Each tiger’s stripes tell a unique tale

Stripe patterns on tigers have now provided scientists a code to identify when and where poachers made their kills, with a help of a new computer software, said a study published in the British journal Biology Letters. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Mar 30, 2009, 01:33:43 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Stripe patterns on tigers have now provided scientists a code to identify when and where poachers made their kills, with a help of a new computer software, said a study published in the latest edition of British journal Biology Letters.

UK-based Conservation Research Limited and Bangalore-based World Conservation Society (WCS) had discovered a code hidden in tigers’ stripes, which is unique to each animal, just like fingerprints and DNA are to humans.

This code can help wildlife investigators track skins recovered from the poachers to the forests where the killings were made. “Now with the help of technology, we can use it against poachers as forensic evidence,” said Fayaz Khudsar, a Delhi-based wildlife scientist.

In this new system, images of the big cats are taken by automated camera traps. The pictures are then fed into a computer, which melds several pictures into a three-dimensional map of an animal’s markings from the neck to the base of the tail.

The map is digitally flattened until it resembles a tiger skin, which can be compared to pictures of skins being traded in the black market, said the research paper.

“If copies of camera trap images were accumulated in a central database, an image taken from a tiger in that database could be traced within a few minutes to where and when the living animal was last recorded,” the authors wrote in a paper published this week in Biology Letters.

“Catching maximum number of animals on camera traps is important for conservation and protecting tigers,” K. Ullas Karanth, senior conservation scientist at WCS told HT. In India, about 40-50 per cent of estimated 1,411 tigers are captured in cameras.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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