This Tiger Was Declared Extinct in 2008. A Genetic Clue Says It May Still Be Alive.
In 2008, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) declared the Javan tiger, a subspecies of the Sumatran tiger, extinct.
More than 20 years later, a conservationist living on the island reportedly spotted the tiger, and a following investigation collected hair from a nearby fence.
Now, a new study confirms with DNA analysis that the hair belongs to the Javan tiger, but more work needs to be done to confirm—and hopefully reverse—its extinction status.
Climate change is ravaging the millions of species on Earth. While it’s impossible to know the planet’s true rate of extinction—after all, species that humans never even knew existed in the first place go extinct every day—estimates put the modern rate hundreds, if not thousands of times above what’s normal. This has lead most experts to conclude that we’re currently living through a sixth mass extinction.
So, it’s a rare ray of sunshine in a forecast of storm clouds when experts announce that one species—thought to be extinct for 25 years—may still be alive. Environmentalists and zoologists in Indonesia recently announced that a strand of hair found by a conservationist on the island contained DNA belonging to the Javan tiger. That would be a particularly remarkable find, as the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) listed Panthera tigris sondaica as extinct way back in 2008.
Of course, the IUCN did so with good reason. A subspecies of the critically endangered Sumatran tiger, this majestic big cat once flourished on the island of Java in the Greater Sundra Islands. But as is typical with many big predators, habitat destruction and human predation (i.e. the killing of tigers for attacking livestock) led to their eventual extinction—or so we thought.
“The […] Javan tiger hair were compared with that of a Javan tiger specimen in Museum Zoologicum Bogoriense, collected in 1930,” the paper about the DNA sample, published in the journal Oryx in mid-March, reads. “The putative Javan tiger hair sample belongs to the same group as the museum specimen of the Javan tiger.”
On August 18, 2019, a conservationist working in the forest of South Sukabumi, West Java, reported the sighting of a Javan tiger—another chapter in a long history of similar-yet-unconfirmed sightings. An investigation a week later found footprints, claw marks, and (luckily) a piece of hair clinging to a nearby fence. This small hair, when tested and controlled against closely-related specimens, allowed researchers to determine that it did indeed belong to a Javan tiger.
This is some of the strongest scientific evidence yet of the Javan tiger’s continued existence. However, this is only a glimmer of hope. The paper suggests that “whether the Javan tiger still occurs in the wild needs to be confirmed with further genetic and field studies,” but Indonesian officials are ready to undergo the search.
“The research has sparked speculation that the Javan tiger is still in the wild,” Satyawan Pudyatmoko, a conservation official, told Reuters. “We have prepared and will prepare efforts to respond to it.”
Who knows—maybe that glimmer will grow into one of the most amazing conservation stories ever told.
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