Translocation of SA cheetahs to India — ‘there is going to be a lot of heartache and pain’

Three cheetah cubs with their mother. Cheetah mothers have to be extra vigilant to protect their cubs as they are easy prey both for predators from above (raptors) and on the ground (lions). 

(Photo: Kalyan Varma)

By Don Pinnock
03 Oct 2022 0

Some say sending African cheetahs to India is a brilliant idea, others insist it’s possible but with warnings, and some say it’s an absolute disaster.

If the 20 African cheetahs destined for Kuno National Park in India die – and there’s a good chance they will – it won’t be met with the same fanfare as their arrival.

The question we would then need to ask is whether they were sacrificed for the greater good of conservation or for a national vanity project.


The cheetahs were planned to arrive on India’s Independence Day (15 August) but didn’t make the date. Instead, they got there on 17 September in time for the birthday of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who released them into a boma in Kuno National Park.

Twelve more are about to arrive from South Africa, pending the signing of a memorandum of understanding.

Cheetah and cub. (Photo: Kalyan Varma)

Some say sending African cheetahs to India is a brilliant idea, others insist it’s possible but with warnings, and some say it’s an absolute disaster. The cost is estimated at R200-million in the first five years. The Wildlife Institute of India estimates that in the first year only 50% will survive.

Is it a reasonable project? You be the judge.

The Indian government

For India, the symbolism is important. Cheetahs have been integral to Indian heritage, folklore and culture since time immemorial. The last cheetah in India was shot in the 1940s. It’s the only large wild mammal to go locally extinct. Their return is a mark of national pride.

India’s environment minister, Bhupender Yadav, tweeted: “Completing 75 glorious years of Independence with restoring the fastest terrestrial flagship species, the cheetah, in India, will rekindle the ecological dynamics of the landscape.”

Their import also flags international cooperation around rewilding, the introduction of a top predator and the rebalancing of biodiversity.

After much legal wrangling, the introduction was approved by the Supreme Court of India in 2020. It was also approved by the Namibian government and is awaiting official approval from South Africa’s Department of Forestry, Fisheries and Environment.

What could possibly go wrong?

The vet

Cheetahs aren’t the best travellers. There’s a high risk of mortality in translocation. Seven of the first eight wild cheetah reintroductions attempted within South Africa between 1966 and 1995 failed, with the cats dying after release. More than 40 have died from immobilisation complications since 2011. Seven percent exported out of South Africa died this way. But we are getting better at it. The first eight arrived in India alive and well.

What about disease or predation in their new home? An assessment of the disease risk by Adrian Tordiffe, associate professor at the University of Pretoria, is reassuring. The chance of them either transmitting or contracting any communicable diseases, he said, was judged to be low. Non-disease risks, such as starvation or conflict with local predators such as leopards or striped hyenas, were also minimal.

But there is a problem: Kuno is unfenced. “We’re used to operating in South Africa with fenced reserves where you have quite a lot more control,” he said in an interview with Our Burning Planet. “In India, you have got a human population of 1.3 billion and no fences

.

Cheetah competition in India. (Image: Supplied)

“All the cheetahs released in India will be collared and satellite-monitored. In South Africa, if a cheetah decided to wander 100km beyond a park we’d use a helicopter to bring it back. But in Kuno they just have 4x4s.”

This means serial wanderers will have to be chased, drugged and returned. Cheetahs are known to be susceptible to capture stress and often die because of it. Serial escapees will be sent to Mukundra Hill Tiger Reserve, which is fenced. Despite its name, it’s free of tigers, but does have leopards, wolves and striped hyenas. It could see the first encounter between an African cheetah and a wolf.

Kuno has one of the highest leopard densities in the world. But hopefully, the cheetahs are predator-savvy. They come from Phinda in KwaZulu-Natal, where they have been exposed to lions, leopards and hyenas.

“Because they’re going into areas where there’s quite a high leopard density,” said Tordiffe, “we wanted animals that are really quite wild.

“They’re not naïve of those carnivores and they can avoid them, they can defend themselves against them, they’re really aware of what they are and the risks that they pose to them.”

But there are risks. In South Africa, leopards are responsible for 9% and lions 30% of relocated cheetah mortalities.

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If all goes according to plan, the 20 cheetahs will stay in a fenced area at Kuno for a month or so before being released into the park. When the gates are opened, every cheetah is on its own.

The risks will not be just predators. Kuno is surrounded by farmers with cattle, sheep, goats, chickens and dogs. The young of cattle, sheep and goats could prove tasty, while dogs may be a vector for distemper and rabies. Though farmers are well compensated for loss to tigers and the same would apply for cheetahs, there is a bushmeat problem.

According to census research, Kuno has people who eat meat once a week or once a month on average. There is also a significant percentage that eats meat every day. Bushmeat snaring is prevalent in the region. People in the area were also found to own homemade guns, bows and arrows and catapults.

The facilitator

Vincent van der Merwe runs Cheetah Metapopulation and is both highly experienced in relocations and a consultant to the relocations from Namibia and South Africa. His job is to make sure they get there alive and well. The Namibian cheetahs arrived intact and he’s enthusiastic about the whole relocation plan.

“India has a completely different population methodology with a completely different mindset — they have a coexistence approach. There’s no fencing. There’s no retaliatory killings. Indians around Kuno belong to a completely different religious outlook.

“South Africa has a surplus of cheetahs and we would have to euthanise or contracept them, neither of which is optimal. So relocating is a good idea.

“There are definitely a lot of ambitious people involved enjoying the media attention,” he added, “but it’s also been a dream for many high-profile Indian conservationists. It’s gonna be one hell of an uphill battle, there are going to be massive losses initially.

“But, you know, we’ll learn. Indian parks have huge, unproductive buffer zones bringing in no revenue. They could hire them out as private game reserves.”

He says the successful establishment of cheetahs in the proposed introduction sites in India will need to be managed until at least 1,000 cheetahs are in place.

“This will require long-term commitment by South African and Namibian authorities to provide unrelated cheetahs for relocation to India. We hope that within 10 years we could have some form of population growth in India, but certainly, within the first 10 years of this project, there is going to be a lot of heartache and pain.”
The Indian conservationists

Once released, though, the big cats will almost certainly walk out of the unfenced park, “and then they’ll have a hell of a problem,” says Ullas Karanth, emeritus director for the non-profit Centre for Wildlife Studies and a specialist in large carnivores. “The cheetahs will get trashed and killed very quickly because there’s nothing outside of Kuno — it’s villages, dogs and farms.”

“There’s not any chance for free-ranging cheetah populations now,” adds Arjun Gopalaswamy, an independent conservation scientist who has conducted research on big cats in Africa and India. Cheetahs in India “perished for a reason”— human pressure, which has only got worse in the 70 years since the species disappeared. “So the first question is, why is this attempt even being made?”

Wildlife biologist and conservation scientist Dr Ravi Chellam of the Metastring Foundation says the cheetah project is poorly conceived and grossly expensive.

“The cheetahs will require intensive hands-on management over decades,” he said. “The government has still not implemented the 2013 court order to translocate Asiatic lions, of which there are only around 700 in the world, from Gir, Gujarat, to Kuno but they’re quick to implement a 2020 order to bring in cheetahs from Africa, which number around 7,000 in the world. Which is more endangered?

An Indian public awareness poster. (Image: Supplied)

“This project is being rushed through to meet some goals other than conservation. The conservation goals are unrealistic and even unfeasible. Unfortunately, this will be a very costly mistake. It will be one of the most expensive conservation projects India has undertaken.

“We do not have habitats of the size cheetahs require. Without suitable high-quality habitats, this project is unlikely to succeed.”

Prerna Singh Bindra, a wildlife conservationist and former member of the National Wildlife Board, also said she wouldn’t classify the cheetah translocation project as a conservation project.

“Such projects, though sexy, are a distraction to our core objective of conserving wildlife and ecosystems. The cheetah is one of the widest-ranging of big cats and is known to travel across areas in excess of 1,000 km2 in a year. Historically, India has lost about 90% to 95% of its grasslands, 31% in a decade between 2005 and 2015. So where will the cheetah roam if it were ever returned to the wild?”

As the South African Department of Forestry, Fisheries and Environment ponders over the memorandum of understanding it is about to sign, it’s hoped they’ll have looked at all sides of the question. DM/OBP

Cheetah reintroduction in India - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheetah_reintroduction_in_India
Cheetah reintroduction in India involves the attempt to introduce and sustain a small population of Southeast African cheetah in India more than 70 years after India

What does cheetah reintroduction mean for Kuno National Park?

TIMESOFINDIA.COM

TRAVEL NEWS, MADHYA PRADESH/

 Created : Sep 17, 2022

Synopsis

It was seven decades ago when this cat species was declared extinct in India. The Asiatic cheetah, more than 70 years ago, went extinct in India, mostly due to poaching. Now, in a very exciting turn of events, eight African cheetahs were brought to India today from Namibia as a part of Project Cheetah, the world’s first inter-continental large wild carnivore translocation project.

Read more: Cheetahs are back in India, a saga of world's fastest cats

Today, September 17, 2022, India celebrated Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 72nd birthday, and the PM released the Namibian cheetahs into the Kuno National Park’s designated enclosure.

It wouldn’t be wrong to say that the whole country eagerly waited to welcome the African cheetahs, flown in on a special cargo flight for 10 hours from Namibia to Gwalior in Madhya Pradesh. From Gwalior, the eight cheetahs were flown by two Indian Air Force choppers to Palpur, near Kuno National Park.



As of now, the cheetahs are released into a quarantine enclosure at the park, which is now the new home to these eight feline newcomers. This reintroduction project is an effort to revitalise and diversify Indian wildlife and cheetah habitat.

The national park, first established in 1981 as a wildlife sanctuary, and later in 2018 as a national park, is a part of the Khathiar-Gir dry deciduous forests ecoregion. But one question comes to mind, why Kuno National Park for this reintroduction project?



Kuno’s geography consists of vast grasslands, open forest patches and hills, perfect for the big cats. Just like tigers have helped the forest ecosystem, we are hopeful that the cheetahs will help revitalise the open grassland ecosystem, which is facing the threat of extinction and also the improved protection of various species that are the cheetah’s natural prey. For this project, another 413 sq km was added to the national park.



The cheetahs, five females and three males, aged between 4 to 6 years of age, now share the park with Indian leopard, jungle cat, sloth bear, dhole, Indian wolf, golden jackal, striped hyena, Bengal fox. Their prey base includes ungulates like chital, Sambar deer, nilgai, four-horned antelope, chinkara, blackbuck and wild boar. One can’t deny the concerns about the well-being of the cheetahs in the wild where there are apex predators like the leopard and wolves. But one can only hope that nature will play itself out and the cheetahs will be able to thrive in Kuno. One can hope for this project to work.

Project Cheetah is also expected to boost ecotourism in the region. It goes without saying that now that the authorities have brought the cheetahs to their new home in India, they need to work towards protecting the wildlife from the main threat that once wiped the cheetah population off the face of India – humans. Can Kuno National Park have the same kind of attention and stricter rules as some of the major national parks in India?

FAQsWhere is Kuno National Park?

Kuno National Park is in Saran Aharwani in Madhya Pradesh

How many African cheetahs were brought to India?

What is Project Cheetah?

Cheetah Conservation Fund - CCF UK 

July 25  · Instagram  · 

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You may have seen reports in the news that #cheetahs are being reintroduced to #india after being absent for 70 years! Here’s our Founder Dr Laurie Marker being interviewed by @aljazeeraenglish discussing how they went #extinct, and how the reintroduction will work.

Daytime pastoralist activities do not negatively affect spotted hyenas in Tanzania

by Forschungsverbund Berlin e.V. (FVB)

Spotted hyena with Maasai pastoralist and cattle in Ngorongoro Crater.

 Credit: Oliver Höner/Leibniz-IZW

Pastoralists herding their livestock through the territories of spotted hyena clans along dedicated paths during daytime do not reduce the reproductive performance of hyena clans, nor elevate the physiological "stress" of spotted hyenas. This is the result of a new study led by scientists from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW) and the Ngorongoro Conservation Area Authority (NCAA).

The scientists analyzed 24 years of demographic and physiological data from eight spotted hyena clans—two of which were exposed to activities by pastoralists. The activities of pastoralists were predictable, diurnal and did not disrupt important behaviors in the mostly nocturnal hyenas. This may have allowed the population to perform well, the scientists suggest. The open access paper is published in the Journal of Animal Ecology.

Human activities can strongly affect wildlife but the effects can vary greatly, depending on the type of activity and the characteristics of the wildlife species involved. To promote human-wildlife coexistence, it is therefore important to assess which activities are sustainable for a given species.

Most past research has documented major changes in the behavioral response of such species to human activities, but did not examine whether such changes are indicative of the Darwinian fitness of wildlife (in terms of its survival and reproductive success) or physiological effects such as "stress" or allostatic load, which are much more relevant to conservation.

"Acquiring the long-term data for such research—especially on large, group-living carnivores, which may be particularly conflict-prone—is not easy because of the enormous financial and temporal demands involved. We assessed for the first time the Darwinian fitness and the physiological effects of a common human activity—livestock herding—in light of the biology and social system of our wildlife species," explains first author Arjun Dheer, doctoral student at the Leibniz-IZW.

The investigation was conducted on eight clans of spotted hyenas (Crocuta crocuta) living in the Ngorongoro Crater, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in northern Tanzania. "Livestock grazing and using mineral licks occurred predictably on a near-daily basis within the territories of two of our eight study clans between 1996 and 2016," adds Dheer.

This created a natural experiment of exposed and unexposed clans which the scientists exploited. "We tested whether the hyenas of the exposed clans had fewer surviving offspring than the unexposed hyenas and whether the herding activities increased the physiological 'stress' of the hyenas," explains Dr. Oliver Höner (Leibniz-IZW), head of the Ngorongoro Hyena Project and senior author of the paper.

To assess the fitness effects, the scientists used 24 years of detailed demographic data from the eight clans and to estimate physiological stress, they measured the concentration of glucocorticoid metabolites (fGMC) in 975 feces from 475 hyenas. The team also accounted for the effects of additional ecological parameters such as disease outbreaks and the abundance of African lions (Panthera leo), the hyenas' main competitor, and prey.

The main result was that hyena clans exposed to Maasai pastoralists moving through their territory with their livestock had similar juvenile recruitment and fGMC levels as unexposed clans. "Our results suggest that the hyenas in the Ngorongoro Crater coped well with daytime pastoralism," explains Dheer. A likely explanation for the lack of detectable effect on hyenas is that the activity was predictable and minimally disruptive because it occurred during daytime.

"Hyenas are mostly nocturnal when it comes to critical behaviors such as hunting," explains Höner. Even if pastoralist activities forced other critical hyena behaviors such as the nursing of young cubs into nighttime, it might not have been too much of an adjustment for them to make. "Spotted hyenas are behaviourally flexible. In other areas, they were observed to move their cubs to dens further away from the paths that pastoralists used, or to nurse more at night," Höner says.

The authors caution that such results should not be extrapolated in uncritical fashion. "In areas where pastoralism is more intense and environmental conditions such as the abundance of wild prey are less favorable than in the Ngorongoro Crater, pastoralist activities may well have a significant detrimental effect even on a behaviorally highly flexible species such as the spotted hyena," explains Höner.

"Our investigation highlights the need to develop evidence-based coexistence strategies within a local context to benefit both stakeholders and wildlife. It also underscores the importance of interpreting the effects of human activity in light of the socio-ecology of the species of conservation interest," concludes Victoria Shayo (Head, Department of Wildlife and Rangeland Management, Ngorongoro Conservation Area Authority). Additional scientific analyses that cover a variety of anthropogenic activities and species—and that measure effects on fitness and physiology—will be conducive to promoting human-wildlife coexistence.Emotions and culture are most important for acceptance of carnivore management strategies

More information: Arjun Dheer et al, Diurnal pastoralism does not reduce juvenile recruitment nor elevate allostatic load in spotted hyenas, Journal of Animal Ecology (2022). DOI: 10.1111/1365-2656.13812

Journal information: Journal of Animal Ecology 

Provided by Forschungsverbund Berlin e.V. (FVB) 

Caller ID: Hyena ‘whoops’ feature individual signatures

Study also finds repetition of whoops may improve identification

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA-LINCOLN

 

IMAGE: A STUDY HAS REVEALED THAT LONG-DISTANCE HYENA CALLS FEATURE SIGNATURES UNIQUE TO INDIVIDUALS — A FORM OF CALLER ID DISTINCT ENOUGH THAT HYENAS CAN LIKELY TELL ONE FROM ANOTHER. view more 

CREDIT: ELI STRAUSS

As dusk begins cloaking the Maasai Mara grasslands of southwestern Kenya, a spotted hyena slinks beneath the woody umbrella that is the acacia tree.

The carnivore pauses, its rounded ears cocking forward as a faint sound sails in, an airborne missive traversing three miles at 767 miles per hour. Again, then again. Whhhhhooo-OOOppp! There it is… the call of a fellow spotted hyena, repeated rapidly enough to warrant attention. A warning of lions in the area, maybe, or of one hyena clan encroaching on another’s territory.

To help or not to help? With so much ground to cover, and so much potential peril lying beyond it, the answer could depend on who, exactly, is on the other end of the long-distance call. For spotted hyenas, then, identification is no laughing matter. But it is a whooping one, says a new study from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s Kenna Lehmann and colleagues.

By applying machine learning to audio clips collected from the field, the team has concluded that hyena whoops feature signatures unique to individuals — a form of caller ID distinct enough that hyenas can likely tell one from another. For the first time, the researchers also managed to quantify how much repeating a call, as spotted hyenas do, might improve the odds of being identified.

The fact that spotted hyena clans are built on hierarchies of social rank, yet consist of multiple families that regularly come together and disperse across the savanna, makes individual identity especially important.

“Hyenas don’t treat every individual in the clan the same, so if they’re deciding whether to show up and help someone, they want to know who they’re showing up to help,” said Lehmann, a postdoctoral researcher at Nebraska.

In its search for vocal signatures, the team turned to what’s known as a random forest model. The researchers first trained the model by feeding it the identities of each hyena they had recorded, along with a massive number of acoustic traits extracted from each of its whoops.

From there, the model used a randomly selected series, or bout, of whoops from one hyena to generate decision trees. Each branch of a tree represented a binary choice in an acoustic trait from a batch that was also randomly selected. The model might begin by splitting the hyena whoops by higher vs. lower frequencies, for instance, then further divide those groupings into, say, longer vs. shorter calls, and so on. Ultimately, the tip of every branch represented a vote in favor of a particular hyena.

After assembling 500 of those haphazard decision trees — a random forest — the model predicted a given whoop’s identity based on which hyena received the most votes from those 500 trees. The team put its trained model to the test by asking it to identify which one of 13 hyenas produced a randomly selected bout of whoops, then repeated that test 999 times.

The model correctly paired a whoop bout with its hyena roughly 54% of the time, or about six times more often than would be expected by chance. That success rate suggests there’s enough variation in the whoops of different hyenas, and enough consistency within the whoops of a single hyena, for the model to reasonably tell them apart. And if the model can discern those differences, Lehmann said, it’s reasonable to presume that the hyenas can, too.

Three traits of the whoops seemed especially instructive: the duration of a call, the highest frequency of the call, and the average frequency during the portion of the call that was most consistent in pitch. The greater the disparity in those traits, the more likely the model — and potentially, hyenas themselves — would be to distinguish among the sources of the respective whoops.

Still, 54% is well short of 100%, even before accounting for the challenges inherent to communicating with a fellow hyena in the Maasai Mara. For one, spotted hyena clans can swell to more than 125 members, a number to seemingly strain even the most voluminous, airtight memories. There’s also the possibility of acoustic nuances getting lost in transmission, particularly when those signals are traveling multiple miles before reaching rounded ears. Wind, rain and other animal calls, meanwhile, can introduce noise to the signal.

“There’s an understanding that one of the ways to get your message across is to repeat it,” Lehmann said, “especially if you’re in a noisy environment or if you’re communicating over long distances.”

Prior research has shown that penguins, for example, reiterate their calls more often when the wind picks up. And other studies have found evidence that various animal species favor repetition under similarly noisy circumstances. But as far as Lehmann and her colleagues could tell, none had quantified the extent to which repeating an animal call might actually improve the transmission of information.

So the team again resorted to its random forest model. When the model guessed the identity of a hyena on the basis of just one whoop, it correctly pegged that identity only about half as often as it did when provided with three whoops. That accuracy rose even further with additional calls, peaking at seven whoops.

“It’s like getting a little bit more information (each time),” said Lehmann, who previously studied vocalizations in orcas. “The first time you hear it, you might notice: Oh, that was definitely a male or a female voice. Then, the next whoop, you might be able to narrow it down further.”

Lehmann and her colleagues knew that the calls of some animal species also contain signatures that differentiate the groups to which they belong from other same-species groups they might come across — somewhat akin to human accents or dialects. She recalled that some researchers studying orcas had become so familiar with pod signatures that the researchers could instinctively tell them apart. (One researcher claimed that a certain pod’s calls were “more nasally” than others’.)

Given the size of spotted hyena clans, Lehmann figured that their whoops, too, might employ a group-specific signature.

“Obviously, if you just have to remember what your group sounds like, and you don’t have to remember each of the 100-plus individual voices, that would be a lot easier to do,” she said.

When the researchers went looking for a group signature in the random forest, though, they couldn’t find one. One potential explanation: The apparent ability to memorize so many individual signatures may have rendered a clan signature either useless or, at best, not useful enough to bother developing.

“If you know who the individual is, you know what group they’re in,” Lehmann said. “Animals are pretty good at associating that information.

“So if they need individual signatures for other reasons, then there just may have never been a need to also develop a group signature, which is what this finding suggests. They should be able to keep track of all the individual voices and be able to distinguish: If this is Individual X, they’re in my group. I can choose to help them based on them being a group member, but maybe there are more decisions to be made about whether they’re a group mate that I actually want to help.”

‘A million different stars that have to align’

All of the team’s findings — the presence of individual signatures, the absence of a clan signature, the utility of repetition — ultimately originated not from a random forest but from the savanna of Kenya’s Maasai Mara National Reserve. There, Michigan State University’s Kay Holekamp and colleagues have been conducting research on the spotted hyena since the late 1980s.

Lehmann herself spent a year in the Maasai Mara, which takes its name from the Maasai people who have long inhabited it. From 2014 to 2015, the then-doctoral student and several colleagues regularly drove west from Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, to a field site at the reserve.

“The first time I went out there … I thought, ‘Oh, I’m gonna be sleeping on the ground for 10 months, in a sleeping bag,’” said Lehmann, who soon learned that a sizable canvas tent and a soft bed awaited her. “But we were pretty spoiled out there, to be perfectly honest.”

If the accommodations were cushier than expected, the data collection proved anything but. From their vantage point in a Toyota Land Cruiser, Lehmann and her colleagues would point a directional microphone out the window and flip on an audio recorder. Unfortunately, the team was very much subject to the vagaries of Murphy’s law.

“You need to not be driving. And the car has to be turned off,” she said, noting that its engine drowned out the sounds of the Maasai Mara. “And the hyena has to whoop. And you have to be able to actually … see who it is. They can’t be in a bush. And they have to be close enough so that you can get a good recording. And the other hyenas need to be quiet at the same time. There are just, like, a million different stars that have to align to get a good recording that you can then use in an analysis like this.”

Under those circumstances, Lehmann said, patience was more than a virtue. It was a necessity.

“With this handheld recording equipment, we were opportunistically, constantly recording and just hoping that they whooped for us,” she said, laughing.

Over those months of hoping and waiting, the researchers stayed busy observing and chronicling behaviors that would inform other studies. As they did, they caught glimpses of the individuality that their analyses of the hyenas’ whoops would, years later, come to affirm.

“You definitely get to know that different individuals have different personalities or might react a certain way in different situations,” Lehmann said. “So it’s always fun to just get to know the hyenas and their little interactions and the dramas that might be going on in their lives.”

The team reported its findings in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Lehmann and Holekamp authored the study with Ariana Strandburg-Peshkin of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, Frants Jensen of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and Andrew Gersick of Princeton University. The researchers received support in part from the National Science Foundation.

---

JOURNAL

Proceedings of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences

DOI

10.1098/rspb.2022.0548 

Jawbone found in China linked to unknown tiger lineage that never evolved

AUGUST 14, 2022

By KEVIN MCSPADDEN

Twitter/TheChinatiger01

A team of scientists in China used DNA analysis of a fossil found in northeast China to identify what they believe is a lineage of tigers that diverged from today’s modern felines approximately 268,000 years ago.

The proposed evolutionary split would have happened far earlier than the previously known divergence around 125,000 years ago when what would become South China tigers (Panthera tigris amoyensis ) split from what eventually became the five other living species of tigers.More from AsiaOneRead the condensed version of this story, and other top stories with NewsLite.

The scientists believe the newly discovered lineage of tigers evolved independently from modern tigers before eventually going extinct at an unknown date, according to a paper published in late July in Royal Society, a peer-reviewed journal.

Sheng Guilian, a study author and professor at China University of Geosciences (Wuhan) Future City Campus, told the South China Morning Post that the team was able to build an evolutionary tree using DNA and molecular analysis that allowed them to identify when different tiger species diverged.

The researchers analysed DNA samples of 40 modern tigers spread across the six living species, as well as one lion and one snow leopard.

“The tree shows that this new tiger is in another branch of the tree and formed a sister clade to all modern tigers,” Sheng said.

The researchers wrote in the paper that their findings support the idea that there may be more now-extinct tiger lineages that humans have yet to discover.

The new tiger was identified by analysing a lower jawbone found in a karst cave in Jilin province, northeastern China, and the researchers nicknamed the cat “Da’an tiger” after the cave’s name.

The area is consistent with historical ranges of tigers and is where Amur tigers (more famously called Siberian tigers) still live. The researchers hypothesised that the location of the fossil might mean the ancient tiger had specific genes enabling it to adapt to cold environments, also reported in Amur tigers.

Sheng said the scientists pinpointed that the extinct tiger evolved from modern tigers 268,000 years ago by using a strategy called the “molecular clock theory”, in which scientists can use the mutation rate of molecules to determine when animal species diverge.

“Before this study, all available research in terms of molecular evolution of tigers was based on modern tigers, which means we could only investigate the evolutionary process of their direct ancestors,” she said.

The discovery also highlights how valuable DNA analysis can be in biological sciences.

The piece of the jawbone excavated from Da’an was not large. Scientists initially thought it belonged to an ancient hyena because other hyena bones were found in the cave.

It was only through analysing the DNA that the researchers could determine that it was a tiger, not a hyena.

Read Also China tiger farms put big cats in the jaws of extinction


“It is not a surprise that you make morphological mistakes if you only get a small part of the [jawbone]. That is why ancient DNA is so important and helpful,” said Sheng.

Scientists would need to identify more bones to give it a specific species classification, and they are very far from figuring out what the ancient tiger might have looked like.

Interestingly, fossils from an ancient species of cave lions called Panthera spelaea have been found in the region, piquing the researchers’ interest in whether the lions and tigers interacted with one another. As of now, we do not have enough information to determine either way.

The oldest known fossil that is considered a close relative of tigers belonged to a species named Panthera zdanskyi. It was found in 2004 in Gansu province in northwest China and is estimated to be between 2.16 and 2.55 million years old.

 

Class And Racist Security In A Liberal Democratic Order – OpEd

 July 12, 2022  Timothy Hopper  0 Comments

By Timothy Hopper

There is an African proverb with the theme that when you see a lion, a bear, a fox, a hyena, and a deer running together at the same time, the forest is on fire and an exceptional situation has been created. An exceptional situation basically occurs when the law is suspended and the ruler’s decision replaces the law. Then, previous legal clauses and regimes and legal and international conventions become an appendage that can only occasionally be used behind the podium to declare that “The forest is on fire and any fire is condemned”. The same situation is going on in the United Nations as without any practical action, the organization only declares its concern about the war in Ukraine.

However, in the Ukraine war, the exceptional situation in the international order will not only affect the Americans or the Ukrainians. These exceptional circumstances are the product of the current situation due to the arrangement of world powers and the tension between them. Nearly 800 US military bases in more than 70 countries have turned the world into something like a US barracks, or rather a hostage of American order. Britain, France, and Russia also have a total of 30 military bases around the world. In addition, China established its first overseas military base in Djibouti in 2017 and is now not much far away from establishing the second one in the Solomon Islands near Australia- However, USA and Australia announced in the AUKUS Pact that this establishment is a red line for them.

 It is estimated that the United States alone spends about $ 200 billion to maintain these bases; a price that is obviously paid from the pockets of American taxpayers. It is a pity that these bases have not been much successful in maintaining global efficacy and deterrence. The strategic question is “What is the purpose of creating this number of bases?” If the new liberal order is based on the continuation of peace, what is the justification for this militarization of the world? The only thing that the other power actors can do in the current situation, especially after the nightmare of the emergence of the enduring paradigm of Trumpism in the United States, is to side with the commander of this invading military order and endless wars.

Another important question is whether countries like Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba which are encircled by US bases, or even China and Russia, as military powers, are allowed to set red lines to maintain their security against the United States or not? The fundamental question is “Why the right to draw red lines is not considered for other countries that do not have close ties to the United States?” History will not forget that John F. Kennedy, then President of the United States, was ready to even wage a nuclear war to push back the Soviets from their borders. 

What does security mean in a situation that the United States defines as a zero-sum game for others? In the current conceptualization of security, it is nothing but the security of the United States and its allies, who define themselves as the rulers of the world order and the guarantor of security. In other words, the security of independent countries or even the actor’s attempt to gain strategic independence from the global hegemony of this order is defined as the insecurity of the international order or American security, which has emerged as an international commander. In the current conceptualization, security is nothing but the security of the United States and its allies, who define themselves as the rulers of the world order and the guarantor of security. 

America considers itself rightful to determine its interests by defining new wars, new rivals, or endless wars so that no country or international organization will ever dare to speak about dismantling these bases.  International organizations and conventions must act according to what is acceptable in Bush and Trump’s governing paradigm of US foreign and security policy. This means that any country could face a threat or war as soon as it violates the unilateral interests of the United States. In this exceptional situation, the international regimes and conventions that constitute the international order have practically become something that is subject to the decision of the ruling hegemon. Another necessity for maintaining this exceptional status for the White House, as the imperial power of the new order, is to maintain and continue the strategy of endless wars. For decades, war has been the most essential part of the Washington order. In other words, the ” war of all against all” under the supervision of the White House has gained legitimacy for years. In the strategy of endless wars, not only should the wars in Syria, Yemen, and Afghanistan not end, but also the provocation of China in Taiwan should be maintained and Russia should be constantly encouraged to pursue geo-strategic expansionism.

It is said that when a government is in danger of falling, the only thing that can save it might be war. From a larger perspective, if we consider that the United States of America is the ruler of the liberal world order and actors like Europe, as former allies seek strategic independence and countries like China fight for authoritarian rule, what can help the US to maintain its dominance once again? In addition to suspending the law and stabilizing the exceptional situation, the war also preserves the ruling order.

In America’s grand strategy, war is the code name that has kept the state of exception stable for American interests. In the war of all against all strategy, Afghanistan was offered to terrorist Islamist jihadists, and now it’s time to provoke Russia into war in Ukraine and possibly mobilize allies who are afraid of Russia in case of future China aggression. Ukraine and Russia will also have to fight until the threat draws closer to Europe until the continent becomes more dependent on the USA. Iran, too, must be isolated with the strategy of keeping the option of war on the table of US presidents. 

Let’s return to the image of a large garrison with 800 military bases around the world. What will 800 military bases do if they have not been able to prevent the war? Isn’t it time for the demand for being released from the prison guard who has turned the world into a great garrison? Isn’t it time that the world is no longer a laboratory of occupation, military operations, and military campaigns? Isn’t it time for US taxpayers to ask why $ 200 billion of their hard-earned money should be spent on inefficient US military barracks around the world? Perhaps now is the time for strategic independence and the preservation of the lost prestige of the Charter of Nations, regimes, and international conventions to become a global and international demand to prevent another country from falling victim to this so-called order.

Timothy Hopper is an international relations graduate of American University.

SMART DOGS
African wild dogs cope with human development using skills they rely on to compete with other carnivores

The Conversation
February 18, 2022

African wild dogs (Screen Grab)

Large carnivores in Africa are important from ecological, economic and cultural perspectives, but human activities put them at risk. Increasingly, lions, hyenas and African wild dogs are restricted to protected areas like national parks. Within these limited areas, they must compete for the same food sources.

Competition is, of course, nothing new. For several million years, African wild dogs have evolved within a set of large carnivores that all prey on the same large herbivore species, like wildebeest and warthogs. Wild dogs are lanky, long-distance hunters that always live in groups, usually of eight to 10 adults. Cooperation with pack mates allows them to hunt prey much larger than themselves. Weighing in at about 40-62 pounds (18-28 kilograms), wild dogs have been shaped by the necessity to compete with larger species like the lion and spotted hyena.

There may be a silver lining to being the bottom dog in the competitive hierarchy. Research that my colleagues with the Zambian Carnivore Programme and I have conducted in Zambia and Tanzania suggests why smaller, subordinate species like wild dogs are better able to move through human-modified landscapes. Understanding how is essential for their conservation.


A pack of African wild dogs makes a formidable hunting team.
slowmotiongli/iStock via Getty Images Plus

Meeting the African wild dog

In the late 1980s, I was studying dwarf mongooses in Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park when an extraordinary thing happened. While I sat on the roof of an ancient Land Rover watching mongooses on a nearby termite mound, a wild dog trotted past. And then another, and another. Wild dogs had been missing from most (perhaps all) of the Serengeti for years due to a combination of intense competition from larger carnivores and outbreaks of rabies. But here they were, back again.

Over the next year, I occasionally followed the dogs to watch them hunt on the shortgrass plains, where they were constantly shadowed by spotted hyenas. Several hyenas often trailed the dogs even as they set out to hunt, and hyenas quickly aggregated when the dogs killed a gazelle or wildebeest – often alerted by the unmistakable sound of vultures plummeting through the air in their own race to the fresh carcass.

Although they are half the size, wild dogs do not easily give up a kill to hyenas. A pack of wild dogs making a coordinated attack on one or two hyenas can easily drive them off. But hyenas are also social animals, and researchers found that the dogs generally lost their kills to hyenas when their numbers were equal. Given the large population of hyenas in Serengeti, they took nine out of 10 kills that the dogs made. And lions are simply too dangerous to fight, so the big cats could always take over a kill from the dogs, and kill them surprisingly often.

At that time, very little was known about wild dogs in places other than Serengeti and South Africa’s Kruger National Park, a more wooded ecosystem where researchers had found a flourishing population that often hunted impala. Biologists started to rethink the prevailing view that wild dogs were specialized to live and hunt in open grasslands.

My colleagues and I spent six years in the 1990s observing wild dogs in the Selous Game Reserve, confirming the Tanzania Wildlife Department’s belief that this large ecosystem was a major stronghold for the species. We found that the density of wild dogs in Selous was very good, at least partly because wild dogs were better able to avoid problems with lions and spotted hyenas in the miombo woodland of Selous than in plains of the Serengeti. It was more evidence that not only could they survive outside of grasslands like in the Serengeti, but African wild dogs found advantages to other kinds of environments.

By the mid-1990s, a scientific consensus was emerging that the persistence of wild dogs in an area depends at least partly on their ability to avoid losing food to hyenas or being killed by lions.


African wild dogs have been less separated by human development, like roads, than some other large carnivores.
Simoneemanphotography/iStock via Getty Images Plus

Being bottom dog can pay off

Many studies, including our current research in Zambia, have confirmed that wild dogs are adapted to “live in the cracks” of a landscape where they are outnumbered and outsized by spotted hyenas and lions.

In the short term, wild dogs move quickly away from an encounter with lions – or an experimental playback of their roars over a loudspeaker – in a straight line that would be unusual under other circumstances. Over the long term, wild dogs avoid areas that are heavily used by larger competitors, even though this requires them to hunt in areas with fewer prey.

But there may be a benefit to being at the bottom of the competitive hierarchy. Compared to most species, all of the large African carnivores live in small and isolated populations that must remain connected to maintain genetic diversity. But humans have now modified more than half of the Earth’s terrestrial surface, cutting lines of movement and increasing the isolation of protected areas. Despite this general pattern, some species are better adapted than others to maintain connections between ecosystems.

Our research has used advances in genetic sequencing to test how well connected wild dogs and lions are in several ecosystems across Zambia and Tanzania. The basic idea is that well-connected populations remain genetically similar, but poorly connected populations become genetically distinct from one another over time.

We wondered whether the adaptations of wild dogs that allow them to move through a landscape dominated by lions and hyenas might also help them move through a landscape altered by humans. For example, wild dogs could move more quickly and in a straighter line after an encounter with people, just as they do after an encounter with lions. We hypothesized that genetic data would show that wild dogs have stronger connections between ecosystems than lions, and that their connections are less affected by humans.

And this is just what the data showed when we compared the genotypes of 96 wild dogs and, separately, 208 lions.



Each dot represents an individual wild dog, and similarity in their color represents genetic similarity.


Scott Creel, CC BY-ND

Wild dogs in eastern, central and western Zambia were genetically quite similar, showing that these populations remain well connected. In contrast, lions were much less genetically similar, with distinct populations that were not well connected.




Each dot represents an individual lion, and similarity in their color represents genetic similarity.
Scott Creel, CC BY-ND

We also mapped the degree to which human effects such as land conversion, agriculture and roads hinder animal movement, differentiating between areas with relatively little resistance to animal movement and areas with strong human effects. The genetic differences between lion populations were strongly correlated with human resistance, but there was no such correlation for wild dogs. That is, places that were less hospitable to animal movement had more genetically isolated populations of lions, but didn’t affect the genetic diversity of the wild dogs in the area.

While it is still too early to know if this pattern will apply to other species, it suggests that eons of dealing with lions and hyenas have provided the wild dog with tools that help them maneuver through the unforgiving landscapes that humans create outside of national parks.

Scott Creel, Professor of Conservation Biology & Ecology, Montana State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.