Odisha To Set Up World’s First Melanistic Tiger Safari Near Similipal At Baripada

Bhubaneswar: An exclusive Melanistic Tiger Safari will be set up near Similipal Tiger Reserve (STR) in Odisha’s Mayurbhanj district.

Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik made this announcement on his official X handle on Wednesday. “Tourists and visitors can now have a glimpse of the rare and majestic species found only in Odisha,” he added.

According to sources, a 200-hectare area adjoining NH-18 of Baripada town has been identified for this purpose. Of this, about 100 hectares will developed into display area and the rest for creating veterinary care facilities including rescue centre, staff infrastructure and visitors amenities.

The site is about 15 km from Similipal Tiger Reserve matching the same landscape.

The Technical Committee of National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) has been accorded ‘in-principle’ approval to the proposal submitted by the state government. A committee constituted by NTCA will soon visit the site for feasibility study before giving final nod, the sources added.

According to All-India Tiger Estimation (AITE) 2022 released in July last year, Odisha registered a drop in the population of the big cat from 28 to 20 with STR as the only silver lining, which saw the number double from eight to 16, out of which 10 exhibited melanism, between 2018 and 2022. The NTCA report had also placed the reserve among the 12 excellent tiger reserves of the country with a management effectiveness evaluation (MEE) score of 90.15 per cent.

In December last, STR director Prakash Gogineni, however, claimed that the camera trap set up as part of the state’s headcount indicated 35 tigers in the reserve.

Notably, the pseudo-melanistic tigers of Similipal are the only actively breeding population of black tigers in the whole world.

A study led by ecologist Uma Ramakrishnan and her student Vinay Sagar from the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bangalore, in 2021, revealed that the coat colouration and patterning causing the wild cats to appear dark stem from a single mutation in the Transmembrane Aminopeptidase Q (Taqpep) gene. It further noted that noted that tigers in STR form an isolated population in eastern India, with very limited gene flow between them and other tiger populations.