11.11.25

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome. This is Marcia for RADIOI. Today I will be
reading National Geographic Magazine dated October twenty twenty five, which
is donated by the publisher as a reminder. RADIOI is
a reading service intended for people who are blind or
have other disabilities that make it difficult to read printed material.

(00:20):
Please join me now for the first article titled The
Curious Case of the Tigers who Change their Stripes by
prosanjit Ya Dove. A century ago, India's tigers or on
the brink of extinction. Slowly their numbers have rebounded, but
that ecological success has prompted a dire new problem and

(00:44):
a race to save many of them from genetic collapse.
It took fifty days of searching before the jungle revealed
its biggest secret to us. Fifty days of jostling along
gravel roads in the Similipal Tiger Reserve in India's eastern
state of Odisha, scanning between trees in the semi evergreen forest,

(01:07):
hoping for a glimpse of an evolusive tiger called T twelve,
whose striking appearance has made him a symbol of a
population at a perilous cross roads. My partner in the quest.
Ragu Porti, a staffer with the regional forest department, had
never set eyes on TA twelve. Most of his colleagues
had only ever seen the tiger in images from camera

(01:28):
traps set up to study animal movements throughout the reserve.
But actually laying eyes on Simla Pal's tigers lets forest
officials look for physical ailments that cameras may not capture,
and also provides a reminder that there's a living, breathing
purpose to the countless hours they spend patrolling in the
sweltering heat. A documented sighting of T twelve would be

(01:52):
particularly valuable since the reclusive ten year old tiger, the
eldest male in Similipal, was right then at the heart
of a plan to ensure the survival of future generations.
It was late in the afternoon of day fifty when
in the blink of an eye, a dark shape dashed
out in front of our pickup truck. I slammed on

(02:13):
the brakes ahead of us. Spanning the width of the road,
an enormous tiger stared back at Ragu and me. It
was an older male, clear from its size, and it
had exactly the strange distinctive coat we'd been looking for
it's black, Ragu said, in an insistent whisper. He pointed
excitedly and repeated himself, it's black. The tiger T twelve

(02:36):
had dark fur that draped over him like a ragged cloak.
Slivers of orange peeked through along his body, with thicker
patches appearing on his face and front legs. This uncanny
widening of a tiger's black stripes, a rare genetic mutation
known as pseudo melanism, is shared among roughly half the

(02:57):
thirty or so tigers that roam the Similipal reserve and
its an indicator of a conservation's success story. Facing a
potentially catastrophic complication because while the number of tigers in
Similopol is more robust than it has been in decades,
the reserve is geographically isolated from other tiger populations, a

(03:18):
tiger island, so to speak, with a dangerously dwindling gene pool.
But during the weeks that Ragu and I scoured the
area for Tea twelve, work was under way elsewhere to
find him a suitable mate. It was a crucial step
in a targeted breeding program years in development, a mission
shared between conservation agents and a team of groundbreaking molecular

(03:40):
ecologists and genetic experts, all working to save the tigers
of Similopol from inbreeding themselves out of existence. In many ways,
India's tigers have faced the same challenges as big cats
throughout the world have hunted to near extinction by trophy
hunters amid relentless habit destruction and fragmentation. In the nineteen seventies,

(04:04):
alarm over the iconic species decline prompted the establishment of
a state run reserve system, but the reserves lacked coordinated
monitoring and enforcement until two thousand and five, when India
created a dedicated central agency, the National Tiger Conservation Authority NTCA,
which today hires and trains rangers, manages scientific oversight, and

(04:28):
guides habitat preservation across fifty eight reserves. A key concept
underlying the reserve system is that tigers are typically able
to travel between protected areas using what are known as
natural corridors patches of connecting forests and other prey abundant lands.
There are a number of benefits to these corridors, but

(04:50):
the most important is that they encourage breeding among neighboring
tiger populations, improving genetic diversity. Similopol, at a little o
over one thousand square miles, is one of India's largest
reserves and its closest neighboring ones. Set Kosia to the
southwest and Sundarban to the east, are both more than

(05:12):
one hundred miles away, which isn't too far for a
tiger to walk, but there are no tigers left in
sat Kosia and no adequate corridor connects Similipal and Sundarban.
The land between them is mostly urban or agricultural Kolkata
its suburbs and a vast area of rice fields with

(05:34):
very little forest cover, which is where tigers prefer to
stay hidden. Dozens of towns and villages separate Similipal from
its two neighboring reserves. As well. For tigers, there is
just no easy way in or out of Similipol. When
the NTCA surveyed wild tigers across India in two thousand

(05:55):
and six, Natalia was roughly fourteen hundred animals, down from
an estimated forty thousand a century before. In Similopol, the
population bottomed out at just four tigers in twenty fourteen,
only one of them mail, but in twenty fifteen a
year or so before he died, the male fathered T
twelve with his strange, predominantly black coat, and T twelve

(06:19):
has since fathered male cubs of his own. India's tiger
population has begun to rebound over the past twenty years,
thanks in large part to the conservation work of the
NTCA and forest officials. As of a twenty twenty two estimate,
the country is home to more than thirty one hundred tigers,

(06:39):
and as Similipoul's population climbed slowly but steadily over the
past decade, the growing number of tigers at first seemed
like a microcosm of the national success story. Soon though,
the reserve's managers began noticing more and more young tigers
sporting the same dark coat as T twelve. The mutation,
as far as both foresters and genetic scientists can tell,

(07:02):
is harmless, merely a cosmetic oddity caused by a random
and naturally occurring quirk of DNA, but experts say it
is also a tangible manifestation of a very real problem.
If this mutation was able to pass so quickly through
Similopaul's population, with all the tigers sharing very similar genetic
makeup due to rampant inbreeding. Then so too could more

(07:27):
serious abnormalities. Now, the task facing some of the some
of India's foremost tiger authorities has shifted from recovering tiger
numbers to breaking this cycle of inbreeding before it's too late.
Playing genetic matchmaker for tigers is tricky. In order to
find the ideal breeding partners for T twelve in his offspring,

(07:48):
the would be saviors of Simili Paul needed to understand
the differences among not only the tigers that roam today,
but also the tigers of the past. That's what led
molecular collegist Uma Rama Krishnan not long ago into a
dimly lit trophy room in a grand home in Akhaltara,

(08:09):
a small town in central India. Rama Krishnan, a National
geographic explorer in the head of a lab at Bengaluru's
Bangalore National Center for Biological Sciences, was invited there by
an Anupam Singh Sisodia, whose family had since held the

(08:30):
role of chieftains across fifty one villages and the surrounding
forests and farmland, responsible for protecting the locals from dangerous wildlife.
His family had done its share of hunting, and the
room was full of mounted black bucks, sloth bears, and
four horned antelope collected between nineteen twenty and nineteen seventy.
But laid out on a table before Rama Krishnan was

(08:54):
a set of tiger pelts, their massive heads intact and
seemingly snarling. Killing problematic tigers Sisodia acknowledged was more of
a political necessity than a pleasure. Since two thousand and five,
Rama Krishnan and her fellow researchers and students at the
lab have been collecting samples of tiger DNA in order

(09:15):
to build an extensive genetic map of the diversity among
India's tigers. She secured roughly two hundred and fifty specimens
from historic estates like the Sisodias. She has plumed taxidermy
collections at sites like the National History Museum in London,
and ventured into Indian jungles to procure scat, blood, hair

(09:36):
and saliva from live tigers. All that evidence has given
her critical insight into how the animals have changed over
generations as they moved throughout the region. Closely inspecting one
of her tiger heads, Rama Krishnan slid her scalpel into
the eighty something year old pelt. Practiced and precise. She

(09:57):
sliced off a small piece the sample into a vial
and held it up. This is the real treasure, she said.
When Ramakrishnan first began building her DNA database, her goal
was to answer questions about tigers that couldn't be answered
by observing them in the field. As their population was decimated.
Tiger's loss not only territory, but also substantial genetic diversity.

(10:21):
Historic historical DNA offered important clues about what else might
exist within the gene pool. Her research became ever more
relevant in twenty seventeen when the antca alarmed by the
dark coated tigers in Similopaul, asked her to formally study
the reserve's tigers. The forest officials clearly saw that the

(10:43):
impacts of the reserve's isolation were becoming measurable. They hoped
Ramakrishnan could both verify the genetic culprit and help them
find a solution. Once she took a closer look at
the animals sequestered within the reserve, Ramakrishnan quickly realized that
the recessive pseudo melanism gene was spreading through the population.

(11:06):
The genetic isolation on display, she said, was a ticking
time bomb. Left unaddressed, it could prove devastating to the
reserve's tigers. It's impossible to know precisely what other maladies
genetic mutations among big cats might introduce, But when Rama
Krishnan and her colleagues analyzed a genetic mutation data set

(11:27):
for the closest available comparison domestic cats, they found that
these not so distant cousins faced issues like retinal atrophy,
kidney disease, and hyperthyroidism, and with female tigers averaging litters
of two to three cubs every two to three years,
health issues can quickly and dramatically compound. We're still trying

(11:48):
to understand the full impact of this inbreeding, she says.
But when thing's for sure, there's no upside to this
kind of genetic erosion. Given Similopaul's lack of connection to
other reserves, Rama Krishnan's recommendation was that wildlife managers identify
a few tigers from a separate reserve and translocate them.

(12:08):
Once in Similipol, the tigrises the forest managers elected to
move females would hopefully reproduce with T twelve or with
his male offspring, which have begun to claim pieces of
T twelve's territory as they mature and have cubs of
their own. This Rama Krishnan said would begin the overdue

(12:28):
effort to diversify the reserve's genetic pool. By comparing Similipol
tiger DNA to the array of records in her data set,
she found that the most genetically diverse tigers with the
lowest chance of more negative genes showing up in any
future offspring, were located in a reserve called Todoba Anddari

(12:50):
in the dense Tik forests of the district of Chandrapur,
halfway across India. Of course, Ramakrishnan knew that identifying their
right reserve is one thing. Actually moving a three hundred
pound wild animal hundreds of miles across the country is another.
One morning last fall, Ravikante Cobro Cobragade stood up from

(13:15):
his spot in the open air back seat of a
two door Maruti Gipsy and looked out onto the Chandrapur landscape.
The wildlife veterinarian turned his attention to his a shooter,
A J. Marathe, who was cradling a tranquilizer gun and
gestured to a young tigris just up ahead. I can
see her. She is sitting in that bush ahead, looking

(13:37):
at us, Cobragade said. The tigris, later named Jumuna, was
twenty eight months old and had spent all her life
in or near the Tadoba Reserve. Her youth meant she
hadn't yet established territory there, and crucially, she had no
history of conflict with humans. Both of these things made
her a prime translocation candidate. Translocation work, particularly for animals

(14:03):
as large and territorial as tigers, is highly sensitive under
any circumstances, and in India's tiger reserves it requires a
large number of verifications and approvals before it can proceed.
High on the list of consideration is whether an area
identified as having candidates has a population healthy enough to

(14:24):
withstand losing breeding age females. In Tadoba, this is not
a concern. Although the reserve is two thirds the size
of Similipal, it is home to roughly ninety five tigers,
and it is no tiger island. Natural corridors connect to
Doba to the umrad Karhandla Wildlife Sanctuary around forty miles

(14:49):
to the north, the Nawagioan Nagzira River Reserve seventy miles
to the northeast, and the Kawal Tiger Reserve seventy miles
to the southwest. Tadoba's tigers regularly venture out in search
of more forested space, and as their numbers have swelled
over the past decade, all their movement has meant that
tigers and people in the surrounding mosaic of forests, villages

(15:12):
and farm lands have had to learn how to live
alongside one another. Again, most important for Tea twelve and
his kin, the network of connected reserves has allowed for
a constant exchange of tiger jeans. Jamuna would be the
first of two Tadoba tigers translocated to Similipal in a
matter of weeks, with others to potentially follow in the

(15:35):
coming months and years if the experiment went well. But
first she needed to be sedated. Is the dark ready, Sir,
asked Marath. Maratha. The tigris rose from her spot in
the bush and marched closer to their vehicle. When she
was around five yards away, Maratha calmly removed the safety
key from his dart gun, brought the scope to his
eye and took the shot. The pink tailed projectile land

(15:58):
landed in Jamuna his thigh, prompting a lar loud growl
that aqued across the landscape. As she bounded away, She
made it about two hundred yards before the tranquilizer took
its toll. The team found her laid out in a meadow.
It took seven men to carefully slide Jamuna onto a
stretcher and move her into the shade. Cobragade checked her

(16:21):
for injuries and drew a blood sample. After he fixed
a GPS collar around her neck, the team moved her
into a metal cage aboard a truck. Once safely inside,
Jemuna was given a revival drug. Within minutes, the men
heard rustling and banging the sound of her nails scratching
against metal, followed by a roar. The road trip to
deliver Jamuna to Similipol took twenty eight hours. The truck

(16:45):
was joined by a small convoy of support staff. The
route had been carefully mapped to circumvent major cities and
other areas where loud noises could cause Jimuna distress. Every
few hours, the vehicles pulled over for a while to
allow her to rest. Finally, the door opened and Jemunah
leaped through the gate leading into her new home, a

(17:05):
two and a half acre enclosure in Similopol, where she
spent almost two weeks acclimating. After that, the gate opened
once more, this time with no cage on the other side,
she was set free into the territory of t twelve.
When it comes to restoring diversity among India's wild tigers,
one critical step remained solely under nature's control. Mating and

(17:28):
tigers engage in selective courtships before they breed, so in November,
less than a month after Jamuna was released into the reserve,
a second female tiger from Tadoba called zee Nott, was
sedated and transferred to an enclosure in Similopol. Whereas Jamuna
settled into the Similopol landscape with relative ease, the stress

(17:49):
of the relocation took a greater toll on ze Noot,
and she quickly wandered beyond the reserve's borders. The forest Department,
not wanting her to stray too far, sent a team
out a tranquil her and bring her back to spend
several more weeks in an enclosure to acclimate before she
was released into T twelve's territory. Both she and Jamunah

(18:10):
wore GPS collars so that forest officials could track their
movement and behavior. Knowing where the tigers were, forest officers
on the ground used night vision cameras to observe them
from a safe distance. They kept a close eye on
the pair to see whether either of them would cross
paths with T twelve or other males, but the observers

(18:30):
only saw Jemuna and zeenat alone. Tiger courtship, by contrast,
is conspicuous. A pair of mating tigers might spend weeks
together walking through the forest and vocalizing. Yet, as the
tigres's established territory in Similapal, forest officials never saw any
evidence that they so much as had contact with T
twelve until one night in May. Reviewing the feed from

(18:54):
a mounted camera that takes thermal and visual images, the
forest department captured footage of Xenot with T twelve. It
was unmistakable evidence their mating ritual had begun. The courtship,
citing signaled that the genetic rescue mission, if not yet
an outright success holds promise. Meanwhile, this summer, as the

(19:15):
teams behind the translocation awaited Xenot's first litter of cubs,
the work continued. Rama Krishnan and her students collected more
hair and scat samples left behind by Similo Paul tigers
to better understand the genetic variation within the population. Officials
are hopeful that Jamuna will eventually find a mate, and

(19:36):
everyone working in Simila Paul is eager to see whether
Xenot's cubs are born with T twelve's pseudo melanism. It's
not yet decided whether or when the reserve will receive
more translocated tigresses, or how many more might be needed
to introduce sufficient genetic variability, but until a quarter links

(19:56):
Similo Paul to other populated tiger reserves, more translocations could
be the only viable option looking ahead, Similipaul Field director
Prakash Chand Gogginini said his personal hope is that Samilopaul's
tigers can become a source population that helps return the

(20:17):
species to places like the near Pye sat Kosia Reserve.
That might happen with the help of a translocated Similopaul tigris,
or perhaps via new quarters, even if the latter are
still likely decades away. Witnessing all of this firsthand, seeing
the pitfalls that India's tigers face as they begin to

(20:39):
make their comeback returns me to certain moments from my childhood.
I grew up on a farm not far from Chandrapur,
where my life revolved around animals and jungles. For better
or for worse. Naming pet dogs was painful as leopards
regularly took them away, and every now and then we
would encounter a pug mark similar to a leopard's, but

(20:59):
much better. The air would fill with fear and excitement
at the realization we were sharing space with the true
apex predator. The experience of living alongside something that powerful
and elusive shaped how I saw the forest and my
place within it. I never came across a tiger at
our farm, but I often dreamed of it. In the

(21:20):
years since, I have seen, studied, and photographed countless tigers,
but none of them looked like what I saw that
day in Similopaul. While sitting in the idling truck with
Ragu locked in a momentary steering contest with t twelve
I didn't reach for my camera, I didn't move. There
stood a black tiger, a testament to human's best intentions

(21:40):
gone wrong. In the best case scenario. For Samilopaul, this
will someday be a rare and unforgettable creature, one that
inspired a new discipline for safeguarding the species. In that moment,
for four seconds in the roadway, it felt like a
miracle of nature. Then, without a roar or a snarl,
T twelve took a few powerful strides and vanished into

(22:02):
the thick evergreen forest, bringing tigers together. After being decimated
by hunting and habitat destruction, India's tiger population has begun
to recover in protected reserves, but in less connected areas
like Similopol, sometimes called tiger islands. In Breeding has become
an issue for reserves like Tadoba and Dari. Interconnected habitats

(22:24):
and wildlife corridors help diversify the population and may offer
a solution for tiger islands. Landscape of the tiger forests
provide spaces for tigers to rest and breed along with
ample prey. Although agricultural lands interrupt forest cover, tigers can
move across them between reserves, but highway and urban areas

(22:46):
remain difficult barriers the benefits of linked reserves. In reserves
with good connectivity, like Toadoba, tigers roame hundreds of miles
along corridors to find mates among neighboring populations the pitfalls
of a Tiger Island. Tigers and reserves with no populations
to mix with have limited mating options. In Similopaul, this

(23:09):
has led to the rapid increase of a coat color
mutation the power of moving tigers. Given Similopaul's isolation from
linked reserves, forest officials have begun to translocate tigers four
hundred and fifty miles from Totoba to the Tiger Island
in eastern India. Next. Can We Save the orbiting Treasures

(23:31):
of the Space Race? By Brian Kevin. As human made
objects proliferate proliferate in space, a coalition of scientists and
historians have floated retrieving some of the most important In
one view. Vanguard I is space junk, an antennaied aluminum
ball that Soviet leader, the Kita Khrushchev dismissively compared to

(23:54):
a grapefruit. The United States launched it in March nineteen
fifty eight and the satellite returned radio signals until May
nineteen sixty four. Defunct since it's the oldest human made
object in orbit, but to space historian Matt Bill that
grapefruit is one of the most precious objects of the
early space age, deserving of a place in the Smithsonian

(24:16):
and scientists he says, could glean much from it about
long term exposure to space. Billy, along with a few
like minded engineers and historians, made this case at a
recent conference of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics,
presenting detailed plans for a hypothetical mission to de orbit
Vanguard one and bring it home. The idea has turned heads,

(24:40):
not least for challenging a preference for n C two
preservation that's increasingly enshrined in heritage fields, including the burgeoning
discipline of space archaeology. Old satellites need to be left
where they are, says Alice Gorman, who sits on the
International Council on Monuments and Sites Aerospace Committee. They're safer

(25:01):
in orbit, she says, where they belong to no one
nation and can be studied via photography and other remote
sensing methods. But space is getting crowded. Bill notes more
than fourteen thousand satellites orbit the Earth, to say nothing
of debris. He and his co authors frame their technical
paper as a thought experiment, should we ever consider nabbing

(25:23):
historically significant satellites which might merit consideration. They offer eleven
more candidates, each a national first or a pioneering mission,
and all conceivably retrievable. Billis says, if one dreams big.
Vanguard on US launched on March seventeenth, nineteen fifty eight,

(25:43):
low Earth orbit, the second U S satellite in orbit.
The first Explorer one burned up upon re entry in
nineteen seventy. Its most distinguished contribution was to confirm, via
variations in its orbit, that Earth was less round than supposed.
Bulging around the equator Luna ie USSR January two, nineteen

(26:07):
fifty nine, solar orbit, a yoga ball to Vanguard's one
grapefruit and the first spacecraft to escape Earth's gravity. The
Soviets aimed for the Moon and missed by some thirty
seven hundred miles. Luna one became instead the first spacecraft
to settle into orbit around the Sun. Pioneer four US

(26:29):
March three, nineteen fifty nine solar orbit. Like Luna On
the first American craft to travel around Earth's orbit, also
blew its objective, passing too far from the Moon to
photograph it as planned. It returned good data, though on
the Earth's encircling radiation belts. Tiros Ie US April one,

(26:50):
nineteen sixty Low Earth Orbit. Today we take weather observation
satellites for granted, but when Nassau sent up its first
time tamped at one, a flying Ladies hatbox, as one
Newsrael called tiros one, just how useful it would be
for forecasting was still an open question. Telstar US July tenth,

(27:13):
nineteen sixty two. Low Earth Orbit, the first ever active
communications satellite, sporadically relayed TV images across the Atlantic until,
as space historian Matt Bill puts it, we sort of
killed it by accident. Radiation from a high altitude nuclear
test knocked it out after seven months. Luette I, Canada

(27:37):
September twenty ninth, nineteen sixty two, Low Earth Orbit. Canada
became the third nation in space with this workhourse, which
sent back some two million data snapshots of the iconosphere,
the atmospheric layer that reflects radio waves during a record
setting ten years in operation. This concludes readings from National

(27:59):
Geographic Magazine for today. Your reader has been Marshall. Thank
you for listening, Keep on listening and have a great day.