ON THE EDGE OF EXTINCTION - A - THE TIGER (Panthera tigris)

[BorneanTiger]

(06-23-2019, 09:50 PM)Greatearth Wrote: BorneanTiger
Sorry, but I have no idea what is your conclusion. So what is your conclusion?
If you can read gene sequence (1st photo) and haplotype/mtDNA (2nd photo), then explain it to me precisely about those two pictures that how does it defines tiger subspecies.

And again, where did samples on Caspian tiger samples came from for their research? Don't tell me if those Caspian tiger samples are from central part of Asia. If Malayan tiger is separate species from Indochinese tiger, then how is it possible for you to believe Caspian tiger lived in westernmost of Asia can be the same as Siberian tiger lived in southern part of the Korean Peninsula?
I even seen worse idiotic biologist from the Texas A&M are saying like, "From our research, we discovered that every big cats were evolved from mixed each other throughout the history." Can you believe that now? That's why I am always having doubt on genetic opinion on species vs subspecies sometimes, especially if it is about big cats or other large mammals. They are just wasting grant money, including ones who published papers on single tiger species. They should better study on how to increase genetic variations from genetic bottleneck.

Yes, Siberian tiger and Caspian tiger are closely related subspecies. I don't think it won't cause problem to releasing Siberian tigers into Caspian tiger range map.
However, I can never agree that those two were the same subspecies unless they are referring to Siberian tigers lived in northern part of their range and Caspian tiger lived in the central Asia.

To put it simply, if you want to treat the Caspian and Siberian tigers as separate subspecies, then the Bengal tiger shouldn't be treated as a single subspecies, but a group of subspecies, such as perhaps Sundarban and Himalayan Bengal tigers, but if you want to treat the Bengal tiger as a single subspecies, then the Caspian and Siberian tigers will have to be treated as the same subspecies, because the Caspian tiger is more closely related to the Amur tiger than a Sundarban Bengal tiger is to a Himalayan Bengal tiger.

Luo et al. tested wild Caspian tigers from China, Afghanistan and the Central Asian countries of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, besides a captive tiger in Moscow Zoo that was taken in the wilderness in northern Iran in West Asia, before coming to the conclusion that Caspian and Siberian tigers were closely related, so there you go, even Caspian tigers in West Asia were closely related to Amur tigers in Northeast Asia: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/articl...ne.0004125

*This image is copyright of its original author

Figure 2. Phylogenetic relationships among tiger mtDNA haplotypes inferred using 4079 bp of concatenated mtDNA sequences (see Table S3).

To compare, the closest relatives of Bengal tigers in the Sundarbans appear to be southern Indian tigers and a number of central Indian tigers, with Bengal tigers in northern India being genetically different to them in a significant manner, see the diagram on the right-hand side: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/article...8846.g002/

*This image is copyright of its original author

Median-joining network created from four mtDNA genes (cytb, ND2, ND5 and ND6) (in total, 2600 bp) depicting genetic relationship between all haplotypes found in tigers.

(a) haplotypes found in Sundarbans tigers (in black) and all other six tiger subspecies (in yellow and green color, from Luo et al. 2004) [2], (b) all haplotypes found in Bengal tiger populations from this study and Mondol et al. [22]. Pink: North India, Yellow: Central India, Blue: South India, and Green: Sundarbans. The sizes of the circles are proportional to the haplotype frequencies. Reply