Saving Nepal's Big Cats

By Sue McMurray

When it comes to protecting the world's natural resources, wildlife professor Lisette Waits' passion for conservation is just as fierce as the wild animals she studies. Waits is one of a small group of international conservation scientists who are uniting to save Nepal’s Bengal tigers, one of the world’s most endangered species.

Waits recently returned from Nepal where she worked on the collaborative Nepal Tiger Genome Project, a new, two-year research project launched by the government of Nepal and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to conserve tigers in the Terai Arc Landscape. The TAL is a 12,231,716-acre tiger habitat spanning four national parks within Nepal and India. About 121 adult tigers are thought to inhabit the region. Nepal is considered to be a source and transit point of poaching and illegal trade of wildlife parts and products, including that of Bengal tigers. Population estimates indicate fewer than 2,500 individuals are left in their full habitat range.

Waits got involved in the project after Virginia Tech. colleague Marcella Kelly sent Kanchan Thapa, a Nepalese doctoral student at Virginia Tech, to the University of Idaho for non-invasive genetic techniques training in the Laboratory for Ecological, Evolutionary and Conservation Genetics (LEECG) in the College of Natural Resources.

"The non invasive genetic approach was new to me, and the training I received in Dr. Waits' lab helped bring an edge to my tiger research work in Nepal," said Thapa, a co-principle investigator on the Tiger Genome Project. "This new perspective has completely brought a new paradigm shift towards monitoring our endangered species in Nepal."

For the last 10 years, Waits has been helping tiger conservationists in India develop molecular methods, including the use of non-invasive genetics, an established data-collection approach that can analyze an animal’s scat, hair, urine, skin, or saliva to:

• identify presence of rare or elusive species
• count and identify individuals
• determine gender
• identify diet items
• evaluate genetic diversity, population structure, and mating system
• estimate wildlife populations without handling, capturing, or even observing individual animals

From the back of an elephant, Waits and a small team of scientists traversed roadless field sites, unsafe for any other form of transportation because of the high, predator-concealing grasses. The team collected scat and used remote cameras to detect and identify tigers in the region. Waits also taught a two-day conservation genetics workshop to train local students, researchers and faculty in the use of genetic methods to answer questions for conservation and management of wildlife and worked to strengthen partnerships among Nepalese and Indian government officials, scientists and tiger genetic researchers.

"It was an important first step in establishing molecular genetics as a conservation management tool in Nepal," says Waits. "Nepalese conservationist biologists plan to use these tools to facilitate a better understanding of the population size, genetic diversity and gene flow for tigers as well as other endangered species such as snow leopards and rhino."