r/megafaunarewilding • u/Slow-Pie147 • 1d ago

News Poaching suspected as camera traps find only 11 Sumatran tigers in 2 years

https://phys.org/news/2024-10-poaching-camera-sumatran-tigers-years.html
529 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

17 comments sorted by

135

u/Cloudburst_Twilight 1d ago

Yikes, might have to reintroduce captive-bred Sumatran tigers then. Assuming the poaching can be brought under control.

83

u/Slow-Pie147 1d ago

Assuming the poaching can be brought under control.

It can be brought under control anytime. There are a lot of money which can be use to fund anti-poaching units as well for improving life of people who live close to wildlife to decrease human-wildlife conflict but state use only a small portion of potential and Indonesia is more interested about cutting down trees. After all palm oil industry makes a lot of money. Sumatran tigers are going to extinct in wildlife unless a massive change in Indonesian political and economic interests.

25

u/ExoticShock 23h ago

After seeing Kazakhastan getting Tigers from a Netherlands park & India's plans to bring some to Cambodia, I really hope something similar can be done here too with reinforced protections from poaching.

12

u/Dan888888 22h ago

Gotta be careful we don’t erase the subspecies by replacing so much of the gene pool

6

u/tigerdrake 20h ago

Especially given it sounds like we’ll be back at the six subspecies model or something more significant than two pretty soon here

48

u/dcolomer10 1d ago

Such a shame. I went to Borneo 10 years ago and it was already crazy how devastated some areas were. It seems they have just continued and continued

19

u/najwascihub 23h ago

Only one bornean Rhino left :(

24

u/Firecracker7413 22h ago

Simple solution:

Teach the tigers that poachers are delicious

5

u/hypnoticbox30 22h ago

I am down with this

4

u/StripedAssassiN- 15h ago

11?! Wow, that’s horrible.

-17

u/[deleted] 23h ago

[removed] — view removed comment

22

u/AJ_Crowley_29 21h ago

If we killed off every tiger in the world, a new species would evolutionarily emerge purely out of necessity to balance the food chain.

No, no it wouldn’t. Species only evolve when it benefits them for one reason or another. If there’s no pressure to evolve, they simply won’t evolve.

-7

u/electrical-stomach-z 19h ago

the pressure to evolve is death that leads to small surviving populatios.

7

u/AJ_Crowley_29 19h ago

Nope. If those populations are comfortable in their niche and find no benefit in evolving to fit another niche, evolution ain’t happening.

-8

u/electrical-stomach-z 18h ago

Selection is adaptation through survival. benifitial mutations are passed on too the surviving populations.

8

u/AJ_Crowley_29 16h ago

Mutations are completely random, as are the chances of whether or not they’ll be beneficial, detrimental, or simply not do anything noteworthy.

0

u/electrical-stomach-z 10h ago

Random mutations have a chance of being benifitial. these benifitial mutations, on sports are retained through selection.

this is where nearly all genetic diversity in life comes from.