The Journal of Wildlife Management has published an article by an international team of authors, examining the success of the rehabilitation and release of orphaned Amur tiger cubs to restore the species in the northwest of its historical range in Russia – in the Amur region.
Over the past 30 years, two major projects have been carried out in the Russian Far East to study the Amur tiger. One, the Siberian Tiger Project (a joint project between the Sikhote-Alin Nature Reserve and the Wildlife Conservation Society, WCS), was launched in 1992, and the second, the Russian Far East Amur Tiger Study Program (a project that is still being carried out with the support of the Russian Geographical Society), was launched in 2008. The leaders of both projects, Dale Mikell and Vyacheslav Rozhnov, decided to combine the data they had obtained during their research on the diet of wild tigers in the Northern Sikhote-Alin and the tiger cubs that had been forcibly removed from the wild and released in the Amur region after their rehabilitation and special training in a center built for this purpose.
During the monitoring of the tiger cubs reintroduced to the Amur region, zoologists were able to not only track their movements with the help of satellite collars placed on the animals, but also pinpoint the locations of their successful hunts based on the location of “clusters” (places where a large number of tiger locations are concentrated). In these "clusters", scientists examined and identified 132 prey killed by tigers, as a result of which they were able to study the diet and amount of food consumed by the tigers returned to the wild. These results were compared with the results of studies of 37 wild tigers radio-tagged in 1992-2013 in the Sikhote-Alin Nature Reserve.
The results of the comparison showed that the diet and food consumption levels of reintroduced tigers in the Amur region and wild tigers in the Sikhote-Alin region were remarkably similar: ungulates made up 88% of the prey of the Sikhote-Alin tigers and 86% of the prey of the Amur tigers. Although the size of the prey killed by the Sikhote-Alin tigers was somewhat larger, the Amur tigers killed it more often, as a result of which the amount of food consumed over time was almost the same. In both the Sikhote-Alin and Amur regions, tigers rarely attacked and killed domestic animals, and did so only in forested areas, i.e. the tigers did not enter villages in search of prey and did not create conflict situations. However, there was an exception: one of the released tigers swam across the Amur and ended up in China, where wild prey was scarce, and killed a large number of domestic animals in one night, including 13 goats in a barn. When this tiger returned to Russia, it was captured, removed from the wild, and sent to a zoo. The other five tigers released as part of the Russian project, as well as eight other adults translocated by the Amur Tiger NGO to the Amur region from other parts of the range, but whose diet was not studied, are thriving in the wild and have produced at least six litters of at least 12 cubs, which has led to the restoration of the Amur tiger population in this part of the range, as previously reported in an article (Rozhnov et al., 2021).
Thus, the results of the Russian project to restore the Amur tiger population by raising orphaned tiger cubs forcibly removed from the wild, and the study conducted, open up opportunities for the restoration of tigers throughout Asia. Article imprint:
Article imprint: Miquelle D.G., Mukhacheva A.S., Bragina E.V., Waller S.J., Petrunenko Y.K., Naidenko S.V, Hernandez-Blanco J.A., Kastrikin V.A., Rybin A.N., Rybin N.N., Seryodkin I.V., Blidchenko E.Yu., Yachmennikova A.A., Chistopolova M.D., Soutyrina S.V., Rozhnov V.V. Rehabilitating tigers for range expansion: lessons from the Russian Far East // Journal of Wildlife Management. 2024. e22691. DOI: 10.1002/jwmg.22691