Book Review

[Dr Panthera]

Book Review: " Tigers of The World " first edition 1987, Ronald Tilson, Ulyssess Seal, and others.

One of the best books ever written about tigers that contributed greatly to our knowledge of this awesome animal.
The book starts with a chapter about the extinction of the Java and Bali tigers by John Seidensticker and why we should rescue other tiger populations from such fate, it has an excellent chapter about tiger genetics and its relations with other pantheras on molecular level again by an excellent geneticist Stephen O'Brien, the book then moves to discussing the status in the wild of all tigers including the South china tigers that were clinging in to survival ( and sadly went extinct since) , and the status in captivity ( which was important to me at the time as I worked with captive tigers) where information about tiger husbandry, raising in captivity, reproduction in captivity, veterinary care for tigers, treatment of ill tigers were described, then the reproductive biology of tigers .
There is an excellent chapter about white tigers and an excellent analysis on whether they play any role in tiger conservation or not.
The final chapters in the book are about man-tiger conflict and management of tigers all over the world.

This book is a treasure of information, written by people who specialize in studying tigers to an audience who studies tigers scientifically and is interested in the multiple graphs, charts, and discussions.
I enjoyed re-discovering the book now as I did almost 27 years ago.
I particularly liked the following :
* The role of the declining numbers of the Rusa deer in the extinction on Java and Bali tigers
* The genetic distance among big cats and among tiger subspecies for example the genetic distance between Bengal and Amur tigers is 0.007 where as it is 0.027 between a Caucasian human and an African extraction human
Between a tiger and a lion it is 0.093, a leopard 0.034, and a jaguar 0.070 
* The sad history of decline and eventual extinction of wild south china tigers, from an estimated 4000 in 1949 to 40 by 1987 to none by now
* Some good info about Malaysian tigers , including high male:female ratio ( 3:2 ) and some morphological data showing the largest tiger to be around 157 kg. Males averaged 117 kg and females 91 kg excluding sub-adults.
* A review of the success of Project Tiger in India, and while the results were encouraging a growth of the number of tigers in the country from 1827 in 1972 to 4000 in 1984 we are back where we started from ( or a bit better)
* White tigers, their history, how all descended from Mohan, a white cub captured in Rewa, India in 1951 and a normal colored wild-caught female, the authors present the pros and cons of white tiger conservation and discuss the problems with white tigers ( premature death, low fertility, inbreeding, high occurrence of stillbirths, susceptibility to disease, reduced litter size, body deformities, crossed-eyes ) , Edward Maruska from the Cincinnati zoo in the USA states that the zoo bred 52 white tigers between 1970 and 1986 and the those perceived 'defects' were not significantly more than what is seen with orange tigers. Reply