The Bengal tiger has suffered from population decrease in the last century, but is its fate now changing?
The number of tigers in India has increased by 20 per cent since 2007. A census, published on 28 March by the Indian government put the population at 1,706 compared to the last count of 1,411.
This is the first rise in a decade. The tiger population has suffered from a decline of 97 per cent in the past century, so environmentalists hail this as good news for the future.
At the turn of the 20th century India had around 100,000 tigers. There are now less than 3,500 tigers in the wild worldwide, with more than half of those in India.
This year’s census is the first to cover the whole of India, including terrain in the Sundarbans, a mangrove forest in West Bengal which borders Bangladesh, for the first time. This swampy estuary zone has proven difficult to survey in the past. Seventy tigers were counted in the Sundarbans tiger reserve.
Caution must be taken when interpreting these results though, as the count could prove inaccurate. Counting methods have included the use of pugmarks, the unique footprint of individual tigers, and DNA tests. The additional use of hidden cameras means that the same tiger could have been counted twice.
The 97 per cent loss of tigers over the past 100 years has been attributed by conservationists to poaching and as a result of shrinking natural habitats caused by growing human populations. Indian officials worry that environmental damage caused by a booming economy has also reduced roaming territory available to tigers.
Bengal tigers are a huge tourist attraction for India, and attempts such as Project Tiger aim to maintain the populations in national parks. The Indian government has been unable to stop poaching, as techniques used by traffickers and smugglers change often.
Some traditional Chinese medicines include tiger parts, which leads to a huge demand in countries such as Taiwan, China and Korea.
Image courtesy of Atul.lonkar via Wikimedia Commons
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