Defenders Magazine
Get Defenders Headlines
Get the latest wildlife conservation news and information... right when we post it online.
Defenders Magazine
Wildlife: Sinking Tiger, Swelling Sea
The struggles of walruses and polar bears in a dangerously warming Arctic are lately getting lots of screen time, but half a world away Bengal tigers are quietly facing similar challenges.
Rising water levels in the Bay of Bengal, attributed to human-caused global warming, are causing the Sundarbans to slowly submerge beneath the sea. These river delta islands, located on the border between India and Bangladesh, are home to the world’s largest wild population of Bengal tigers, which regularly swim between land masses in search of food. But that could soon change.
As unusually warm temperatures cause the Himalayan Mountains’ icecaps to melt, swelling rivers are emptying greater amounts of water into the bay. Add increasingly violent rainstorms into the mix and the islands’ inhabitants—both people and animals—have a desperate situation on their hands.
The imperiled cats are particularly vulnerable to loss of habitat, which is already occurring at an unsustainable rate as fresh water is diverted for agriculture. The once-lush mangrove cover, needed by the tigers to stalk and hide, is instead turning into masses of decaying branches caused by an overexposure to salt water.
“Tigers are pretty flexible,” says the Smithsonian’s John Seidensticker. “But they won’t be able to survive if poaching continues and people keep taking away their land.” About 40 years ago, officials estimated the Sundarban tiger population at about 500. About 300 remain today.
The rest of India’s cats are not faring much better. A century ago, India provided habitat for about 40,000 tigers. But loss of habitat and poaching have taken their toll throughout the country, reducing tiger numbers to between 1,300 and 1,500, according to a recent government census.
