The Caspian and Siberian Tiger belong to the same subspecies

2009/04/01 Elhuyar Zientzia Iturria: Elhuyar aldizkaria

• Eboluzioa
• Zoologia

A study reveals that the caspian tiger, already disappeared, and the Siberian belong to the same subspecies. A genetic analysis by researchers at the University of Oxford and the United States Cancer Institute has revealed that only a genetic code base differentiated both subspecies.

The criteria for the distribution of subspecies were appearance and geography. According to this, biologists divided the population of natural tigers into eight subspecies. However, after the first use of DNA analysis in 2004, five subspecies were confirmed.

And the caspian tiger was a subspecies. She lived isolated from other tigers and died in 1970 the last specimen in Turkey. To find out their origin, they took the tissue of 20 tiger specimens and sequenced the parts of five mitochondrial genes. This allowed them to develop an image of tiger deployment. Thus it was demonstrated that the two subspecies were actually a single subspecies. According to the researchers, in the early years of 1900 the Caspian and Siberian tigers lived together, but then the hunters isolated both groups.

This discovery will allow the recovery of caspian tigers using the Siberian tiger reserves in the zoos. However, there are still two missing subspecies for classification: The Balic and Java tigers, who lived in Indonesia.