Jackie Chan is known for his wild stunts and kung fu comedies. But he has also backed a quieter battle: the fight to save one of the world’s rarest big cats. The South China tiger once roamed the forests of southern China. However, for decades, no one has spotted one in the wild. A field survey of eight reserves in five provinces in 2001 and 2002 by Ronald Tilson and colleagues, published in the journal Oryx, tried to find them. The team found no evidence of wild South China tigers in the survey area.
What the survey found
Tilson and his team looked for signs of tigers, their prey, and damage to the land. Few prey animals were found, and there were no reports of tigers killing livestock in the previous 10 years. The reserves were small, averaging about 100 square kilometers. Tree farms were common, and people and their livestock filled many of the patches of forest. But the authors said a lone tiger or a few might still be hiding in places they missed. Still, they wrote, their findings strongly suggest that no viable wild population remains in the tiger’s historical range. They noted more fieldwork was needed to find out if any wild tigers are still in existence.
How Jackie Chan and a charity fit in
Chan became an ambassador for Save China's Tigers. Li Quan founded this charity in 2000. With his help, the group ran an awareness campaign in Hong Kong in 2006. It aims to build a healthy tiger population and eventually reintroduce tigers into protected land in China. It’s a big goal, and it starts with tigers being born in captivity. Researchers note that the only stock available for reintroduction is captive-born animals. And so a big question arises: can a zoo-raised tiger learn to hunt?
{{/usCountry}}Chan became an ambassador for Save China's Tigers. Li Quan founded this charity in 2000. With his help, the group ran an awareness campaign in Hong Kong in 2006. It aims to build a healthy tiger population and eventually reintroduce tigers into protected land in China. It’s a big goal, and it starts with tigers being born in captivity. Researchers note that the only stock available for reintroduction is captive-born animals. And so a big question arises: can a zoo-raised tiger learn to hunt?
{{/usCountry}}That's what researcher Maria Fàbregas and her colleagues sought to test. For their 2015 paper in Biological Conservation, they fitted 12 captive-born tigers with GPS collars. The test took place at Laohu Valley Reserve in South Africa, part of the same charity's rewilding program, using blesbok, a local antelope, as the available prey species; the researchers reasoned that tigers who could hunt successfully on South Africa's more open terrain should do even better once reintroduced to China's more forested landscape, which offers more cover for stalking. They were all over two years old. Each tiger was placed on its own in a 100-hectare enclosure with blesbok, a type of antelope. The team then tracked how often each tiger killed. All but one of the tigers hunted blesbok. But the kill rates varied a lot. The best hunter killed a blesbok every three days, while one tiger killed none. Tigers also fared better in the enclosure with more cover to stalk from.
What this does and does not prove
The authors say their work is the first to provide empirical evidence that tigers born in captivity can hunt free-ranging prey well enough to meet their energy needs. That’s a good sign for rewilding schemes. They do add one caveat, however. This is only valid if other criteria of the reintroduction are met.
Tilson's survey shows how much work may remain: few prey animals and small reserves crowded with people and livestock. Nothing in either study proved that tigers would roam China's forests again. The outcome remained unknown. For now, the South China tiger shows how fast a species can slip away. It also shows how hard it is to bring one back, and the effort to do so is still unfinished.