Bali Tiger

A colonial victim of hunting tourism

Shortly after the Indonesian island of Bali came under Dutch colonial rule in 1908, the first photographs were taken showing white men in linen suits with pith helmets, half-naked islanders and killed Bali tiger. The Hungarian Baron Oszkar Vojnich is said to have killed the first tiger in Bali in 1911. With In the East Indian Archipelago, published in Budapest in 1913, he even let the world share his hunting experience. It is said that Vojnich aroused the local population’s interest in tigers and hunting them. In view of this, it seems paradoxical that most of the photos and documentary records about the Bali tiger that are available to us today come from the same Vojnich.

If Vojnich hadn’t given the starting signal for the eradication of the big cat, someone else would certainly have European settlers soon organized hunting trips to Bali from the neighboring island of Java. Whether with or without Vojnich, numerous Europeans, equipped with modern firearms and still inspired by the romantic and yet destructive Victorian hunting mentality, would certainly not have missed the opportunity to come to Bali.

The hunting tourists even developed special techniques to make the hunt promising and at the same time not too dangerous. The European settlers used iron traps with bait such as goats or muntjacs, which the tigers fell into and couldn’t get out. They shot the big cats at close range finally.

With the colonization of Bali From the end of the 19th century the population grew enormously—and the Bali tiger’s already small living space shrank more and more. The settlement of the island was accompanied by the clearing of forests and the destruction of vegetation in order to create agricultural land and obtain timber. Palm plantations and irrigated rice fields were largely created on Bali’s lush volcanic land in the north and on the alluvial land surrounding the island.

In addition to the Bali tiger, a number of other big cats have become extinct in historical times: These include, among others, the Zanzibar leopard († 1991), the Eastern puma († 1938), the Cape lion († 1865), the Barbary lion († 1942) or the Formosan clouded leopards († 1983). Not a big cat, but also extinct, is the one belonging to the civet cat genus king genet († mid-20th century).

Bali tiger – fact sheet

alternative names	Balinese tiger, Sunda Island tiger, Samong, Harimau Bali
scientific names	Panthera tigris sondaica, Panthera tigris balica, Panthera tigris ssp. balica, Panthera sondaica ssp. balica, Felis tigris balica
original distribution area	Bali (Indonesia, Indian Ocean)
Time of extinction	1940s
Causes of extinction	Hunting, loss of habitat

Suspected sightings of the Bali tiger date back to the 1970s

At the beginning of the 20th century Bali tiger only in mountainous regions and in the less populated western part of the island to find. By the mid-1930s, most of the Bali tiger had already become museum specimens or trophies.

Scientists assume that the Bali tiger population was never very large, as Bali is a comparatively small island at 5,708 square kilometers. For comparison: the neighboring island of Java has an area of ​​126,700 square kilometers.

In the The Doomsday Book of Animals (1981) is given by David Day the 27th September 1937 is the day on which the last tiger, an adult female, is said to have been shot in the western part of Bali near Sumbar Kima. While this case is well documented, there is evidence to suggest that the big cat survived in Bali for a while. That’s what it said, loudly IUCN, a natural park created by the Dutch, the forerunner of today’s Bali Barat National Park, founded in 1941 as a retreat for Bali tiger. That at least implies the existence of Bali tigern around 1941. Nonetheless: The creation of a retreat for the Bali tiger came too late.

In the 1940s there were increasing reports of Bali tiger sightings; this continued in the 1950s, although with decreasing frequency. For example, a Dutch forest scientist, whose testimony is considered reliable, claims to have seen a Bali tiger in 1952. The last suspected sightings date back to the 1970s: one sighting occurred in a western reserve in 1970 and Balinese forest workers claim to have seen a tiger in 1972.

Experts today generally assume that the last Bali tiger disappeared at the end of the Second World War. However, it is difficult to prove this because there are no well-founded records of Bali’s wildlife. The island’s history is marked by invasions, subjugation, colonization and war.

What’s left of the Bali tiger

Unlike other tiger subspecies Little is known about the biology and ecology of the Bali tiger. The German-American zoologist Ernst Schwarz described the species in 1912 using only a skull and a fur from the collection Senckenberg Museum in Frankfurt. It is also uncertain whether Bali tiger were ever kept in zoological gardens. The only thing we know from photographs about the Ringling Brothers Circus, founded in the USA in 1884, is that Bali tiger were trained there. There are also the old ones already mentioned, some of which were colored later and dated inaccurately Photos from the colonial era showing hunted Bali tiger.

A few skulls, skins and bones still exist in museum collections. For example in British Museum The largest collection is in London: two skins and three skulls. In the Bogor Zoological Museum, Indonesia, is said to preserve the remains of the last known Bali tiger. And in 1997 another skull turned up in an old collection Hungarian National History Museum on.

The Bali tiger is one of Indonesia’s three insular tigers. The other two island species are the Java tiger, which has also disappeared today (Panthera tigris sondaica) on the island of Java and the endangered Sumatran tiger (Panthera tigris sumatrae) on Sumatra.

The Bali tiger was relatively small compared to other tigers. The reason for this was probably the limited habitat on the island, the lack of predators and the limited supply of prey animals. Bali tiger reached a length of 180 to 220 centimeters (including the tail) and had a shoulder height of 60 to 68 centimeters. The females weighed around 80 kilograms and the males around 100 kilograms. That doesn’t sound like island dwarfism at first, but compared to the Siberian tiger (Panthera tigris altaica) these are really manageable dimensions: Male Siberian tigers are almost three meters long including their tails and weigh 250 kilograms.

Are Bali and Java Tigers actually different?

As Black the Bali tiger 1912 scientifically described, he gave it the name Felis tigris balica and argued that the Bali tiger would be distinguished from the Java tiger by its lighter fur color and a smaller skull with a smaller zygomatic arch. Let the Bali tiger be “Easily distinguishable due to its very small size” from the other tigers of the Sunda Islands.

The Czechoslovakian zoologist Vratislav Mazák also stated in 1983 The Tiger the visual distinguishing features of the Sunda Island big cats. According to Mazák it is Bali tiger the smallest of the three island tigers been. He had the darkest coloring and his stripe pattern was rather broad with dark spots between the stripes, which are not otherwise found on tigers.

There also exist two common theories that are supposed to prove the close relationship between Java and Bali tiger. It is assumed that during the Ice Age part of the island of Java separated and became the island of Bali, so that the tiger population split up. Another possibility is that some tigers used the strait between Java and Bali, which is only 2.4 kilometers wide, to swim from Java to Bali.

The fact that Bali and Java tigers actually have differences was questioned as early as 1969 by the German zoologist Helmut Hemmer. Morphological analyzes showed that the Skulls of the tigers from Bali hardly differ in size from the tiger skulls from Java have. There would also be no significant differences in the color and pattern of the fur.

2015: Genetic analyzes are finally possible

Genetic analyzes finally shed light on the matter. For the study Genetic Ancestry of the Extinct Javan and Bali Tigers (2015), researchers compared mitochondrial DNA from 23 museum specimens of the Bali and Java tigers with 122 mtDNA samples from all living tiger subspecies and the extinct Caspian tiger (Panthera tigris virgata).

The result shows one high genetic similarity between the three species in the Sunda Islands: the Bali, Java and Sumatran tigers. According to the study, the Java, Bali and Sumatran tigers therefore form one monophyletic group or clade. All three subspecies go back to a common ancestor. The tigers colonized the Sunda Islands during the last ice age, 11,000 to 12,000 years ago. As a closed ancestry community or branch of evolution, the tigers of Bali, Java and Sumatra differ from the tigers of mainland Asia.

Turn 9 into 2: A revision of tiger taxonomy

The Cat Classification Task Force of the Cat Specialist Group put an end to the whole discussion and revised the taxonomy of cats in 2017 in A revised Taxonomy of the Felidae. Based on the previous genetic analyses, the expert group is convinced that the The previous division of tigers into nine subspecies is no longer tenable is. Only the tigers of the Sunda Islands are really clearly genetically distinguishable from the Asian mainland tigers.

The experts therefore recommend that it only two tiger subspecies instead of nine should give:

• Sunda Tiger (Panthera tigris sondaica): This includes the tiger populations on Bali, Java and Sumatra balica and sumatrae. Sunda tigers differ from mainland tigers in their smaller size and darker fur with more stripes.
• mainland tiger (Panthera tigris tigris): This includes the tiger populations of mainland Asia (India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim, China, Russia, Indochina and the Malay Peninsula). virgate, altaica, amoyensis, corbetti and Jackson. Compared to Sunda tigers, mainland tigers are larger and have lighter fur with fewer stripes.

And in the end, the extinct Bali tiger doesn’t even have its name or species status.

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