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A complete ‘family tree’ of the tiger

WildCRU researchers working within an international team, have achieved the first complete intra-specific phylogenetic tree of the tiger. The genetic analysis included all the nine putative tiger subspecies, helping us to understand the evolution of the tiger.The study published online in the May – June issue of the Journal of Heredity is an international collaboration between scientists from China, USA, UK, Israel, Russia, and Qatar.

The article is now freely available for anyone to read or download: http://jhered.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2015/03/12/jhered.esv002.full

We found that tigers from the islands of Sumatra, Java and Bali were closely related to each other. Whereas all three of these Sunda island tigers were clearly distinct from all mainland tiger subspecies. Sequences of parts of six mitochondrial genes of 1750 nucleotides resolved the phylogenetic relationship amongst the three Sunda Islands subspecies. Although geographically close to Sumatran tiger, the intra-specific phylogenetic positions of Javan and Bali tigers, which went extinct in the 1980s and 1940s, respectively, was elusive until now, although their distinct skull morphology had suggested there were differences between them. This finding may parallel WildCRU’s earlier discovery of the genetic similarity of the tigers previously classified as Amur tiger and the extinct Caspian tiger (Driscoll CA, Yamaguchi N, Bar-Gal GK, Roca AL, Luo S, et al. (2009) Mitochondrial Phylogeography Illuminates the Origin of the Extinct Caspian Tiger and Its Relationship to the Amur Tiger. PLoS ONE 4(1): e4125. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0004125).