Asiatic Cheetah - Evolutionary History

Evolutionary History

Asiatic cheetahs once ranged from Arabia to India, through Iran, central Asia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. In Iran and the Indian subcontinent, it was particularly numerous. Cheetahs are the only big cat that can be tamed and trained to hunt gazelle. The Mughal Emperor of India, Akbar, was said to have had 1,000 cheetahs at one time, something depicted in many Persian and Indian miniature paintings. The numerous constraints regarding the cheetah’s conservation contribute to its general susceptibility and its very complex conservation requirements, e.g., its low fertility rate, the high mortality rate of the cubs due to genetic factors, and the fact that females are the ones who select mates, have been reasons why captive breeding has had such a poor record. A cheetah-specific issue is its limited gene pool. All living cheetahs have very limited genetic diversity due to a near-extinction event some 12,000 years ago. The cheetah will not be a “robust, vigorous species anytime in the foreseeable future"

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the species was already heading for extinction in many areas. The last physical evidence of the Asiatic cheetah in India was three shot by the Maharajah of Surguja in 1947 in eastern Madhya Pradesh. By 1990, the Asiatic cheetah appeared to survive only in Iran. Estimated to number more than 200 during the 1970s, more recently Iranian biologist Hormoz Asadi estimated the remaining number to be between 50 and 100. Figures for 2005–2006 suggest between 50 and 60 in the wild. Most of these Asiatic cheetahs live in Iran in the Kavir desert. Continuous field surveys, along with 12,000 nights of camera trapping inside its fragmented Iranian desert habitats, are used to estimate the population size. Using 80 camera traps placed throughout the Dasht-e Kavir plateau, Iranian researchers obtained images of 76 individual cheetahs over the course of ten years.

A remnant population inhabits the dry terrain covering the border of Iran and Pakistan. In the areas in which the cheetah lives, locals say they have not seen it for more than fifteen years.