Tigers in India are threatened with extinction, and
biodiversity ecologist Uma Ramakrishnan's on a mission to help
prevent this.
Speaking at the WIRED2014 conference,
she recalled a time when India was full of tigers. However, as it
stands, populations of once variant tiger species are scattered
around India, and now only seven percent of tiger habitats remain.
So in order to understand these changes in tiger populations,
Ramakrishnan's looking at the DNA of tigers from 200 years ago to
uncover how the pathway to extinction can be stopped.
"DNA stays stable for a long time, so we take small
bits of tissue from 200 year old skins and compare the DNA of these
extinct tigers to the tigers that are around today," she said. This
DNA comparison revealed that many genetic variations had been lost,
that inbreeding had become a problem, and that certain populations
of tigers -- specifically desert ones -- had become isolated from
the rest of the tiger population in India.
Given these obstacles, Ramakrishnan asked if there was
a future for tigers in India. The answer is that there could be, if
tigers could have more mobility around the Indian subcontinent.
Technological advances have also provided Ramakrishnan
with a helping hand. Comparisons of tiger DNA taken from locations
around India where tiger populations are scattered reveals whether
a species of tiger in one location is an immigrant or local to that
region.
"I need more data to understand how tigers move across
the Indian subcontinent," said Ramakrishnan. "Getting DNA from
tigers shows how far tigers are moving in a particular landscape.
It reveals what elements of the land may promote or retard
movement."
While Ramakrishan may have made some progress in
understanding tiger populations and their movement, she's been
faced with another minor obstacle: she has to collect tiger faeces
from current tigers in order to access their DNA.
"We've been using tiger faeces, extracting DNA, and
finding out their secrets through that." She pointed out the poor
quality of such DNA, however, stating, "if your DNA is like a book,
tiger faeces is like a torn up book." So, in order to upgrade her
research methods, she's currently working on a SNP chip -- a kind
of tiger genomics -- which will more effectively reveal where
tigers are from, and from which diseases they suffer.
Ramakrishan explained that landscapes in India were changing --
that the country was set to become 60 percent urban. However, she
said that though India was crowded, biodiversity among tiger
populations could be maintained by using genomics and modelling
landscapes. Such methods allow scientists to explore the past,
investigate the present, and come up with more options in order to
save tiger populations and ensure their mobility in the future.
Source Article from http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-10/16/uma-ramakrishnan-ecologist http://cdni.wired.co.uk/620x413/s_v/Uma-Ramakrishnan-2-Wired-Michael-Newington-Gray
Meet the woman on a mission to save India's tigers
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