vlad.tribnet.com / Issue #542 / Environment / Reading article...

Aiming to evaluate the condition of the Far Eastern population of leopards and tigers, an international team of conservationists captured one male Siberian tiger and one Amur leopard in late October in the Primorye region.

A large adult male Siberian Tiger was acquired by the research team on October 26, and a large leopard was subsequently captured on October 29, a press statement from Wildlife Conservation Society reported on Thursday.

The international team of conservationists is led by John Goodrich of WCS, whose team includes Alexei Kostyrya of the Institute of Biology and Soils of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and Melody Roelke, a veterinarian from the US National Cancer Institute’s Laboratory of Genomic Diversity.

The ultimate goal of the project is to evaluate the animals’ health and risk for disease, as well as to assess the possibility that inbreeding due to their small and isolated populations may be affecting their ability to reproduce.

Until the recent capture, no information on the leopard population had been available to scientists and conservationists. “This capture represents a milestone in our cooperative efforts to save the Far Eastern leopard and Siberian tiger from extinction. With the information gained from these animals, and others to come, we will be in a much better position to determine the appropriate conservation actions,” Dale Miquelle, Director of WCS branch in Vladivostok was quoted in the press statement as saying.

The current tiger population amounts to approximately 450 cats in Primorye while only 30 Amur leopards are left in the wild in southwest Primorye.

If serious problems due to inbreeding are discovered, the project announced that it may introduce a small population of genetically similar cats into the area whose intermingling will increase reproductive rates and add to the health and vitality of the species. This approach at conservation has proved successful in the past when pumas from Texas were used to revive and replenish the population of the Florida panther.