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

[GuateGojira]

Thanks for the maps peter, I was going to put it here, but you do it first.
 
1. About Kitchener & Dugmore (1999):
This team created two good prediction maps about who could be the climate of Asia about 20,000 years ago. They manage to predict that tigers do lived in the Sunda shelf and that its stronghold was the south east of Asia. From the two maps, that one of the HTP model is the most accurate as it predicted all the modern tiger populations and match with the accounts of tiger reports compiled by Mazák, and also show that Europe was a very suitable place for tigers (records from medieval times suggest that some tigers do reached the eastern part of the continent) but human influence prevented the tiger to enter the area.
 
Using the HTP model, they predicted that tigers lived in a more or less continue population from the Amur region to the Sunda shelf, about 20,000 years ago. The model also proposed that the some areas around the Caspian sea and Central Asia were suitable for tigers, along with the fact that it suggest that the way for the colonization of this area was trough the north of India.
 
The problem with this model from 1999 (copy-paste by Kitchener in his chapter of 2010, with Yamaguchi) is that recent genetic analysis show that Caspian tigers are EQUAL to the Amur population, while there is no direct genetic relation with those from India. Other problem is that this model focused in the time about 20,000 years ago, however Driscoll et al. (2009) states that the first tigers began its colonization of the west just about 10,000 years ago, which is 10,000 later than the predicted map, and probably the climate presented by Kitchener was no longer accurate at that time.
 
In this case, the maps of Kitchener & Dugmore (1999) serve us to see that the habitat of the East and Southeast of Asia was very suitable for tiger populations, while the dry areas like India, about 20,000 years ago, were not suitable for tigers and was probably used by lions, which according with the classic theory, invaded India about 40,000 years ago.
 
2. Japan “tigers”:
It is interesting that both maps predicted that Japan was a very suitable place for tigers in the late Pleistocene, but like peter say, it is a mystery why tigers get extinct and bears and wolves no. However, there is a big problem with this long-know “fact”: the “tigers” in Japan were, apparently, not tigers!
 
According with the tables of Kitchener (1999), the tigers of Japan were classified as Panthera palaeosinensis, which in the old days it was classified as a primitive tiger species. However, new research shows that this great cat was closer to leopards and lions than to the tiger. Latter Kitchener & Yamaguchi (2010) classified all the cats from the late Pleistocene in Japan as “Felis youngi”, which was another great cat that showed affinities of both lions and tigers. If this is true, it will suggest that in fact, there were no tigers per se in Japan, but another primitive great cat that lived no longer than the late Pleistocene and don’t survived the Holocene. In this case, that will cut off the old assumption that tigers actually lived in Japan.
 
3. Tiger variations:
Like I mentioned before, the Indian tigers have a great intraspecific variations, from the giant specimens from Kaziranga, the heavy Nepalese and Central India tigers, the long but lite specimens from the Western Ghats in southern India and the small “island”-sized animals from the Sundarbans.
 
I believe that probably do existed some intraspecific variations between the populations of Amur-Central Asia-Caspian tigers. The pictures above show some small specimens and other huge ones. However, the problem is that we don’t know the age and sex of these animals, so it is impossible to state if this are in fact clinal and/or geographical variations or simple young animals compared with full grow specimens. What I believe is that Caspian tigers were no smaller than Bengal or Amur tigers, but as very few skulls are available and even less measurements are recorded, we don’t have conclusive evidence, apart from these pictures.
 
Personally, I will not trust to much in the descriptions of the old explorers, as they observations are sometimes incomplete or based in a few, often second hand, observations.
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