Tigers Transcript

Continuation of the Tiger Conferance Call on July 21, 2006

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Tom Lalley: Are there other questions? If so, please go ahead.

WWF Supporter 4: I wondered what are the successes in managing human-tiger conflict other than separate spaces? Is it possible to manage these where they're both in the same habitat?

Eric Dinerstein: We like to think that-we know that tigers have lived in close proximity to people for eons. The Gangetic Plain of India was settled in 1400 AD and so you've had a long history of Asian people living in close proximity to their mega fauna; not just tigers, but elephants and rhinos and wild cattle and leopards and other species. And we think that can still continue. It really comes down to a question of zoning, and I think that gets us to the heart of your question which is, how are we able to look at not just individual sites but larger landscapes so that we can zone these areas where if for example there are productive lowlands that need to be used for rice cultivation, they are zoned in an appropriate way. But enough area is kept in natural habitat to preserve the natural capital there, so for things like preventing floods by having riparian forests along rivers that break the course of the Monsoon floods that would normally just inundate farmers' fields. And there is no reason why these same forests can't maintain healthy populations of tigers and elephants and rhinos.

It's just simply a matter of making sure that we have the proper zonation so that there is enough habitat for these species. There's also an opportunity to provide compensation for livestock losses, and we've had experiments with that in a number of places where tigers are taking livestock. If we can bring the natural prey back up to levels that were seen before, tigers only rarely take livestock. It's usually when there isn't enough natural prey available and I think that we can think about in the present and future offering other financial incentives that can make tigers-as the term we like to use-worth more alive than dead. This can be through ecotourism which has been demonstrated across a large part of their range-particularly in the subcontinents, where tiger ecotourism has been a major source of generating revenue. The challenge here is making sure that revenues get back to the local people who actually live next to the tigers.

WWF Supporter 5: This is [a WWF supporter]. I have a question: I was wondering how much the just threat of traditional Chinese medicine and poaching for that purpose is still a factor, and if so, is the Chinese Government amenable at all to working with conservation groups and mitigating that?

Ginette Hemley: Hi everybody. This is Ginette Hemley. I'm with the Species Provision Program here at WFF. I'll jump in on that one since I've spent a number of years working on wildlife trade issues.

The trade threat to tigers for the use of tiger parts in traditional Chinese medicine is indeed an ongoing issue. Our strategy, which we've seen some success in even though challenges remain, has been to try to engage the leadership of traditional Chinese medicine communities and sectors in China, so you're absolutely right-China is at the core of this in driving this trade threat. We had a very important breakthrough in the late 90's, 1999, in China, through the first ever gathering of leaders of traditional Chinese medicine and conservationists that did lead to some commitments on the part of the Chinese government to legally remove the tiger parts and tiger bone that is traditionally used in these medicines from traditional medicine in China. Our task now is to make sure that that commitment is fully followed through on, and it's been a challenge, but we have seen some progress. In market surveys that have been conducted through our wildlife trade program TRAFFIC we have collected data to show measured declines in the availability of medicinal products in traditional medicine, so we're continuing work on that front with traditional medicine leadership.

A new threat that relates to this has emerged in the last couple of years where it's been an issue that has taken on more attention, and that is the issue of tiger "farming" in China. Because tigers breed quite readily and easily in captivity, there are tigers that the Chinese have kept for the purpose of both entertainment, but also for the use of the bones of tigers that die naturally in captivity for use in traditional medicine. And the Chinese have-at the government level-been exploring the possibility of opening their own internal market for the sale of these products of tigers coming off of these so-called farms, which of course, is a hugely controversial issue and one that we are much engaged on, actively and strongly opposing and trying to make sure that the government doesn't do that.

So it's an ongoing challenge. We are addressing it, but you're right, that it is something that we need to keep our eye on as a priority for conservation.

WWF Supporter 6: This is [a WWF supporter]. I'm wondering about success stories in bringing back small populations, noting these are cat statements, and wondering about the conservation science community, are they at consensus about the subspecies and the value of preserving unique subspecies?

Eric Dinerstein: There are eight recognized subspecies of tigers that scientists use to classify them below the level of species. We've actually avoided using the subspecies designation and this is why, for a couple of reasons. First is that there are ecological differences-call them a suite of adaptations that tigers have for living in different habitats. So tigers that live in the deep snow of the Russian Far East and hunt musk deer and red deer, or where tigers prey on moose, have a different suite of adaptation than tigers that walk through the 26 foot tall grasslands at the base of the Himalayas, that are different than tigers that swim between mangrove islands in the Sundarbans that are almost semi-aquatic. And tigers that live in the dry forest of Cambodia or the tropical moist forest of the Western Indochina or Southern India or Sumatra. It's this different suite of adaptations to hunting different prey, being exposed to different diseases, different climatic conditions, living in different habitats, that are as vital to conserve as any sort of subspecies designation.

What we did in doing our first study 10 years ago, and in this study as well, is to preserve these suites of adaptations that we put under one word that we've created, if you'll excuse this jargon, we call it "tigerness," so it captures the uniqueness of these adaptations among tigers across their range. That's a fundamental tenet of our approach to conserving them.

As to conserving small populations, one could argue that the whole science of conservation biology is the science of scarcity and diversity, and so scarcity often includes populations of species that are low numbered. Some of the advantages or some of the issues that you always want to think about when you conserve populations or try to restore populations that are at low numbers are first, what's their reproductive rate? And second, how large are the species? And third, how specialized are they in their habitat requirements? And what we have going for us with tigers, remarkably, even though that they are the world's largest ((inaudible)) carnivore, is that with wolves, they are the two large carnivores that breed faster than their prey. So a tiger can have, in ideal conditions, a new litter every year, and they can have up to five cubs and often they get survival of at least three of them. You compare that with the reproductive rate of their prey and it's much faster, so we've seen tigers rebound very, very quickly.

The other really important feature here is that outside of the rain forest and the other habitats, these habitats tend to be extremely dynamic and come back very quickly from disturbance, and so we're not talking so much about trying to restore say orangutans or mature forest dependent hornbills, kind of large forest birds, that would probably take generations of patience to see the recovery of species.

Or if we didn't look at tigers, if we went into the marine realm and looked at say tiger sharks, the top predators in marine systems, they have very, very slow reproductive rates. They reach sexual maturity at a much later age. They have only a few young in their lifetime and in some places that have been fished out of sharks, it may take 100 years to recover shark populations. We can see tiger populations rebound in 2 to 3 years. One example of that would be in the Russian Far East where in the 1940's there were an estimated 40 to 50 tigers, and now there are between 400 and 500. And we know that tigers can also occur in very high densities, even though they're very territorial, they can occur in very high densities in places where their prey is extremely abundant.

And my favorite statistic, although it's a little gruesome, gives indication of how abundant tigers once were: In the royal hunt in Chitwan National Park - where I worked - in December of 1937 through January of 1938 when the maharajas came to shoot tigers, they shot 125 tigers in a relatively small area. That gives you a sense of just how abundant tigers can be in areas that have been well protected.

Colby Loucks: As Eric stated, I think tigers are really catholic in their use of habitats, so they don't need the primeval forest to survive, but they tend to be able to survive in some disturbed habitats which allows us to start to connect protected areas through the use of corridors by working with communities to grow trees or alluvial grasslands. They don't have to be 100-year-old forests. They can start to go through some of these areas that are only maybe five or 10 years removed from agriculture and that's what is so hopeful for us, to be able to help work with local communities to establish these corridors by encouraging the growing of forests and forest plantations, which would bring back the prey and then the tigers following the prey into these areas. So that's one way that we're hoping to conserve small populations and start to connect small populations, so hopefully they will become bigger and connected populations.

WWF Supporter 7: This is [a WWF supporter]. What is the reaction-or have the countries had a chance to react to study-particularly in those areas where you want to emphasize the restoration?

Eric Dinerstein: I think it really varies. Probably the gold standard for us in conservation is when we come up with a science-based approach to conserving species or habitats and the governments not only adopt them, but they write them into their five-year development plans. And that's certainly the case for the Terai Arc at least on the Nepal part of that where the configuration of the reserves and the corridors that connects the tiger reserves have been written into law and are part of their ongoing development efforts.

In the country of Bhutan, the altitudinal corridor that we have created is the only place left where tigers prey on the same species as snow leopards where they go right up the timberlines, which is a phenomenon that used to occur throughout the Himalayas. But now it's just restricted pretty much to Bhutan, that these areas are also protected such that the conservation of these altitudinal corridors is written into the Bhutanese constitution. That's one extreme of the best possible scenario of what we hope to achieve and how our conservation measures are embraced and incorporated. At the other end are places where we don't have very good control of the situation, and there is a ramp-up in poaching; that certainly has been the case in large parts of Indochina where we've seen a tremendous off-take of tigers. So, I think that part of this effort towards the Tiger Summit will be to highlight the success stories and think about how we can really emulate those and spread them across the regions.

Eric Dinerstein: I'll throw in here a new piece of information that isn't in the report, isn't even published yet, but as biologists we found really fascinating. One of the scientists who contributed to this study, Dr. Ullas Karanth who, in many people's and my opinion too, is the world's leading tiger biologist, has studied tigers for many years in the Nagarhole National Park in Southern India. His long-term studies have shown that in areas of the better productive tiger populations, i.e., those with very high prey densities, that tiger populations can withstand off-take of up to 20 percent per year and still remain stable, which is really extraordinary. That means that 20 percent of the population is lost through either animals moving outside the population or dying, whether because of natural causes or some poaching; that up to 20 percent, the reproductive rate of tigers can replace that population each year. That's a very productive habitat.

Whether that can be extended across all the tiger's range is not clear, although I just had an e-mail conversation with him today in which we talked about the potential of other places. One of the concerns, if you take places like Indochina where you have these dry forests and some of the tropical evergreen forests that we don't think of as productive as say the grasslands at the base of the Himalayas, or the area where Ullas works in, in the Western Ghats. One of the things that he pointed out is that back in the time when they built Angkor Wat that the densities of the large wild cattle, the banteng the couprey elephant, the forest deer, rhinos, et cetera, probably rivaled the densities that you see in the subcontinent right now. Poaching has so heavily affected the great species of tigers in Indochina and in Sumatra that we just don't see those densities at all., and if we did, we'd probably see equally high densities of tigers as well.

Colby Loucks: Eric's tidbit reminded me of another tidbit. Sybille Klenzendorf, Director of Species Programs, just had a baby or else she would be here on this call with us, but she said that in one of our priority areas , Tesso Nilo. We're funding a Ph.D. student name Sunarto to do research, and what we're trying to find there is in reference to one of the last remaining lowland habitats of Sumatran rain forest. It's surrounded by acacia and oil palm plantations; the oil pump is for palm oil. It's just used in cooking and the acacia plantations are being planted to feed some pulp and paper mills on the island of Sumatra. The issue we wanted to explore was, do tigers use these plantations because in a sense, can live in plantation forests. Do tigers use these? Are they viable places where tigers can survive? Some preliminary results from this research is that what they seem to do is rush in to the very edges of these plantations, maybe take a deer or some small bit of prey, but then return to the natural forests. They need the intact forest or these natural lowland forests to survive. So they're in fact not using these plantations except in the very marginal edges as they are right beside natural forests, which is a huge implication to the connectivity of Sumatra's rain forests.

So that's another one of the kind of findings that are not quite out yet, but we just sort of are trying to explore in some of the other areas we're going into.

Continued in part three.