Save the Tiger! How India is doing it

For this newsletter, I have taken as my remit all of biology and the ways that different subjects in it relate to human affairs. Perhaps, given the reach of biology today, this was foolishly ambitious but it is too late now. I have already dipped into a large number of topics, from biodiversity to disease transmission to mass extinctions to the nature of genetic effects and a lot more. Of course, aiming to write one article per week, covering new ground, I am always on the lookout for new topics. Since there is never any dearth of possibilities, how does one choose a topic?

Of course, the subject must be interesting but my basic attitude to this is that there are no intrinsically dull or boring topics though, of course, poor writing can turn any interesting subject into a tedious-seeming one. Needless to say, some topics are relatively small, hence of initially potential limited interest but one can get around that problem by drawing out the topic’s implications and connections to larger subjects, which should always be possible. Nevertheless, while everything is potentially of interest, when extended in this way, a writer always has one’s favorite subject areas and tends to gravitate toward them. One of mine is biodiversity and conservation, of both animals in general and of natural areas and ecosystems. I have been interested in animals since I was 3 or 4 and in conservation issues since at least age 10.

Hence, when I saw a recent research article on the rebound of tiger populations in India, I was immediately interested in the possibility of doing an article on it.¹ Yet, even before getting into the article and its specific content, a phrase popped into my head, whose provenance I did not instantly recognize. The phrase was: Save the tiger! And then I remembered; wasn’t that the title of an old Hollywood movie? Indeed, it was a film from 1973, starring Jack Lemmon, a great 20^th century American actor who played the main character, a middle-aged businessman, struggling with incipient failure of his business and also with larger questions of the meaning of his life. In effect, it was a film about a mid-life crisis. Lemmon won an Oscar for best actor for his portrayal.

Indeed, I have a further dim memory of having planned to see it, then deciding not to because it did not really deal with tiger conservation, as I had hoped and assumed when I first heard of it. Hence, having (dimly) remembered the existence of the film but having no real memories of it, I Googled it and found out that the word “tiger” in the title was a reference to the main character, as a past-his-prime wheeler-dealer, an aging male tiger as it were. There were apparently two further fleeting references to tigers and their conservation in the film. It was made as the environmental movement was gaining strength in the United States, in the early 1970s, and there was growing public awareness of the fragility of ecosystems and of endangered species, brought to the brink of extinction, including tigers.

More than 50 years later, tiger populations are still in trouble but, perhaps, showing some signs of resilience. By the year 2000, there were only an estimated 3600 tigers in the wild left in Asia. This was down from (probably) one hundred thousand or so wild tigers in Asia in the early 20^th century. By the year 2000, about 75% of the surviving tigers were in India, the remainder being in several Asian countries, in particular Russia and Bangladesh, and in a few national parks in south east Asia (Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia). Apparently, by the 21^st century, there were no wild tigers left in China.

The article I had seen dealt with a detailed survey of tiger numbers, both inside and outside of national parks in India from 2008 onwards, with measurements at four-year intervals. This program had started two years before the launch in 2010, with a meeting in St Petersburg, Russia, of the Global Tiger Recovery Program. One goal of this project was to help achieve the doubling of tiger numbers in India by 2022 and this may have been achieved.

The two kinds of areas in India surveyed were 1) protected areas, especially national parks, and 2) areas that were not dedicated to conserving Nature per se and had human populations. Preserving wild animals in protected areas is termed “land sparing” and doing so in the second kind, “land sharing”. The expectation was that, if things went well, there would be some growth in tiger numbers under land sparing but probably not, possibly even decline, in land sharing arrangements.

Altogether, the results have been encouraging, more than expected. In total, areas occupied by Indian tigers in the wild have increased, in the past two decades, by 30%, at the rate of about 3000 additional km² per year. The strongest increases have been, as would have been predicted, in the protected areas and also in “corridors” between them. However, the numbers of tigers have also increased in areas inhabited by humans that are adjacent to protected areas when human density is low (< 250 per km²). Evidently, a certain degree of coexistence of tigers and people, outside of protected areas, is possible.

Of course, there were also areas during the study period where tiger numbers had decreased. These were areas distant from either protected areas or corridors. Needless to say, a number of factors come into this, one of the most important being prey availability, in particular three species of deer found in India and also gaur (a kind of buffalo.) Those animals are, of course, more abundant in the protected areas and corridors but also, generally, in places adjacent to both.

A finding that I found encouraging and initially surprising, but less so upon reflection, is that the degree of prosperity of the people had an apparent marked influence on tiger numbers in the areas of co-existence, with both relatively high levels of development or high poverty levels correlated with lower tiger numbers. The reduction in tiger numbers in more developed areas would be expected while higher poverty is associated with greater levels of forest clearing and reduced numbers of prey animals, hence less favourable conditions for tigers. Clearly, these relationships need further exploration and in other regions for other ecosystems and their animals but it suggests that co-existence of Nature and human development involves a matter of balance. It is not necessarily a zero-sum form of competition between people and animals.

Even with these encouraging results, it should be emphasized that tigers are not out of the woods so to speak. In the terminology of conservation, they are either still “endangered” or “critically endangered”. The total number of tigers in the wild in Asia is still only on the order of 5000-6000, which would be a reduction of about 95% from about a century ago. As one of the most striking, indeed charismatic, of the so called “charismatic megafauna”, the tiger has a special place in human imagination and in appreciation of wildlife. Correspondingly, it would be a real loss for the world if they were allowed to go extinct. Fortunately, the efforts to save them have continued.

Of course, the implications of the present survey and analysis go beyond tigers and extend to any “apex predator”, whose range extends into areas occupied by humans. Given the expansion of human populations, especially in the last 100 years, that means, effectively, all apex predators and, indeed, all are threatened if not yet officially in the category of “endangered”.

An instructive example would be North American wolves in the American West and we have already looked at the effects of their restoration to Yellowstone National Park since the mid-1990s (see Yellowstone, wolves, elk, and aspens: a tale too appealing to be true?) There, the clear benefits have been to the ecological health of the Park but, as in the tiger story in India, one might expect comparable spillover benefits in areas adjacent to the parks.

In general, wherever there are top predators, they play a positive role in the ecological systems in which they participate. In effect, they prune herbivore populations, which allows plant life to thrive. This is true not just in the terrestrial ecosystems but in marine ones as well, for instance, where sea otters help maintain the health of kelp forests near coasts by controlling sea urchin populations. Also, sharks in general contribute to well-functioning marine communities (see Sharks! Coming back from the depths).

However, the developing tiger story in India, reviewed here, may prove to be one of the most valuable in terms of lessons for understanding the possibilities of human coexistence with the natural world. In the past 10,000 years or so, since the dawn of large-scale agriculture, humans have certainly made their mark, both figuratively speaking and literally, on the natural world. Indeed, geologists and people who study climate change and its consequences have debated whether this period should count as a new geological era, the so called “Anthropocene”. A recent verdict from the learned group charged with such nomenclatural changes was, in effect, “not yet”. However, it would not be unreasonable to expect this topic to resurface for debate before too long, given the undeniable reality -- at least for those willing to consider the evidence – of climate change and its consequences for the planet and its life. ²

Yet, regardless of how the debate about the reality (or otherwise) of the Anthropocene as a new geological era turns out, it is clear that: a) we humans are part of Nature, not distinct and separate from it, and b) that whole-sale destruction of ecosystems, which characterized so much of the 19^th and 20^th centuries and often carried out in a triumphalist spirit, creates an impoverished and less livable world for us humans. The evidence from the Indian tiger story that, under the appropriate conditions, humans and apex predators can co-exist, to the benefit of both, is a hopeful sign for the future of both people and our fellow animals.

1. See Jhala, Y.V. et al. (2025). Tiger recovery amid people and poverty. Science 387: 505-509.

2. While there is general agreement that humans are having a real impact on the climate and innumerable life forms on the planet, the slipperiness of the term “Anthropocene” becomes apparent when one tries to decide when it began and what, if anything, should be considered its definitive marker(s). Did it begin with the dawn of agriculture, about 11,000 to 10,000 years ago? Or with the Industrial Revolution in the 18^th century? Or w the explosion of the first nuclear weapons in 1945? Or with the massive increase in plastic pollution in recent decades? One can take a case for any of these as signifying the Anthropocene, though nuclear weaponry and massive plastic pollution would leave the most unmistakable geological traces, perhaps best justifying the concept of a new geological era.