According to the 2022 census data, the tiger population in the park is estimated at 88.
New Delhi:
There has been controversy over reports claiming that there are 25 tigers in Rajasthan Ranthambore National Park have gone “missing,” officials said Thursday, adding that 10 of those big cats have already been located.
The official response came after Rajasthan’s chief wildlife conservator, Pawan Kumar Upadhyay, said on Monday that 25 of the 75 tigers in the wildlife reserve, 130 km from the state capital Jaipur, had gone missing in the past year.
Officially, this is the first time that such a large number of tigers have disappeared in a year. Earlier, 13 tigers disappeared from Ranthambore from 2019 to 2022.
“Ten tigers have already been detected within 24 hours of this report,” said a park official.
“After the long monsoon this year, the forest department has recently started camera trapping again, and the tiger has been recorded,” he said.
A three-member committee has been formed to investigate the missing persons, review the monitoring records and recommend action if negligence on the part of park officials is found. The focus was on finding the tigers, which had not been seen since May this year.
The committee has been asked to submit its report within two months.
A list of 25 missing tigers accessed by NDTV shows that four of them are above 17 years old. It is relevant to note that tigers in the wild usually do not live more than 14-15 years and it is believed that some of these big cats may have died.
Dharmendra Khandal, a conservation biologist at Tiger Watch, an NGO active in the area, expressed surprise after receiving the news that 25 tigers were missing from the park.
Park officials say Ranthambore faces challenges due to overcrowding of tigers, which leads to conflicts over territory. According to the 2022 census data, the tiger population in the park is estimated at 88.
The park’s area of about 1,400 square kilometers is struggling to support them as they lack all prime habitat.
For years, conservationists have also been stressing the importance of creating safe forest corridors so that Ranthambore’s tigers can safely disperse to other forests.
In the past there have also been incidents of villagers poisoning tigers.
Recently, angry villagers allegedly pelted a tiger with stones and an ax after a tiger was killed in a tiger attack.
(TagsToTranslate)Ranthambor National Park