Only 106 tigers in Sundarbans

Dhaka: The tiger population in Bangladesh part of the Sundarbans, the world’s largest mangrove forest, has sharply declined to 106 from 440 in 2004, confirms a top forest official quoting the tiger census 2015.

The retired method of tiger counting involved analyzing animal prints, but the tracks were ultimately hard to locate and integrate into a form of reliable data.

The governmental tiger census carried out in 2004 with the pug mark method estimated the number of tigers in the Bangladesh Sundarbans at 440.

More scientific method was used in the new Tiger census this year, which found only 106 big cats in the Sundarbans, and attributed its sharp fall in recent years to unchecked wildlife poaching, said forest conservator Dr Tapan Kumar Dey.

“So, it didn’t give the exact figure of Sundarbans tigers”, he said.

Khan said his studies showed the figure was no more than 200.

In this photograph taken on February 18, 2008, a rescued tigress swims in the river Sundarikati after release by the forest workers at Sunderbans, some 150 kms south of Kolkata.

The news from Bangladesh is in contrast to South Asian neighbor India – home to about 70% of the global tiger population – where the Environment Ministry said in January that the number of tigers had risen to 2,226 from 1,411 in 2008.

About 74 tigers have been previously counted on the Indian side of the Sundarbans, which makes up almost 40 per cent of the forest that straddles both countries over 10,000 sq km. “It seems the population has declined more than what we had feared”, Prof Khan said.

Khan said the government needed to do more to protect the animals, whose numbers were shrinking because of poaching and rapid development on the edge of the forest.

The worldwide Tiger Forum in 2010 declared their collective political will to take all necessary actions to prevent the extinction of wild tigers and increasing global tiger population double by 2022. Their numbers have fallen from 100,000 in 1900 to around 3,200 now.

“The 440 figure was a myth and an imagination”.

According to Bangladesh’s Forest Department, at least 49 tigers were killed between 2001 and 2014 – a statistic with serious implications for the species in Sundarbans, which is the country’s only natural tiger habitat.