I'm an ornithologist so I thought I should work on mammals too, once in awhile, in my life. But I got off onto this because conservation people at zoos wanted me to do it because I had a molecular lab. This is the Indo-Chinese tiger. Tigers, we know, are Bengals, Siberians, and South China tiger, very rare even in South China. There are also Sumatran tigers, and there was a Caspian tiger, a Java tiger, and a Bali tiger but those three are all extinct.

The numbers of wild individuals of all of these are depressingly low. But one of the things that zoo people want to know is, are all tigers one thing, are they one entity? They manage these as if there are five evolutionary units. Remember, I used that word a long, long time ago. Zoo people, conservation people often now use the notion of evolutionary units.

When they are using that word - evolutionary unit - they really mean phylogenetic species. These are different, diagnosable units. And that's how we want to manage, in captivity, and in the wild - we want to know what those units are. So I was approached and asked would I look at this because previous biochemical work had been very gross and was unable to show that there were any differences. What that work did show was that tiger populations obviously very similar genetically. But they wanted me to look at it again, so they provided me with a lot of blood from known tigers.

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