, apart from the increases in tigers in a
few reserves in India and parts of Thailand, there are no convincing data to show that populations are recovering in the rest of
Southeast Asia or Russia. Indeed, countries such as Cambodia,
Vietnam and China have lost their viable tiger populations in recent yearslosses masked by any single global tiger number.
Speculative tiger numbers for countries and regions undermine efforts to save tigers by distracting conservationists and
the public from what should be our top priority: guarding and
growing the source populations. In a way, the overall number of
wild tigers, if we could even get an accurate count, may not matter. The source populations are the ones we need to monitor vigilantly, using the best science available to track their numbers.
Only with reliable counts can we set realistic goals for future
growth, develop suitable strategies for meeting those goals and
measure the impact of our conservation efforts.
History shows that scientific progress can stall from lack of
understanding, institutional inertia and political considerations
for decades or even centuries. But as the world enters into the
sixth mass extinction of wild species, we simply cannot afford to
divorce conservation practices from sound science if we are to
have any hope of saving a wildlife icon like the majestic tiger.
M O R E TO E X P L O R E
Tigers and Their Prey: Predicting Carnivore Densities from Prey Abundance.
K.Ullas Karanth etal. in P roceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA,
Vol.101, No.14, pages 48544858; April 6, 2004.
An Examination of Index-Calibration Experiments: Counting Tigers at Macroecological Scales. A
rjunM. Gopalaswamy etal. in M
ethods in Ecology and Evolution, V
ol.6, No.9, pages 10551066; September 2015.
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