There is a world somewhere between reality and fiction. Although ignored by many, it is very real and so are those living in it. This forum is about the natural world. Here, wild animals will be heard and respected. The forum offers a glimpse into an unknown world as well as a room with a view on the present and the future. Anyone able to speak on behalf of those living in the emerald forest and the deep blue sea is invited to join.
The extinction of the Caspian tiger is within the conceptions of its time, and so it was attributed. Between the 1950s and 1980s, information, studies and considerations did not have the scope or financial and technological resources of today. Although redundant, it never hurts to reflect on the reasons and attributions in which a big cat no longer inhabits a territory. Looking at the map of Turkey's protected areas, it seems unlikely that something bigger would step in to save the tiger to the point of remaining genetically viable. So even if the subspecies were not officially declared extinct, it would still have the same fate. Poaching and recreational hunting would not have been less impacted by a Law whose usefulness would only exist on paper. When considering the time factor, over the 40 years prior to 1990, the reasoning becomes more credible, although fateful regarding any comparison outside its time and historical context.
This quote (below) makes an intriguing point, as previous genetic studies classified Virgata and Altaica as essentially the same animal (not enough genetic variation to separate them). Assigning a common ancestor seems like an oxymoron. Preliminarily, the authors may be adept at divisionist concepts, favoring the perspective of existential perspectives of several subspecies of tigers that, to attribute conservation measures, gain greater status and geographic relevance. I will need to read more about it.
Quote:Considering that Caspian tigers probably existed in Turkey perhaps up until early 1990s, some 40 years after international scientific community considered the species extinct, it is reasonable to posit that the complete absence of surveys throughout that period, as one symptom of national and international inertia, squandered a historical opportunity to save the species. Today, the continued presence of the Caspian tiger in some remote corner of eastern Turkey is less likely. However, it is important to note that a recent study elucidates the evolutionary and natural history of tigers (Sun et al., 2022). Specifically, the study indicates that the Caspian tiger may have originated from an ancestral Northeast Asian tiger population and then experienced gene flow from southern Bengal tigers (Sun et al., 2022). The study also suggests that Amur and Caspian tigers had a once-common ancestor in East or Northeast Asia (Sun et al., 2022). Moreover, similar to the tiger reintroduction programme in Kazakhstan (see WWF Russia, 2019 for details), reintroduction from the Amur tiger (P. t. altaica) stock to Turkey might be an option since “interruption of potential historical gene flow across the ancestral Eurasian distribution of P. t. altaica + P. t. virgata may have been too recent (<200 years) to accumulate sub-species level genetic differentiation” (Driscoll et al., 2009; see Chestin et al., 2017 for an assessment of tiger reintroduction in Central Asia).
Environmental DNA is our best tool for recognizing the existence or otherwise of a species in any landscape being surveyed. There is nothing like technological evolution to support the knowledge of the present towards the future.
Thanks for your feedback. Yes indeed legislation and the reality in the ground not always go in hand. And I agree in Turkey that's the case, even for some other species today. Thus considering dwindling population of Caspian tigers I think extinction was inevitable in the last century. However, I think this piece of paper sheds light on something important, bias of conservationists towards citizen science projects or a like. Lastly, it is quite interesting to know genetically altaica and virgata wasn't that different (I know that's why IUCN lumped them with tigris in 2017), but morphologically I still think there was enough difference to tell them apart.
Caspian tigers from Azerbaijan
