24 Aug 2009: Mondol S, Karanth KU, Ramakrishnan U (2009) Correction: Why the Indian Subcontinent Holds the Key to Global Tiger Recovery. PLOS Genetics 5(8): 10.1371/annotation/9f8748f6-300f-450e-bbed-63e66e1b6661. doi: 10.1371/annotation/9f8748f6-300f-450e-bbed-63e66e1b6661 View correction
With only ∼3,000 wild individuals surviving restricted to just 7% of their historical range, tigers are now a globally threatened species. Therefore, conservation efforts must prioritize regions that harbor more tigers, as well try to capture most of the remaining genetic variation and habitat diversity. Only such prioritization based on demographic, genetic, and ecological considerations can ensure species recovery and retention of evolutionary flexibility in the face of ongoing global changes. Although scientific understanding of ecological and demographic aspects of extant wild tiger populations has improved recently, little is known about their genetic composition and variability. We sampled 73 individual tigers from 28 reserves spread across a diversity of habitats in the Indian subcontinent to obtain 1,263 bp of mitochondrial DNA and 10 microsatellite loci. Our analyses reveals that Indian tigers retain more than half of the extant genetic diversity in the species. Coalescent simulations attribute this high genetic diversity to a historically large population size of about 58,200 tigers for peninsular India south of the Gangetic plains. Furthermore, our analyses indicate a precipitous, possibly human-induced population crash ∼200 years ago in India, which is in concordance with historical records. Our results suggest that only 1.7% (with an upper limit of 13% and a lower limit of 0.2%) of tiger numbers in historical times remain now. In the global conservation context our results suggest that, based on genetic, demographic, and ecological considerations, the Indian subcontinent holds the key to global survival and recovery of wild tigers.
Tiger range and numbers have collapsed globally despite substantial conservation efforts. Genetic data quantifying variation from 73 wild tigers in 28 reserves in the Indian subcontinent suggests historically high numbers for tigers, and simulations reveal a signature of a 200-year-old, possibly human-induced decline. Simulations suggest that only 1.7% of historical tiger numbers now persist in peninsular Indian. Our data also reveal that tigers of the Indian subcontinent retain most of the species' genetic diversity, besides this region harbouring maximum diversity of tiger habitats. Overall, the Indian subcontinent appears to be a global hotspot holding the key to any future recovery of wild tigers from both an ecological and genetic perspective.
Citation: Mondol S, Karanth KU, Ramakrishnan U (2009) Why the Indian Subcontinent Holds the Key to Global Tiger Recovery. PLoS Genet 5(8): e1000585. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1000585
Editor: Dmitri A. Petrov, Stanford University, United States of America
Received: November 18, 2008; Accepted: July 2, 2009; Published: August 14, 2009
Copyright: © 2009 Mondol et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Funding: Funding for this research was from a startup grant to UR from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
As top predators, large carnivores strongly shape ecological interactions in biological communities, thus playing a critical role in maintaining their structure and diversity ,. However, during historical times, increased anthropogenic impacts have driven range collapses and population declines in many large carnivores, thereby engendering significant efforts at species recovery. These efforts have typically aimed at increasing local population