Genetic / taxonomic issues for the Cat Specialist Group

[Matias]

@BorneanTiger 

I'll clarify or, who knows, complicate things further.

Conservation practices actions for a certain feline are not related to the establishment of subspecies. Amur tigers are adapted to a unique environment and their conservation value is recognized internationally; and efforts will continue to your aid regardless of a change in your taxonomic conceptualization. In other words, it is not necessary to recognize any living being that occupies a unique ecological area, within its natural range of existence, to have immeasurable conservation value. We can use the same criteria for the tiger that inhabits the "Sunderbans". No specialist in big cats will make any proposal to mix Indian tigers with wild tigers from the Russian Far East.

See "adapted desert lions" and their unique conservation value. All shared efforts to safeguard them in northwestern Namibia are independent of conceptualizing them as a subspecies.

Dividing a species, depending on many factors, can facilitate local conservation action, as well as deter this action. When a subspecies has extremely small numbers, saving them requires much more than a good project and a good amount of money. See tigers recently extirpated out in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. What is the possibility of Thailand (with small numbers of tigers) providing a good number of individuals for future reintroduction projects? Any species of feline must have separate conservation units, the entire range of occupation is important and largely represents its genetic variation, as much as it works in establishing metapopulations.

I believe, based on what I read, that there are no profound genetic differences between Indian and Amur tigers. There are studies that do not follow this reasoning. Geneticists have not yet established objective and consensual criteria, and another 30 arguments, grouped or not, are said in the statements to subdivide a species. Despite records in museums for specimens such as tigers in southern China, java, bali are scarce, the same specimens have been shared by genetic research studies that have reached different results, despite analyzing the same sources. By division criteria, until a few decades ago, China would have in its territory four subspecies of tigers. In Southeast Asia, in terms of phylogeography, what natural agents could have separated tiger populations by enough to justify establishing so many subspecies in this region?

The important thing would be to know what percentage of genetic variation these continental tigers have. Still, biologists recognize that this is a terrible way to understand the evolutionary processes that give rise to differences between populations. One of the central points of the discussion was that morphology, behavior or different DNA markers may have different patterns of geographic variation. Each of them constitutes a part of the complex evolutionary history of a species and, in some cases, its adaptations to the different environments that it occupies today or occupied in a more remote temporal past. Reply