Saving tigers by counting their stripes

Tuesday, December 16, 2014, 9:43 AM - With tiger numbers in decline - freefalling in some areas - conservationists are having to get creative about preserving the ones that are left.

The latest scheme: Counting their stripes.

Not literally going out and doing it (although the image holds some amusement), but using photographs matched with special software, developed by India's Wildlife Conservation Society and researchers.

The software purports to be great at accurately matching photos to identified individuals. Around 700 tigers in 16 habitats have been earmarked that way, and at least two of them have been saved from being killed.

This paper on the tiger-matching software tells of the two incidents: One in December where a villager was attacked and eaten, and another where a tiger was attacking cattle.

For the man-eater, the villagers were quite ready to hunt down and burn to death the animal in question, but by setting up camera traps and looking at the photos, officials identified one individual they'd been tracking for years, an older cat past its prime who was well out of his usual stomping grounds.

Figuring that was the cat responsible for the killing, they captured it and sent it to a zoo. The cattle-killer, a younger individual also identified from photos, was also sent into captivity rather than killed or relocated.

Seems an awful lot of effort just to rescue two tigers from angry mobs, but theirs numbers have crashed so thoroughly in the last century, even that is a victory.

The Wildlife Conservation Society says as few as 3,500 individuals may remain in the wild, down from an estimated 100,000 at the beginning of the 1900s. They're found in only six per cent of their past range.

The International Business Times says around 1,700 of those are in India, and the numbers are dropping. Of 274 fatalities in the last four years, only 82 are believed to have died of natural causes. The rest were a combination of poaching, habitat loss and other, unspecified causes.

Two tigers doesn't sound like much, but the species is in such rough shape, they need all the help they can get.

WATCH: Trio of tiger cubs at a London zoo