In the Far East, the number of wild boars has halved due to ASF

Specialists will evaluate the consequences of reducing the food supply after accounting for the Amur tigers.

The number of wild boars, which serve as the main source of food for Amur tigers in the Far East, has been halved due to African swine fever, First Deputy Minister of Forestry of the Primorsky Territory Alexei Surovy said on Wednesday.

To assess the consequences of a reduction in the food supply for the number of Amur tigers, a large-scale census of Amur tigers will be held in the Far East in early 2022. The last "tiger census" took place here in the winter of 2014-2015, usually it is carried out once every 10 years.

"Taking into account the fact that African swine fever arose in the Primorsky Territory, which led to a reduction in the number of wild boar by almost half, it was decided to census the Amur tiger along with its food resources in the Primorsky, Khabarovsk Territories, the Amur Region, the Jewish Autonomy in order to understand the situation with the tiger and its food resources in order to make certain management decisions," Surovy said live on the Instagram account of the government of Primorye.

Earlier, Pavel Fomenko, chief project coordinator of the department for rare species of the Amur branch of WWF RUSSIA, told TASS that wild boars are the main source of food for Amur tigers that live in the Khabarovsk Territory and the Jewish Autonomous Region. In other territories of the Far East region, other artiodactyls predominate in the diet of wild cats - roe deer, musk deer, red deer.

African swine fever is an infectious disease with an incubation period of up to two weeks, its carriers are animals. The virus enters the body through food, wounds on the skin, mucous membranes, insect bites. Cases of human infection have not been registered, but scientists do not exclude such a risk.

The largest tiger species in the world, the Amur tiger, lives in the Russian Far East. It is listed in the international Red Book. In the middle of the 20th century, the uncontrolled shooting of Amur tigers led to the almost complete destruction of the population. According to the latest data, up to 600 individuals (95% of the world animal population) live in the regions of the Far Eastern Federal District. In 2013, at the initiative of President Vladimir Putin, the Amur Tiger Center was established to protect and expand the habitats of these predators.