Saturday, November 28, 2009

Siberian Tigers


According to research carried out by the Siberian Tiger Monitoring Programme, the last remaining population of Siberian Tigers is declining and will soon go extinct if nothing is done. Over the last 4 years, the amount of siberian tigers in the 16 monitoring sites has gone down from 500 tigers to just 56. The 500 in 2005 was a massive recovery from the 30 tigers they found in the late 1940s, but since then, the population has started to go down again - if we don't help them now, they'll go extinct. Researchers think that the reason there is such a massive decline is because of habitat loss and poaching. They also think it's possible that there may be more than 56 tigers living in the area, they just didn't come out last winter because the snow was so deep. Although the tigers are so close to extinction, people do believe that if we step up our conservation efforts, this species could be saved.

I realize this isn't very geoscience related, but I thought this was a very important issue.

Link to BBC news website (it won't let me copy-paste the link into my post).

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