Superpowers Join Up for Siberian Tigers

Siberian tigers, the greatest and most mysterious of the great cats, may vanish from their snowy home in the next few decades.

U.S. and Soviet scientists are about to embark on an unprecedented project to keep that from happening.

It will blend the divergent expertise of the two superpowers in their first joint study of Siberian tigers in the wild. The Soviets are unparalleled in their ability to track the huge beasts in the deep snows of the Soviet Far East. To this the Americans will add tranquilizing techniques, sophisticated telemetry for monitoring the animals, and computerized data-processing programs.

After three years of study, the experts say, the tigers will have been watched as closely as if they had been in zoos. Intimate details of the Siberians’ lives will, it is hoped, become clear for the first time: how far they roam, what they eat, where they live, how they mate.

“Ultimately, the measure of our ecological conscience, of our attitude toward the natural world, will be how many of these animals--and others--are allowed to live in their natural state,” said Howard B. Quigley of Frostburg State University, a wildlife ecologist who is one of the two American leaders of the project.

Quigley estimates the number of Siberian tigers surviving in the wild at 200 to 700. Nobody knows for sure. All of them live in wooded areas in a small region where southeastern Russia, northeastern China and North Korea come together. Quigley thinks there are about 450 tigers in the Soviet Union and much smaller numbers in the other two countries.

The other key American on the project is Maurice G. Hornocker, director of the Wildlife Research Institute in Moscow, Ida., and an authority on all kinds of cats.

“It’s the same story that many of the big carnivores face the world around--shrinking habitat, more and more people,” he said.

Endangered though they are in the wild, Siberian tigers breed well in captivity. Biochemist Ulysses S. Seal of the Minnesota Zoological Gardens, a leader in research on the captive animals, says that captive Siberian tigers now total 700 to 1,000, of which about 225 are in U.S. zoos.

But Seal and all other tiger experts emphatically draw the line between animals in captivity and animals in their natural habitat.

“The problem is, if you look at captive breeding as an alternative to habitat protection, you might as well shut off the lights right now,” Whitney Tilt of the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation has said.

“The time you can call captive breeding a success is not when you get your first baby born, but when you can get animals back into the wild.”

The foundation and the National Geographic Society are supporting the U.S.-Soviet project, the first year-round study of Siberian tigers.

Starting next December, the Americans and Soviets will begin work in the 1,329-square-mile Shikote-Alin Biosphere Reserve, home of perhaps 20 tigers, north of Vladivostok. Quigley says he expects to capture most of them with snares.

Quigley’s wife, Kathy, a veterinarian, will tranquilize the animals with darts, weigh them, draw blood samples and collect other vital medical data.

Then the tigers, wearing new American-made radio-transmitting collars, will be set free. For at least the next three years, the collars will enable researchers to keep track of the cats and to record previously unknown information.

What is already known is that Siberians, the biggest of all tigers, are loners, like their smaller relatives. In captivity they may grow to more than 800 pounds, although some experts think they seldom weigh much more than 500 pounds in the forest. In Russia, their favorite prey is wild pigs.

Besides their immense size, Siberians differ from other tiger subspecies because of their long, heavy coat and their broad, fur-padded paws, which make travel in snow easier.

Tigers don’t purr. When angry or attacked, they roar--an earth-vibrating explosion.

Ronald L. Tilson, a Siberian-tiger expert at the Minnesota Zoo, tells of a zoo board member who was standing near the cage of a large, hostile Siberian that simultaneously roared and threw itself against the bars.

“I swear to God, I thought this guy was going into cardiac arrest,” Tilson said. “I really thought I’d lost him.”

Such sounds, conservationists say, are an integral part of nature. Unless something is done to save Siberian tigers, say Hornocker and Quigley, the animals and their sounds may disappear from the wild.

Then the woods would be silent--with no more paw tracks in the snow.