The Caspian tiger: a Lesson from History
By David Prynn, reprinted with permission from Marwell Zoo News
(Summer 2003, No. 116, pages 10-11)
 The Caspian tiger is one of the eight varieties that have
been described. But have you ever wondered why there are no Caspian
tigers in Marwell Zoo? Before answering this question it is necessary to
explain more about these great cats and where they came from.
Tigers were already widespread in Asia one and a half million years
ago. However, recent genetic research suggests that they nearly became
extinct in the late Pleistocene Era, probably about 10,000-12,000 years
ago. A small remnant population survived, probably in what is now China.
From this area tigers then spread out again, migrating along river
valleys following their prey, mostly deer and wild pigs. Although all
mainland tigers are very closely related, and may be regarded as
regional populations rather than as discrete subspecies, they have
developed physical or morphological adaptations to different
environmental conditions.
The two varieties of tigers in the former Soviet Union represented
the most easterly and westerly populations of the great cat. Amur tigers
prowl the rich mixed forests in the southern Russian Far East on the Sea
of Japan, while Caspian or Turanian tigers (Panthera tigris virgata)
were the most westerly ranging tigers. They inhabited the basins of
inland drainage of western and central Asia, wherever there was adequate
prey, water and vegetation cover.
These magnificent great cats had thick, plush winter coats usually of
a more reddish background colour than Amur tigers, with closer set black
or sometimes brown stripes, long white belly fur and beard, though their
summer coats were shorter. A little smaller than their Far Eastern
relatives, adult male Caspian tigers weighed 170-240 kg and measured
270-290 cm in total length.
They were found from Turkey and Transcaucasia, in the reed beds and
gallery forests along the great rivers of Central Asia, east to the
edges of the lakes of Lop Nur and Bagrash Kul in Xinjiang Province,
formerly known as Chinese Turkestan.
 The Caspian tiger’s unique habitat was the
seasonally flooded tugai vegetation growing along the great rivers that
flow from high mountains and traverse deserts, or around lakes. Tall,
dense reed beds grow along the riverside fringed by gallery forests of
poplar and willow. These give way to tamarisk shrubs, saxaul and other
salt resistant plants on the desert edge. In this dense undergrowth the
tigers sometimes stood on their hind legs to obtain a better view.
Tigers and their prey, such as Bukhara red deer, roe deer, goitred
gazelles and especially wild pigs, had a restricted range in these bands
of tugai vegetation and were vulnerable to human disturbance and habitat
destruction as these valleys were avenues for agricultural settlement by
people.
The tiger played an important part in the culture of the people of
southwest Asia. The Tigris River was named after the tiger that in
legend carried a pregnant princess across the turbulent river on his
back. On the other side she gave birth and so the tiger was associated
with the fertility of the river. Usually living creatures are not
represented in Islamic art, but in Sufism, one of the branches of Islam,
the tiger’s image is represented on carpets and textiles and can
be seen on the facades of mosques and other public buildings in
Samarkand, Uzbekistan.
Tigers in Central Asia were not usually regarded as a threat to human
life and were known to co-exist with human habitation, even close to
major towns such as Tashkent. But the spread of settlement, especially
Russian immigration into Central Asia from the late nineteenth century,
was to lead to their demise. As the riverside vegetation was cleared for
cultivation, and rivers tapped for irrigation water, notably for the
great expansion in cotton growing from the 1930s, tigers lost their
habitat and prey.
In Russian Central Asia in the early decades of the twentieth century
military detachments were used to exterminate the tigers, as well as
leopards and wolves, ahead of human settlement. Herdsmen regarded tigers
as a threat to their livestock, including camels, horses and sheep. As
their fine pelts were valuable they were killed by strychnine poison and
steel traps, and large bounties were paid for their destruction. Soon
the ribbons or bands of tiger habitat were broken up by the spread of
human settlement and tiger populations diminished and became more
fragmented: bands became spots on the map of Caspian tiger
distribution.
Zapovedniks or strict nature reserves established in Soviet Central
Asia were too small to support a viable population of tigers and only a
few areas of tugai vegetation have survived, perhaps a tenth of the
original reed beds and gallery forests. Their extent may now have
stabilised but the tigers have gone.
The Caspian tigers’ extermination in Soviet Central Asia was
linked to the general environmental destruction that has affected the
human inhabitants adversely. The drive by a command economy since the
1930s to concentrate on cotton growing had dire results for people and
for tigers. Demands for irrigation water seriously damaged the fragile
ecosystem of the region, resulting in a 50% reduction in the area of the
Aral Sea and widespread salinity of the soils.
Along the Syr Dar’ya and Amu Dar’ya Rivers and around
Lake Balkhash the last resident tigers were killed in the 1930s though
there were sightings of vagrant tigers in the 1940s, and in the Vakhsh
valley in Tajikistan the last was seen in 1961.
Probably the last Caspian tigers seen in the USSR were in the
foothills of the Talysh Mountains and the Lenkoran river basin in
southeast Azerbaijan near the Caspian Sea in 1964, but these were
probably tigers that had migrated from neighbouring Iran. There, in the
southern Caspian littoral of Iran, tigers had once been numerous, and
15-20 may have survived in this region in the1960s. The last tiger
reported shot in Iran was in 1957, but a few may have lingered there
into the 1970s. The clearing of reed beds and lowland forests on the
southern shores of the Caspian Sea—part of the anti-malarial
programmes in the 1950s and 1960s—made human settlement easier and
deprived the tiger of its habitat. In eastern Turkey, surprisingly,
fresh tiger skins were revealed in 1972 but none have been reported
since that time.
Far to the east, skirting the forbidding Takla Makan Desert in
Xinjiang Province, China, flows the Tarim River. Along this river and
around Lop Nur (or Nor) Lake into which the Tarim flowed as a basin of
inland drainage, tigers once stalked wild pigs in the reed beds and
oases. But by 1920s they had been extirpated. As so much water has been
taken for irrigation agriculture along the Tarim and its feeder rivers,
Lop Nur Lake has dried up completely and the gallery forest along the
rivers, that previously provided the tiger’s habitat, has mostly
gone. From the 1960s the Lop Nur desert was used by the Chinese for
testing nuclear weapons. Despite this, some wild Bactrian camels survive
there.
So, as recently as the 1970s, the last Caspian tigers were
exterminated, though the major destruction of their population was in
the 1930s. These great cats lived in a vulnerable habitat. They were
eliminated as human settlement extended along rivers, around lakes and
oases. In such arid regions there was nowhere for them to survive.
The ban on tiger hunting in the USSR in 1947 was too late to rescue
the Caspian tiger. However it did help save the few surviving Amur
tigers. Their stronghold remains the Sikhote-Alin range, a continuous
forest as extensive as England. Despite poaching, their numbers
increased from the 1950s to the 1980s and today seem to have stabilised.
Both Russian and international nature conservation organisations are
working hard to save the Amur tigers and we must ensure that this
splendid great cat does not share the same tragic fate as those from
Central Asia.
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