The world’s largest cat, the Amur [Siberian] tiger, is down to an effective wild population of fewer than 35 individuals, new research has found.
Although up to 500 of the big cats actually survive in the wild, the effective population is a measure of their genetic diversity.
Do we have time to change our ways and save it? Probably not.
Further depression:
At the start of the 20th Century, nine subspecies of tiger existed, with a total world population of more than 100,000 individuals.
Human impacts have since caused the extinction of three subspecies, the Javan tiger, Bali tiger and Caspian tiger, and world tiger numbers could now have fallen to fewer than 3000.
