Up until the 1950s, we had Caspian Tigers (Panthera tigris virgata) all over Central Asia, ranging from Turkey to China. Due to hunting, poisoning, and hunting of their food sources, the Caspian became extinct, but now scientists are trying to reintroduce tigers back into this area. Sadly de-extinction is not really viable at the moment, so we cannot get the Caspian tiger back unless we improve our de-extinction methods first, but instead the scientists are wanting to bring the Siberian tiger into the area where the Caspian tiger once roamed.
An image of the Caspian tiger. Not really good quality, but this will have to do when the tiger has been dead for over 50 years. Image is public domain.
The Caspian Tiger is a subspecies of the tiger (Panthera tigris), and is genetically very much like the Siberian tiger (Panthera tigris altaica), although a little bit smaller. These two subspecies share a lot of the same genetic material, and this makes the Siberian tiger a good match for reintroducing tigers into the Central Asia.
For this project, scientists from WWF and IUCN wants to release a total of 40 tigers into a mountain area in Kazakhstan, close to Lake Balkhash. This area has a climate that is pretty similar to the climate the Siberian tigers are used to, but with less snow. However, they will probably thrive in this area, and there are about 7,000 square kilometers of mostly pristine nature, so they have plenty of space to grow a new population. There is also very little human activity in the area, which was the problem for the Caspian tigers, but due to Kazakhstan having become an independent state, there is less agriculture in these areas.
Lake Balkhash as seen from space. This is where tigers will be reintroduced if everything goes according to plan. Image by NASA, posted as Public Domain.
The scientists hope these 40 tigers can in time turn into a population of 200 tigers, but this is a slow process. The best estimate on reaching this number is sometime within the next century, so this is a really long-term conservation project.
It will be interesting to follow this project in the future, and hopefully it will see action in a few years. Grand conservation ideas like these are really great in theory, but it is often more difficult to actually do it than to write about doing it, so we will see if it actually happens or not. Fingers crossed!
Sadly it is too late to do anything about the Caspian tiger, but introducing an almost similar subspecies into the same area is at least better than doing nothing. Hopefully this project will lead to a healthy tiger population in Kazakhstan in the future!
Sources
Here is a paper writing about the reintroduction of tigers in the Lake Balkhash area. This has also been much discussed and written about in the medias lately, so finding another source should also be pretty easy if you want more information.
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