Inbreeding in Big Cats: Consequences and Conservation

[peter]

ALL

I've not much to add to Balam's lead post, as it covers just about all of it.

This thread was created to inform our members and readers about inbreeding in wild big cats. Inbreeding is a very real problem, because the world is rapidly changing. I'm referring to the continuing growth of the human population, the loss of wild country, climate change, poaching, population fragmentation, a lack of corridors, the dwindling numbers of prey animals, politics and all the rest of it. The question is what the impact of these factors is for those making their home in the natural world. 

Big cats are apex predators, meaning they'll be the first to suffer when the conditions change. Example. 

In the last decades, poaching developed into a problem of significant proportions in many regions in southeast Asia. The forest is still there, but it's loaded with snares and, therefore, largely empty. The result is tigers, protection or no protection, are all but gone. In Sumatra and Malaysia, they're severely struggling. Amur tigers recovered after the population bottleneck of the previous century. Journalists, magazins and those involved in documentaries noticed, but so did poachers. Recent information (referring to an article in the National Geographic in January 2022 in particular) strongly suggests poaching is developing into a very real problem in the Russian Far East once again. 

Tigers are not the only big cats that suffer. In most wild regions, big cats struggle to make ends meet. And that's still without inbreeding. 

The time to discuss the problem has arrived, that is. 

I recently got a link to an article about the impact of inbreeding in wild lions. If I remember correctly, it was posted by 'Wild at heart', a new member. I'll ask BAO, who informed me about the article, to guide you to the thread in which the article was posted. According to BAO, the contributions of our new member are well worth your time. 

Here's the link to the article. Interesting read:            

https://cbs.umn.edu/sites/cbs.umn.edu/fi...ongoro.pdf Reply