A solution to save the tiger ??? : Diverse gene pool critical for tigers' survival, say experts -- ScienceDaily
genetic diversity is a key element in species survival?!? I am stunned! Those scientists at Stanford sure have done their homework.
yes, I hope the tiger studbook keepers get in touch with these students right away so they can sort out how to do their jobs properly! In all seriousness though, reading the link it doesn't appear that the "researchers" actually have any clue how tiger/zoo breeding programmes work. They appear to think the zoos are simply breeding them as fast as possible to get the numbers up with no inkling of relationships between the tigers they are propagating. They also don't seem to appreciate the huge differences in ecology between, say, a Sumatran tiger and a Siberian tiger. How well could some mongrel tiger actually survive in Sumatra or the Siberian winter? Sure you could get a lot of tigers by just breeding them all together, but then what? They probably aren't fit for many of the habitats the subspecies evolved for!
I was hoping this article would be about the possibility of cloning tigers from long-dead specimens in an attempt to bring back genes that may have disappeared from the population a long time ago. I'm disappointed. Even with my limited knowledge of zoos and breeding programs, yeah, this article seems kind of dumb. "The tiger gene pool must be diverse to save the species" is kind of a no-brainer. It's like saying "Zoos that keep tigers should feed them meat and not vegetables". Zoos today are pretty careful about what animals they allow to breed with each other. Also, since when did anyone start saying it's a good idea to mix different subspecies for conservation? That's kind of insane. Different subspecies evolved for a reason: they live in different environments. I don't think it's a good idea to put a half Siberian, half Bengal tiger in India or Malaysia...
HeHe! That's the sort of remark I'd like to make about this too. It does seem they are completely ignoring here the suitability of such Tigers they are recommending for the various habitats they evolved in. No mention is made of that aspect at all. Scientists can certainly be very blinkered and dogmatic at times.
I expect this is just bad reporting. A great deal of science is simply checking that common sense is correct, because occasionally it isn't and the world turns out not to be flat. I do tentatively agree with mixed subspecies. Ideally you want to keep subspecies pure, but once you have subspecies with populations so small that they start becoming inbred that some mixing would be a good idea. And of course you have to be sensible, nobody's suggesting just creating a generic tiger that couldn't cope with conditions in the wild. I'd rather have healthy populations of mongrel tigers than pure, genetically identical ones.
