The Rekindled Hope of the Extinct Java Tiger: A Tale of Discovery and Skepticism

[Social Media]

 

Five years ago, Kalih Raksasewu was getting his car tuned when his mechanic shared a curious tidbit: he had stumbled upon a tiger near his home. The startled creature had jumped a fence and vanished, the man said. Strange encounter, thought Raksasewu, not least because the men live on Indonesia’s most populous island, Java, and especially because Javan tigers have long been believed extinct. The last confirmed sighting dates back nearly half a century, to 1976.

 

Raksasewu took out his phone and showed the mechanic images of leopards, which can sometimes be confused for tigers. "No sir," came the reply. "The cat had stripes."

 

Raksasewu found himself getting excited. A researcher involved in local conservation work, he had grown up hearing tales of the giant felines, including from his mother, who once saw one while driving. “In my heart, I’ve always been greatly interested in this creature, and I was very sad when it was declared extinct,” he said. He raced off with the mechanic, the auto-shop boss, and a few hangers-on to search for traces of the big cat.

 

They tramped through the area of the alleged sighting, near plantations and fragmented forest landscapes where wild pigs and other potential tiger prey abound. Then they saw it: a single strand of hair that lay on the low wooden fence the animal had allegedly jumped. “I had this hope that the tiger had a hair snagged when he leapt,” said Raksasewu. “It turned out to be true.”

 

In the beginning, guesses as to the provenance of the hair were wildly varied: a local plant or a cat of the regular, purring kind rather than the mighty, roaring kind—both of which, while anticlimactic, seemed more plausible. Years went by as the lone strand made an improbable journey through myriad government offices and laboratories, peered at by a parade of locals, bureaucrats, and scientists. Two weeks ago, DNA analysis suggested a match: Javan tiger.

 

In an article in Oryx, a peer-reviewed journal published by Cambridge University Press, researchers said they compared DNA from the lone hair with that of its nearest living relative, Sumatran tigers—close but no cigar. Same for the DNA of a Javan leopard. The best match: the DNA of a Javan tiger from the 1930s preserved at an Indonesian museum.

 

“In Indonesia, if you talk about the king of the jungle, you’re talking about the tiger,” said Wirdateti, a government researcher trained in genetic analysis who co-authored the paper with Raksasewu and two others. If the results are confirmed by further testing, it would be one of the most dramatic examples of what some in the conservation community refer to as “Lazarus” creatures—animals declared extinct that somehow survived.

 

While the study has caused buzz, it is also attracting a good deal of skepticism. Anubhab Khan, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Copenhagen who is an expert on the tiger genome, cast doubt. Khan said the genome of big cats is hugely complex, with distinctive features that affect what happens when big-cat DNA is sequenced for study. In this case, while the Indonesian researchers thought they were comparing what is known as mitochondrial DNA, they were in fact comparing a different type of DNA, Khan said.

 

That muddied the analysis, he said. Khan said there may be a way to study the DNA further, but it would be challenging because there’s just one putative tiger hair to work with. As things now stand, Khan said, he’s fairly confident the hair comes from a big cat, but can’t go any further. “It’s just inconclusive.” He plans to publish his response in an academic journal.

 

Indonesia’s environment ministry has said it plans to use camera traps and commission further genetic study. It cited the deepwater charr, which was believed to have perished from a large European lake decades ago but started turning up in fishing nets again in the 2010s. Tigers, however, are a different kettle of fish. “It is quite something,” Wulan Pusparini, an Indonesian ecologist pursuing a doctorate at Oxford University, said of the study. “I am quite skeptical about the possibility of a large cat hidden from public view for nearly five decades.”

 

The giant predators were once so numerous in Java that entire villages would be evacuated after tiger attacks, which killed hundreds of people a year for much of the 19th century as coffee and sugar cane plantations expanded into the tigers’ forest home. Locals referred to bad years as “tiger plagues” and fortified their villages against attack. The British naturalist Alfred Wallace visited Java in the 1860s and recounted how a tiger dragged a boy from a cart. Some 700 villagers armed with spears systematically hunted down the cat, whose teeth were worn as charms.

 

Today Java has long since lost its whiff of wildness. It is one of the most densely populated places on the planet, with more than 150 million people squished into an area slightly larger than Pennsylvania, leaving little room for tigers to roam undiscovered. Although residents claim to spot “tigers” occasionally, in many cases the cats turn out to be leopards. The Javan tiger was thought to be confined to folklore, used as a character in shadow puppet theater, and as an emblem for the armed forces. Wirdateti, who goes by one name, said she remained confident that the hair was from a Javan tiger and plans more research to buttress the team’s findings. She noted that other locals had also reported seeing what they said was a tiger.

 

Ripi Yanur Fajar, the mechanic who claimed the initial sighting in 2019, said in an interview that he was confident of what he saw as he was riding his motorbike late at night. “The tiger was right there in front of me,” Fajar said. “It looked like they do in the zoo.”

The discovery of a single hair has reignited hopes and dreams that the majestic Javan tiger may still roam the island. Yet, this revelation has also sparked a wave of scientific scrutiny and skepticism. As researchers continue to analyze and debate the findings, the world watches with bated breath, hoping that one of nature’s most magnificent creatures has defied the odds and survived the test of time.

 

Credit: WSJ 2024-07-15

 

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[Tug]

Hope it’s true!

[Gandtee]

Tiger, tiger burning bright. In the forest of the night. Oh, what mortal hand or eye could frame thy perfect symmetry?

Edited July 15 by Gandtee

[Purdey]

Find it, put it in a prison zoo to attract tourists, make money until it goes extinct again. 

The civilized reaction?

[RayC]

13 hours ago, Social Media said:

 

Indonesia’s environment ministry has said it plans to use camera traps and commission further genetic study. It cited the deepwater charr, which was believed to have perished from a large European lake decades ago but started turning up in fishing nets again in the 2010s. Tigers, however, are a different kettle of fish. 

 

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I would also like this story to be true but I don't have much confidence in the researchers. They seem to think that tigers are a type of fish!😁😉

[placeholder]

2 hours ago, Gandtee said:

Tiger, tiger burning bright. In the forest of the night. Oh, what mortal hand or eye could frame thy perfect symmetry?

 Not bad, but I like William Blake's version better:

Tyger Tyger, burning bright, 

In the forests of the night; 

What immortal hand or eye, 

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43687/the-tyger

[impulse]

I hope it's true, too.  But I wouldn't fund any more than camera traps based on DNA from one hair.  Too easy to scrounge up one hair from a museum and go off in search of $$ funding.

 

If there are tigers, I'd bet they're escaped or released pets.

 

OTOH, if they get images from Ring cameras or CCTV or game cams, and that enables them find more hairs (independently verified by witnesses), great.