CLIMATE NEWS
Tigers Are Now Extinct In A Country Where They Used To Thrive
Six years after 13 countries pledged to double the number of tigers in the wild by 2020, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) declared tigers “functionally extinct” in Cambodia on Wednesday.
According to WWF, the last wild tiger in the country was observed in 2007 thanks to a hidden camera in the Mondulkiri Protected Forest. Cambodia, one of the 13 countries in the world where tigers live, has approved a plan to reintroduce tigers into the Mondulkiri protected forest in eastern Cambodia, the Guardian reports. “We want two male tigers and five to six females tigers for the start,” said Keo Omaliss, director of the department of wildlife and biodiversity at the Forestry Administration, according to the Guardian. “This is a huge task.”
Though it may be a huge task, the announcement comes a week after researchers said in a studythat forest loss has been lower than expected in tiger habitats, so there is enough space for tigers to come back from the brink of extinction, if habitats are preserved. Habitats are critical for any species, said Anup Joshi, one of the study’s authors, “and especially so with tigers, which need large areas to survive.”
Tigers are solitary animals apart from the connection between mother and cub. They traverse large territories and their size is determined mostly by the availability of prey. Joshi, a conservation biologist at the University of Minnesota, told ThinkProgress that out of the 76 conserved landscapes where tigers live, 29 were recognized as areas where tiger populations could double.
