It's been a long century for the Amur, or Siberian, tiger (Panthera tigris altaica), the
largest of the six remaining tiger subspecies. Once hunted nearly to extinction, just 50
tigers remained when Russia protected the species in 1947. Despite that protection,
illegal poaching soon dropped that number to as few as 20. But enforcement and
careful conservation over the ensuring decades have done wonders, and today the
worldwide Amur tiger population stands at more than 900-421 in captivity and an
estimated 500 in the wild,
But despite that success, future danger could still lurk in the Amur tigers' very genes.
New research led by a team from the University of British Columbia, in Kelowna,
Canada, has shown that Amur tigers in the wild have an "effective population" of just
27 to 35 individual tigers, meaning they show a very low level of genetic diversity-the
lowest, in fact, ever shown in wild tigers.
What mechanism of evolution is this?
Geographic Isolation
bottleneck
natural selection
Founders effect