ECSST News article of the day HOW WOULD YOU COUNT TIGERS IN THE WILD? TIGER CENSUS: COUNT THE STRIPES 2,226. That’s India’s tiger population in the wild, according to a recent study. But how did the researchers arrive at that number? For a nation that counts a billion and more people every ten years, counting a few thousand tigers might seem like easy game. Not true. For one, tigers are not easy to spot. And when they do get spotted, they don’t look very different from each other. That’s where tiger scientists find themselves in a bit of a spot. Historically, pugmark technique has been one of the most popular ways of counting tigers. Each tiger is known to leave a distinct pugmark on the ground and these are different from the others in the big cat family. Photographs or plaster casts of these pugmarks are then analysed to assess the tiger numbers. Though the most reliable then, the pugmark method was only waiting to be replaced by a more accurate way of counting tigers. As technology progressed, deploying cameras seemed to be the most obvious way of spotting tigers. Cameras could be left in dense forests for several days to capture images of individual tigers. There is very little subjectivity involved. Cameras have become an essential part of the tiger census, though they are not all there is to the exercise. It is not possible to install cameras at every place that is likely to have tigers, and even in places where they are installed, there is no certainty that the tiger would walk into a camera’s range. K Ullas Karanth of the Bangalore-based Wildlife Conservation Society says DNA analysis of scats can also be used to estimate the tiger population. “Some people also claim you can use trained dogs instead of DNA testing, but that has not been fully proven,” he says.....………………………… READ FULL ARTICLE AT: indianexpress/article/india/india-others/count-the-stripes/ If you like it, please share it? ECSST (Endangered Cat Species Survival Trust) Homepage: ecsst.org (in the process of updating with lots of information regarding endangered cat species in the wild and our entire project, our photographers, cat species etc.) Facebook: facebook/Endangeredcatspecies Twitter: https://twitter/ECSST777 Photographers group: facebook/groups/332219533550937/
Posted on: Mon, 26 Jan 2015 11:24:01 +0000
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