Rare South China Tiger

Wallpaper Description:

The South China tiger (Panthera tigris tigris) is a tiger population in the provinces of Fujian, Guangdong, Hunan, Jiangxi in southern China. The population has been listed as Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List since 1996, and is possibly extinct in the wild since no wild individual has been recorded since the early 1970s.Already in the late 1990s, continued survival was considered unlikely due to low prey density, widespread habitat degradation and fragmentation, and other human pressures. The name Amoy tiger was used in the fur trade. It is also known as the South Chinese, the Chinese, and the Xiamen tiger.

Since the 1980s, the South China tiger is considered a relict population of the "stem" tiger, living close to the possible area of origin. Morphologically, it is the most distinctive of all tiger subspecies. Results of a phylogeographic study indicate that southern China or northern Indochina was likely the center of the Pleistocene tiger radiation.

In 2017, the IUCN Cat Specialist Group revised felid taxonomy and now recognizes the tiger populations in mainland South and Southeast Asia as P. t. tigris.

THREATS
Widespread habitat degradation and fragmentation
Low prey density