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Ecology & Environment
Mahesh

02/11/24 13:12 PM IST

Melanistic tigers

In News
  • A tigress from the Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve, Maharashtra, was sent 800 km away to the Similipal Tiger Reserve.
Psuedo Melanistic Tigers
  • As far as appearances go, pseudo-melanistic (pseudo: false; melanistic: dark coloured) tigers appear to have a black coat with white and orange stripes occasionally peaking through. Their pelt looks almost the inverse of a normal tiger.
  • Till the 1700s, these tigers were considered mythical.
  • One of the first pieces of evidence of a black tiger was a watercolour painting by a British artist and writer named James Forbes.
  • The pseudo-melanistic tiger is a colour variant of the Bengal tiger. Its strange coat is a result of a mutation in a particular gene.
  • This genetic quirk cause their stripes to widen and spread across the orange or tawny coat and at times give the appearance of being completely black.
  • A comparison between tiger populations showed that apart from the Similipal population, the mutation of the gene is extremely rare or even non-existent.
  • The only other black tigers that have been found beyond the Similipal population are in captivity—Nandankanan Zoological Park at Bhubaneswar and Arignar Anna Zoological Park at Chennai—whose ancestry could be traced back to the Similipal population.
Case of Simplipal
  • A majority of the tigers found in Odisha are in the Similipal Tiger Reserve.
  • The All Odisha Tiger Estimation (AOTE-2023-24) says a total of 30 tigers were found in Odisha’s forests of which 27 of them are in Similipal.
  • Of these 27, atleast 13 adult tigers (seven females and six males) were found to be pseudo-melanistic. No other wild habitat in the world has pseudo-melanistic tigers. 
  • The genetic analysis of the tigers along with computer simulations showed that the reason for such high mutation was genetics and not adaptation as previously theorised.
  • The Similipal tiger population is cut off from the other populations by a great distance and has been isolated for an extended period of time.
  • This has led to inbreeding in an already small founding population leading to higher chances of the mutated gene being passed down.
  • The study also attributed the phenomenon of genetic drift which suggests that a mutation may appear in high frequency or die out all together depending on pure chance.
Source- The Hindu

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