The department of forest has taken up a project to count and monitor the number of the endangered Royal Bengal Tigers in the Sunderbans, using modern camera trapping technology, which is used across the world for wildlife census. The initiative has been undertaken jointly by the Bangladesh Department of Forests and the Wildlife Institute of India, under a World Bank-funded project, “Strengthening Regional Cooperation for Wildlife Protection,” which is likely to start in the middle of October or in the first week of November. “Camera trapping is the preferred method over the pug-mark method for conducting tiger census. The camera traps, equipped with an electronic switch and a camera, record tigers or other animals that walk in front of it as a photograph of the animal,” Tapan Kumar Dey, conservator of the wildlife and nature conservation circle of the department of forests told The Independent.
Tigers have natural markings (stripes) and stripes of each individual tiger are different, he said, adding that “photographs obtained from the cameras can be compared to identify each individual tiger, thus using cameras.”
He further said it would be possible to count the exact figure of tigers through the camera trapping system and gather general information about the tiger, its ecology and current status, its prey, concepts of population monitoring, distance sampling and line transact survey, capture-recapture sampling and camera trap survey, lab and field exercises, data analysis, etc.
In 2004, the government had conducted a census using the pug-mark counting and estimated that there were about 440 Royal Bengal Tigers in the Sunderbans, the world’s largest mangrove forest.
As per the 2004 census, there were are 121 male, 298 female and 21 tiger cubs in the Sundarbans, Tapan Kumar Dey said.
“We had conducted surveys through pellet group count, transect count and complete count during 2000–2002 to estimate the number of deer, pig and monkeys in the Sunderbans, stretching in an area of 6,017 square kilometres. As per the survey, there were about 95,000 spotted deer, about 2,200 maya deer, about 30,000 pigs and 52,000 monkeys,” he explained.
In the 19th century, there were about one lakh tigers across the globe, Dey said, adding that the numbers of tigers have dwindled alarmingly over the years and the number stood at only 3,200 across the world today.
Dey noted that scientists had suggested conserving the present number of tigers instead of thinking to double the population.
-With The Independent input
