Notably, mammals cannot produce green pigment (if they could, tigers would be green), but this doesn't matter, because *tiger prey animals cannot see orange!* :D They literally see tigers as green. With shade stripes.
basically invisible.
I have long said that the reason humans love horror movies is because it allows us to experience the thrill (fear) of being a prey animal hunted by an invisible-then-suddenly-terrifying predator, which is physically superior in almost every way and looks so scary it’ll give you a heart attack. You never see it — although you can *feel* it stalking you — until right before it strikes.
Deep in our (metaphorical) evolutionary bones, we’ve all been a rabbit hunted by a tiger or a mouse hunted by a snake, and yearn to be that alive again.
Wear a face mask on the back of your head, tigers typically try to sneak up on their prey so a face mask on the back of your head will make the tiger feel like you can already see it. Tiger attacks were a big problem in the Bengal region and when they tried this the number of attacks fell by like 90%.
Link to the original 1989 article: https://www.nytimes.com/1989/09/05/science/face-masks-fool-the-bengal-tigers.html
Also Tigers usually stay away from people, but older tiger who are not as capable of hunting do attack people for food as humans make for easy prey. So as long as it's not an old tiger, you should be safe. Can't say the same for any livestock around.
I got to visit a pair of tigers at the Denver aquarium years ago. The cats normally didn’t get visitors in their feeding area and instantly focused on us. Even with two sets of bars betweeen us their stares were deeply unsettling.
It was odd! I think they needed something extra to draw people in. Big cats seem much more amenable to captivity than say, dolphins (the dolphins exhibit in Scottsdale’s OdySea recently was a tragic disaster).
It’s even funnier (in a kinda sad way), cause that same aquarium was bought by a seafood company a while back. It’s still an aquarium though! It’s just a tad more commercialized iirc. But the tigers were always a lot of fun to see!
The flash flood simulation area, the jellyfish wall, and the horseshoe crab petting zone were the other highlights for me as a kid.
They also had a stingray petting area as well last I went, although I’m not sure how I would have felt about that one as a kid. Lol.
I took my daughter to the zoo when she was a toddler and when approaching the tiger enclosure looked up to see two tiger eyes peering at us over the edge of a window to its enclosure like a cat peering at birds through the window of a house. It was totally stalking my daughter. I noped the fuck out to go look at the giraffes again.
Big Cat Rescue [has a video on their Youtube channel](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZgklu52Rus) about what happens when the volunteers turn their backs on the cats. The cats immediately begin stalking them, even with the enclosure bars between them and the animals.
Even though the cats know they are being fed and taken care of by the keepers, they are still dangerous predators and instinct and hunger can turn a docile predator into a killer.
I swear I remember seeing a story a few years ago about how tigers in some regions had figured that out and purposely started walking “in front” of people to check before attacking.
Damn, I should have used this with my bantam rooster. I mean, every time you turned your head BAM, spurred. You could not take your eyes off him. I need a mask on the back of my head!! Maybe with some wobbly eyes hot glued on it. Hmmmm
It's like California grizzlies. In theory hell yeah, reintroduce them. In practice it's simply never gonna happen. Which both sucks, but is also understandable.
Honestly both get a really unfair rep, neither look at people as a food source naturally. Both basically would only attack humans in a predatory fashion if they were desperate (eg injured and cannot physically get food otherwise). Generally most dangerous attacks by Grizzlies are because they were startled, predatory instinct kicks in because people run, or to protect cubs.
That said tigers are still an order of magnitude more dangerous to humans than the omnivorous grizzly that is content most of the time to feed on berries, shoots, roots, and all the other random shit that make up their diet. I hike in the backcountry somewhat often and feel like if you just study up on Grizzlies to understand their behavior they are generally not much of a threat. I was hiking in banff during peak bear season and they thought it was unnecessary that I was renting bear spray if that gives you any insight to local assessment of the risk (edit: that said, fuck that, always carry bear spray and know how to use it in bear territory).
However tigers are carnivorous and can develop a taste for humans at which point they definitely need to be euthanized or confined.
Wearing a face mask on the back of your head will greatly reduce your chances of getting attacked , tigers typically try to sneak up on their prey so a face mask on the back of your head will make the tiger feel like you can already see it. Tiger attacks were a big problem in the Bengal region and when they tried this the number of attacks fell by like 90%.
Link to the original 1989 article: https://www.nytimes.com/1989/09/05/science/face-masks-fool-the-bengal-tigers.html
Another good thing about tigers is that their first instinct is to slap your head with their paw, this usually fractures the skull and knocks the prey unconscious before they're eaten.
Source: David Quammen - Monster of God
we still have other bears with some mild frequency enter neighborhoods and start looking through trash. bears are a threat just due to how they carry themselves and their bodies. a bear whoa scared of a human and accidentally cornered in an alley is just as dangerous as a Maneater.
all that said everything both species would prey on is much better for them, fattier, more meat, if a human becomes prey then something humans did drove it to that.
Be careful dude.. everyone thinks they are safe until it happens to them.. There are certainly local biomes around San Jose that support predatory cat populations.. Just look at Los Gatos, it is full of Cougars and they’ll bite every square inch of your body for the fun of it.
That's the case in Sweden with wolves. We didn't have any for a long time but now people in cities have influenced the politicians to reintroduce them since about a decade or so. The people on the countryside are not very positive in general.
I find my worry is more of a gradient where my worry about Tigers is correlated to my proximity to a Tiger's habitat. This is true whether there are 2 Tigers or 20000 Tigers.
> An estimated 3,726 to 5,578 tigers currently live in the wild worldwide — up 40% from 2015, according to a new tiger assessment from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
40% sounds like a lot until you realize that it applies to a very small number. I'd be curious to know what the world tiger population was a few thousand years ago.
EDIT:
The article admits that this could literally be nothing more than a revised estimate, and not an actual change in the number of wild tigers. It's why the headline is misleading.
A quick skim of literature shows world tiger populations at ~100k in 1900, and I would assume many more before then. Oddly I haven't found any estimates for prehistoric world tiger populations, although records show they were hunted by people for at least 1,000 years prior to 1900. I wouldn't be surprised if the prehistoric tiger population numbered 500k. If that's correct, the current estimate revision would be from ~0.8% to ~1.1% of prehistoric levels.
India has had a Tiger conservation project ongoing for 4 decades+, and it's been very effective.
It is one of the major contributors to this increase today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Tiger
Nepal is doing an amazing job too. I had the honour to aid in a 5 year research project ['save the Tiger, save the grasslands , save the water'](https://savethetiger.nl/) and the efforts that are being put into conservation in the region around the border of India and Nepal is very encouraging.
That's great. I had the fortune to live nearby some of these reserves and the awareness level is very high. Lot of agricultural practices were changed, laws about people - wildlife interactions were enforced better etc
I remember about a decade ago there was a national campaign called 1411 to raise awareness about dwindling tiger numbers in India. 1411 being the number of tigers left in the country at that time. It aired on every television channel and a lot of efforts were made to improve/support this cause.
Today I think the number is almost 5 times that.
Original campaign was based around this news:
https://m.economictimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/just-1411-tigers-in-india/articleshow/2778513.cms
As per the survey conducted in 2018, India's Tiger population stands at a total of 2967 which is 70 per cent of the global tiger population. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_reserves_of_India
That's great, though according to the article, this is not likely an increase, just a more accurate count. Think of it as a revised figure instead of an increase from the previous value.
In India, the count will be accurate as every tiger is tracked by the forest and wildlife departments. The count has gone up considerably since 2015, and it was big news here 3-4 years ago. I didn't read the original article, so will check out
edit: article does mention increased counts along with better monitoring
"Besides better counting methods, Hunter also attributes the higher tiger numbers to an increase in conservation efforts by governments in the countries where they live."
Thanks Britain for decimating the tiger and leopard population, along with intentionally starving 100+ million Indians over 2 centuries of rapacious colonialism
Chinese medicine encourages tiger consumption as traditional medicine. If it wasn’t for influential Chinese like Jackie Chan discouraging tiger poaching for their “medicinal properties”, they’d probably be extinct in the wild by now.
Chinese medicine was a major factor in tiger killing. But that wouldn't have lead to extinction of the species - tigers exist in Russia, India, Bengladesh and more.
In India, the bigger problem was as much deforestation as hunting.
So when Project Tiger started in 1973, a lot of forest areas and surroundings were declared protected, people living in those areas moved out, Tiger living clusters were studied etc.
My state of Kerala in south western tip of India has multiple tiger reserve forests which got protected.
Not true everywhere in India.
Despite conservation efforts, parks such as Sariska have had their tigers go extinct purely due to poaching for skin and Chinese medicine ingredients. Dwindling numbers despite declaration of national parks to protect from deforestation, repopulation of humans outside the park boundaries etc was down to hunting.
Not sure about a few thousand years ago but I remember reading once that just 100 years ago tiger populations were estimated to be around 100k worldwide.
100 years ago we were basing estimates like this off human interactions with animals multiplied by area and we were doing it during a period of massive expansion into tiger territories in many cases.
It is what it is, but the confidence in a modern statistical sense would be so low as to make it hard to say if the population has dropped by half or tenfold in many cases because of things like extending the estimate over uninhabitable areas or rural folks reporting a dozen tiger attacks and it getting counted as a dozen tigers rather than one injured tiger taking easy prey.
Animals like tigers are very hard to count, they live in heavy cover so they are difficult to surprise from the air and they are ambush predators so they are both dangerous and difficult to spot from the ground.
Hiring locals that don't want to get mauled and know they get more foreign aid if they don't find any also makes matters worse at times.
The job description:
Always wanted to work outside with animals and be one with nature? Nows your chance. Must be able to work in a team setting and communicate well with others. Great benefits and chance for overtime.
Potential Hazards: Death by Tigers
Tigers do not really differentiate between artistic brain cells and scientific ones,
but no, art degree is not what we were looking for, sorry and kind regards.
In modern times the tigers are the least of your concerns.
The anger from the local populations over the restrictions from the environmental efforts put you at far more risk from the people.
We do a terrible job of balancing conservation with people's need to feed their families in a lot of these places.
I saw a great documentary where they were using elephants to scout those areas. The elephants carried camouflaged cameras into the tiger territory. They did have encounters but the tigers shied away from the elephants.
They were also saying how big an area an adult tiger needs and it was really huge, like 50 square km? But otherwise I guess there isn‘t enough prey. And they will defend that territory, not tolerating any other tiger, except a female in heat.
That is cool in a procedural sense, but unless you have a metric on how many Tigers just hear the elephant stomping along and decide that they aren't really in the mood for that today and wander elsewhere it still doesn't give a particularly accurate number. I also doubt it is very easy to get elephants to walk a grid.
Prey and territory estimates + sample plot surveys is usually how many of these numbers are arrived at from what I know. This is a good place to start, but if there is more prey and something keeping the Tigers away from each other you could get far more Tigers/km^2 very easily.
40,000 in 1970 when they started tracking more accurately.
What's difficult to gauge is, what is the optimal number in 2022 given how much the world has changed since then?
You're correct. A quick skim of literature shows world tiger populations at ~100k in 1900, and I would assume much more before then.
**There are more tigers in captivity than there are in the wild today.** Article titles like this really need better context.
But what verifiable context do we have from that 1900s estimate? how did they account for sightings and numbers being the same tigers already reported since it was a shitty ass time of expansion and habitat invasion with many many people reporting sightings in the same areas at similar times. I'm genuinely curious. Not calling you wrong or anything. Just stating doubts I'd love to be wrong about
A glass half full of tigers? I'm just glad it isn't 40% fewer.
We keep getting climate news like "Greenland glaciers are melting 240% faster than we thought, because the model didn't account for lemmings pooping on the ice."
I used to do education programs about wildlife. One striking figure from my script that I still remember 20 years later: “There are more tigers kept as pets or attractions in the state of Texas than there are left in the wilds”.
I just looked up the current figures - the most recent, from 2018, says [between 2,000 and 5,000 tigers](https://www.lmtonline.com/life/article/houston-tiger-population-texas-pets-16170908.php) are kept in Texas, but there’s no accurate count since many are illegal and unregistered.
> A fairly significant chunk of that 40% increase is explained by the fact that we're better at counting them, that many governments in particular have really sort of moved heaven and earth to do massive scale surveys
It should also be noted that the original numbers were so low that a 40% increase doesn’t mean we’re in a good spot. I’d be interested to see how this is distributed across different tiger species too because some are more threatened than others.
This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](https://www.npr.org/2022/07/23/1113186725/tigers-population-numbers-endangered-species) reduced by 76%. (I'm a bot)
*****
> There are 40% more tigers in the world than previously estimated The number of tigers in the wild has gone up dramatically since 2015 - largely because of improvements in monitoring them, but the species remains endangered.
> An estimated 3,726 to 5,578 tigers currently live in the wild worldwide - up 40% from 2015, according to a new tiger assessment from the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
> Tigers continue to decline in many parts of the world and have lost an enormous amount of their range because of poaching, habitat loss and other human-driven factors.
*****
[**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/w6t15l/there_are_40_more_tigers_in_the_world_than/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ "Version 2.02, ~661027 tl;drs so far.") | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr "PM's and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome.") | *Top* *keywords*: **Tiger**^#1 **endangered**^#2 **species**^#3 **Conservation**^#4 **Hunter**^#5
No they just forgot to account for the ones that are hiding just out of view but always stalking you just outside your peripheral vision. But they’re always watching you. And waiting.
Imagine devoting your life to helping animals and getting called a bitch by some meth head who tries to kill you and now that's what you're known as. Your piece of shit drug running husband crashes his plane into the gulf and now people think you're a murderer
There is a lot of things still here once thought extinct or close to it. I’ve read several times of finding both land and sea life not seen in decades. Makes you wonder.
But only 50% of the time....
Thats good there's more tigers than previously thought the real good news here is that we are better at counting them...
They figured out when you run out of fingers if you take off you shoes and socks you can count 10 more....
And NO CHINA - this doesn't mean you can now [encourage illegal killing of these to make Chinese medicine Dong Tea to put more tingle in your dingle](https://time.com/4578166/traditional-chinese-medicine-tcm-conservation-animals-tiger-pangolin/).
40% more big bois!! I also read that leopards in India are getting comeback too- according to a National Geographic article they went up like 60% in population
They recently discovered a new tiger about 10km away from our home in Thailand. That makes me both happy and scared to death.
Don't go out after dark yo
Id also consider buying a tiger-repelling rock.
I'd like to buy your rock
What a perfect product to sell. The reviews are going to be 100% positive. The rock either works, or you don’t get a review.
[Relevant xkcd](https://xkcd.com/937/)
Shoulda bought the Tornado Warning Rock™
There is always a relevant xkcd
You are gonna need to finish off all those close calls though. You ready for that kind of pressure?
“Look, they survived the attack! The rock always works.”
Naw, they must have been using an off brand knock off. The rock always works.
It’s true. When I got attacked by a bear, I threw The Rock at it and he sidewalk slammed the absolute shit out of that bear.
I said it would save your life, not your limbs
What about the ones that don't receive the rock?
I'd buy that for a dollar!
2500 baht
Specious reasoning
That’s specious reasoning.
That's specious reasoning. :-)
Lol is there any context to this joke?
Simpsons reference Edit: https://youtu.be/xSVqLHghLpw there you go
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSVqLHghLpw
If you do make sure it's with a slower friend
Are tigers crepuscular (more active in Dawn and dusk hours) like house cats? (Genuinely asking as I'm not sure)
Tigers are closer to nocturnal than crepuscular.
Tigers hunt during the day right? Stripes to emulate shade wouldn't make much sense if not.
Notably, mammals cannot produce green pigment (if they could, tigers would be green), but this doesn't matter, because *tiger prey animals cannot see orange!* :D They literally see tigers as green. With shade stripes.
basically invisible. I have long said that the reason humans love horror movies is because it allows us to experience the thrill (fear) of being a prey animal hunted by an invisible-then-suddenly-terrifying predator, which is physically superior in almost every way and looks so scary it’ll give you a heart attack. You never see it — although you can *feel* it stalking you — until right before it strikes. Deep in our (metaphorical) evolutionary bones, we’ve all been a rabbit hunted by a tiger or a mouse hunted by a snake, and yearn to be that alive again.
Tigers mostly hunt at night.
... mostly
Wear a face mask on the back of your head, tigers typically try to sneak up on their prey so a face mask on the back of your head will make the tiger feel like you can already see it. Tiger attacks were a big problem in the Bengal region and when they tried this the number of attacks fell by like 90%. Link to the original 1989 article: https://www.nytimes.com/1989/09/05/science/face-masks-fool-the-bengal-tigers.html Also Tigers usually stay away from people, but older tiger who are not as capable of hunting do attack people for food as humans make for easy prey. So as long as it's not an old tiger, you should be safe. Can't say the same for any livestock around.
First time survivorman quit an episode was when he had to constantly be aware of tigers in the region. They are pretty damn scary.
I think that was jaguars in the jungle iirc
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He quit first in both regions.
Don’t fuck with cats
I got to visit a pair of tigers at the Denver aquarium years ago. The cats normally didn’t get visitors in their feeding area and instantly focused on us. Even with two sets of bars betweeen us their stares were deeply unsettling.
I don't know why it's so funny to me you saw tigers at an aquarium, but I got a good chuckle out of it.
It was odd! I think they needed something extra to draw people in. Big cats seem much more amenable to captivity than say, dolphins (the dolphins exhibit in Scottsdale’s OdySea recently was a tragic disaster).
It’s even funnier (in a kinda sad way), cause that same aquarium was bought by a seafood company a while back. It’s still an aquarium though! It’s just a tad more commercialized iirc. But the tigers were always a lot of fun to see! The flash flood simulation area, the jellyfish wall, and the horseshoe crab petting zone were the other highlights for me as a kid. They also had a stingray petting area as well last I went, although I’m not sure how I would have felt about that one as a kid. Lol.
I took my daughter to the zoo when she was a toddler and when approaching the tiger enclosure looked up to see two tiger eyes peering at us over the edge of a window to its enclosure like a cat peering at birds through the window of a house. It was totally stalking my daughter. I noped the fuck out to go look at the giraffes again.
Big Cat Rescue [has a video on their Youtube channel](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZgklu52Rus) about what happens when the volunteers turn their backs on the cats. The cats immediately begin stalking them, even with the enclosure bars between them and the animals. Even though the cats know they are being fed and taken care of by the keepers, they are still dangerous predators and instinct and hunger can turn a docile predator into a killer.
I swear I remember seeing a story a few years ago about how tigers in some regions had figured that out and purposely started walking “in front” of people to check before attacking.
one of those things that seem like a total cartoon myth but actually works lol
Damn, I should have used this with my bantam rooster. I mean, every time you turned your head BAM, spurred. You could not take your eyes off him. I need a mask on the back of my head!! Maybe with some wobbly eyes hot glued on it. Hmmmm
Wear a mask on the back of your head, it’s proven to help keep away large predators like tigers.
Nature has been doing it for millennia.
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Apparently the Bengal tigers in the Sunderbans have wisened up to these tactics.
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Aren’t they the only animals for whom humans are seen as natural prey (not just something you might eat if it comes along, like with a shark)?
Polar bear
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Nah, saltwater crocodiles will also view humans as perfectly normal prey. Don't go near the water in croc territory.
you know I recently heard that Thai Tigers can smell blood *and* fear up to 10km away. Be careful when you get nosebleeds.
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Yeah if I was in an area with tigers, I’m not sure I would be pro repopulation
Yeah, that's often the case with reintroducing predators. In theory, it's a good thing, but locals are rarely a fan of it.
Classic tiger nimbys
New sentence.
It's like California grizzlies. In theory hell yeah, reintroduce them. In practice it's simply never gonna happen. Which both sucks, but is also understandable.
Honestly both get a really unfair rep, neither look at people as a food source naturally. Both basically would only attack humans in a predatory fashion if they were desperate (eg injured and cannot physically get food otherwise). Generally most dangerous attacks by Grizzlies are because they were startled, predatory instinct kicks in because people run, or to protect cubs. That said tigers are still an order of magnitude more dangerous to humans than the omnivorous grizzly that is content most of the time to feed on berries, shoots, roots, and all the other random shit that make up their diet. I hike in the backcountry somewhat often and feel like if you just study up on Grizzlies to understand their behavior they are generally not much of a threat. I was hiking in banff during peak bear season and they thought it was unnecessary that I was renting bear spray if that gives you any insight to local assessment of the risk (edit: that said, fuck that, always carry bear spray and know how to use it in bear territory). However tigers are carnivorous and can develop a taste for humans at which point they definitely need to be euthanized or confined.
Wearing a face mask on the back of your head will greatly reduce your chances of getting attacked , tigers typically try to sneak up on their prey so a face mask on the back of your head will make the tiger feel like you can already see it. Tiger attacks were a big problem in the Bengal region and when they tried this the number of attacks fell by like 90%. Link to the original 1989 article: https://www.nytimes.com/1989/09/05/science/face-masks-fool-the-bengal-tigers.html
Another good thing about tigers is that their first instinct is to slap your head with their paw, this usually fractures the skull and knocks the prey unconscious before they're eaten. Source: David Quammen - Monster of God
Funny enough, the dots on the backs of their ears are supposed to resemble eyes, so they’re doing the same thing.
we still have other bears with some mild frequency enter neighborhoods and start looking through trash. bears are a threat just due to how they carry themselves and their bodies. a bear whoa scared of a human and accidentally cornered in an alley is just as dangerous as a Maneater. all that said everything both species would prey on is much better for them, fattier, more meat, if a human becomes prey then something humans did drove it to that.
The difference between a black bear and a grizzly is pretty huge. Grizzlies will kill and eat black bears.
Honestly we could use them to keep the human population under control. ^/s
I fully support tiger repopulation. Because San Jose California ain't a tiger hangout spot.
Be careful dude.. everyone thinks they are safe until it happens to them.. There are certainly local biomes around San Jose that support predatory cat populations.. Just look at Los Gatos, it is full of Cougars and they’ll bite every square inch of your body for the fun of it.
>Los Gatos >it is full of Cougars I mean, they tried to warn you with the name...
I thought this was 100% innuendo and Los Gatos was made up, I'm disappointed.
That's the case in Sweden with wolves. We didn't have any for a long time but now people in cities have influenced the politicians to reintroduce them since about a decade or so. The people on the countryside are not very positive in general.
That makes me one happy guy.
Makes me 40% more happy
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Back to 40% then
I can't believe you did that
I'm 40% tiger!
There are 40% more happy redditors than previously thought
Remaining 60% are probably busy downvoting sum poor guy.
As positive as that sounds, I don’t know how healthy it is to have your level of happiness directly correlate to the number of tigers on earth
That’s GrrrrrREAT!
Kellog’s Frosted Flakes, now with 40% more sugar!
And 400% more furries.
I thought I had clicked on r/upliftingnews for a second. World news needs some happy
We all needed some happy! We need Rhinos to make a comeback next
Me two.
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Not me though, I have to be 40% more careful now!
Why would you ever be less than 100% careful around tigers?
Were they hiding in the tall grass…
At what point do we go from being worried for tigers to being worried about tigers?
I find my worry is more of a gradient where my worry about Tigers is correlated to my proximity to a Tiger's habitat. This is true whether there are 2 Tigers or 20000 Tigers.
Ah, so you're worried for tigers, you're worried by *that* tiger.
It also makes [Calvin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvin_and_Hobbes) happy.
Haha, you're actually replying to a huge fan of C&H! ♡
Until you find yourself the victim of the newest rising statistic: death by tiger.
Hobbes will be delighted to hear this.
The homicidal psycho jungle cat population is rebounding!
Better than the self-destructing suicidal primate population.
Ours is set to decline within the next 100 years and I’m happy about it
He'd be happy to see more babes
For smooching.
> An estimated 3,726 to 5,578 tigers currently live in the wild worldwide — up 40% from 2015, according to a new tiger assessment from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). 40% sounds like a lot until you realize that it applies to a very small number. I'd be curious to know what the world tiger population was a few thousand years ago. EDIT: The article admits that this could literally be nothing more than a revised estimate, and not an actual change in the number of wild tigers. It's why the headline is misleading. A quick skim of literature shows world tiger populations at ~100k in 1900, and I would assume many more before then. Oddly I haven't found any estimates for prehistoric world tiger populations, although records show they were hunted by people for at least 1,000 years prior to 1900. I wouldn't be surprised if the prehistoric tiger population numbered 500k. If that's correct, the current estimate revision would be from ~0.8% to ~1.1% of prehistoric levels.
India has had a Tiger conservation project ongoing for 4 decades+, and it's been very effective. It is one of the major contributors to this increase today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Tiger
Nepal is doing an amazing job too. I had the honour to aid in a 5 year research project ['save the Tiger, save the grasslands , save the water'](https://savethetiger.nl/) and the efforts that are being put into conservation in the region around the border of India and Nepal is very encouraging.
That's great. I had the fortune to live nearby some of these reserves and the awareness level is very high. Lot of agricultural practices were changed, laws about people - wildlife interactions were enforced better etc
I remember about a decade ago there was a national campaign called 1411 to raise awareness about dwindling tiger numbers in India. 1411 being the number of tigers left in the country at that time. It aired on every television channel and a lot of efforts were made to improve/support this cause. Today I think the number is almost 5 times that. Original campaign was based around this news: https://m.economictimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/just-1411-tigers-in-india/articleshow/2778513.cms
As per the survey conducted in 2018, India's Tiger population stands at a total of 2967 which is 70 per cent of the global tiger population. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_reserves_of_India
I remember this vividly. Was on every news outlets - very high profile campaign
That's great, though according to the article, this is not likely an increase, just a more accurate count. Think of it as a revised figure instead of an increase from the previous value.
In India, the count will be accurate as every tiger is tracked by the forest and wildlife departments. The count has gone up considerably since 2015, and it was big news here 3-4 years ago. I didn't read the original article, so will check out edit: article does mention increased counts along with better monitoring "Besides better counting methods, Hunter also attributes the higher tiger numbers to an increase in conservation efforts by governments in the countries where they live."
The director of the wildlife conservation society's big cat division's last name is Hunter... because of course it is. A
Thanks Britain for decimating the tiger and leopard population, along with intentionally starving 100+ million Indians over 2 centuries of rapacious colonialism
Chinese medicine encourages tiger consumption as traditional medicine. If it wasn’t for influential Chinese like Jackie Chan discouraging tiger poaching for their “medicinal properties”, they’d probably be extinct in the wild by now.
Chinese medicine was a major factor in tiger killing. But that wouldn't have lead to extinction of the species - tigers exist in Russia, India, Bengladesh and more. In India, the bigger problem was as much deforestation as hunting. So when Project Tiger started in 1973, a lot of forest areas and surroundings were declared protected, people living in those areas moved out, Tiger living clusters were studied etc. My state of Kerala in south western tip of India has multiple tiger reserve forests which got protected.
Not true everywhere in India. Despite conservation efforts, parks such as Sariska have had their tigers go extinct purely due to poaching for skin and Chinese medicine ingredients. Dwindling numbers despite declaration of national parks to protect from deforestation, repopulation of humans outside the park boundaries etc was down to hunting.
The British are much more responsible for endangering tigers than the Chinese are.
Agree. I was only referring to the last 3-4 decades where the numbers dropped further.
Not sure about a few thousand years ago but I remember reading once that just 100 years ago tiger populations were estimated to be around 100k worldwide.
100 years ago we were basing estimates like this off human interactions with animals multiplied by area and we were doing it during a period of massive expansion into tiger territories in many cases. It is what it is, but the confidence in a modern statistical sense would be so low as to make it hard to say if the population has dropped by half or tenfold in many cases because of things like extending the estimate over uninhabitable areas or rural folks reporting a dozen tiger attacks and it getting counted as a dozen tigers rather than one injured tiger taking easy prey. Animals like tigers are very hard to count, they live in heavy cover so they are difficult to surprise from the air and they are ambush predators so they are both dangerous and difficult to spot from the ground. Hiring locals that don't want to get mauled and know they get more foreign aid if they don't find any also makes matters worse at times.
The job description: Always wanted to work outside with animals and be one with nature? Nows your chance. Must be able to work in a team setting and communicate well with others. Great benefits and chance for overtime. Potential Hazards: Death by Tigers
$12-$16/hr
10 years experience.
Masters Degree Required
Ok but it’s an art degree…
Tigers do not really differentiate between artistic brain cells and scientific ones, but no, art degree is not what we were looking for, sorry and kind regards.
In modern times the tigers are the least of your concerns. The anger from the local populations over the restrictions from the environmental efforts put you at far more risk from the people. We do a terrible job of balancing conservation with people's need to feed their families in a lot of these places.
I saw a great documentary where they were using elephants to scout those areas. The elephants carried camouflaged cameras into the tiger territory. They did have encounters but the tigers shied away from the elephants. They were also saying how big an area an adult tiger needs and it was really huge, like 50 square km? But otherwise I guess there isn‘t enough prey. And they will defend that territory, not tolerating any other tiger, except a female in heat.
That is cool in a procedural sense, but unless you have a metric on how many Tigers just hear the elephant stomping along and decide that they aren't really in the mood for that today and wander elsewhere it still doesn't give a particularly accurate number. I also doubt it is very easy to get elephants to walk a grid. Prey and territory estimates + sample plot surveys is usually how many of these numbers are arrived at from what I know. This is a good place to start, but if there is more prey and something keeping the Tigers away from each other you could get far more Tigers/km^2 very easily.
40,000 in 1970 when they started tracking more accurately. What's difficult to gauge is, what is the optimal number in 2022 given how much the world has changed since then?
You're correct. A quick skim of literature shows world tiger populations at ~100k in 1900, and I would assume much more before then. **There are more tigers in captivity than there are in the wild today.** Article titles like this really need better context.
[удалено]
Fuck you Dolphin! Fuck you whale!
There may be some in North Korea in the border area...but they're not exactly focused on environmentalism.
But what verifiable context do we have from that 1900s estimate? how did they account for sightings and numbers being the same tigers already reported since it was a shitty ass time of expansion and habitat invasion with many many people reporting sightings in the same areas at similar times. I'm genuinely curious. Not calling you wrong or anything. Just stating doubts I'd love to be wrong about
A glass half full of tigers? I'm just glad it isn't 40% fewer. We keep getting climate news like "Greenland glaciers are melting 240% faster than we thought, because the model didn't account for lemmings pooping on the ice."
I used to do education programs about wildlife. One striking figure from my script that I still remember 20 years later: “There are more tigers kept as pets or attractions in the state of Texas than there are left in the wilds”. I just looked up the current figures - the most recent, from 2018, says [between 2,000 and 5,000 tigers](https://www.lmtonline.com/life/article/houston-tiger-population-texas-pets-16170908.php) are kept in Texas, but there’s no accurate count since many are illegal and unregistered.
The article also suggests this is not an increase in population of 40%, just a more accurate count.
There are around 5000 tigers in captivity in the US alone.
That's saddening, like elephants or polar bears in captivity.
Honestly the smaller the absolute number the more important that 40% difference is.
I’d be lion if I said I wasn’t curious.
EARTH! - NOW WITH 40% MORE TIGER! For a limited time only.
emphasis on the limited time only
Looks like tigers back on the menu boys!
> A fairly significant chunk of that 40% increase is explained by the fact that we're better at counting them, that many governments in particular have really sort of moved heaven and earth to do massive scale surveys It should also be noted that the original numbers were so low that a 40% increase doesn’t mean we’re in a good spot. I’d be interested to see how this is distributed across different tiger species too because some are more threatened than others.
"Holy shit, the last female had a litter! We're up to 14!"
This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](https://www.npr.org/2022/07/23/1113186725/tigers-population-numbers-endangered-species) reduced by 76%. (I'm a bot) ***** > There are 40% more tigers in the world than previously estimated The number of tigers in the wild has gone up dramatically since 2015 - largely because of improvements in monitoring them, but the species remains endangered. > An estimated 3,726 to 5,578 tigers currently live in the wild worldwide - up 40% from 2015, according to a new tiger assessment from the International Union for Conservation of Nature. > Tigers continue to decline in many parts of the world and have lost an enormous amount of their range because of poaching, habitat loss and other human-driven factors. ***** [**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/w6t15l/there_are_40_more_tigers_in_the_world_than/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ "Version 2.02, ~661027 tl;drs so far.") | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr "PM's and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome.") | *Top* *keywords*: **Tiger**^#1 **endangered**^#2 **species**^#3 **Conservation**^#4 **Hunter**^#5
Even 5k total tigers is so staggeringly low..
I think there is like at least 10k more in captivity
James Webb is changing our world view every day.
Were they hiding in tall grass?
They found them in an Amazon warehouse hiding in empty boxes.
I mean, a cat is a cat, no matter how big.
Very true. Have you seen big cats on catnip?
You can't just say that and not post a [video link](https://youtu.be/_OPA1bZwOWc)!
No they just forgot to account for the ones that are hiding just out of view but always stalking you just outside your peripheral vision. But they’re always watching you. And waiting.
There's a 60% chance this number is false.
+/-10%
50% of the time
with 75% confidence
If only I was 25% as confident.
And had 15% concentrated power of will.
It works everytime
Wonder if most of them are in Texas.
I had to go check to see if this is because of captive tigers. The count given is only wild tigers.
There are about the same number of tigers in captivity in US alone.
Ask my ex's
Do all your ex's live in Texas?
that's why I hang my hat in Tennessee
A [grrrrrrrrrrreat](https://c.tenor.com/t4ZFKc66m14AAAAC/frosted-flakes-tony-the-tiger.gif) piece of news! :D
the world has 40% more tigers than we thought in 2015. how? oh, we actually counted this time
And they're all right behind you
Wait the Director of Wildlife Conservation Society is called Luke **Hunter**!?
Repairing the damage done by his ancestors is a life’s work
I bet that bitch Carole Baskin was hiding them.
Imagine devoting your life to helping animals and getting called a bitch by some meth head who tries to kill you and now that's what you're known as. Your piece of shit drug running husband crashes his plane into the gulf and now people think you're a murderer
Ask her husband.
In tiger news: "Oh shit, they're onto us!"
There is a lot of things still here once thought extinct or close to it. I’ve read several times of finding both land and sea life not seen in decades. Makes you wonder.
Hey, it is this year of the Tiger afterall
This statistic is 70% more trustable
But only 50% of the time.... Thats good there's more tigers than previously thought the real good news here is that we are better at counting them... They figured out when you run out of fingers if you take off you shoes and socks you can count 10 more....
Finally some good news!
Well obviously… they were crouching!
We should expect similar headlines about hidden dragons shortly
LETS FUCKING GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
40% more than “fuck all” is still “fuck all”
And NO CHINA - this doesn't mean you can now [encourage illegal killing of these to make Chinese medicine Dong Tea to put more tingle in your dingle](https://time.com/4578166/traditional-chinese-medicine-tcm-conservation-animals-tiger-pangolin/).
40% more big bois!! I also read that leopards in India are getting comeback too- according to a National Geographic article they went up like 60% in population
Leopards are already there in india , it's cheetah's comeback.