SUMATRAN TIGER

The Sumatran Tiger

The Sumatran tiger is the last tiger standing on the Sunda Islands — and it's running out of room. This smallest of the world's remaining tiger subspecies once prowled across all of Sumatra. Now, squeezed into a handful of forest patches, fewer than 400 remain.

These are fierce, territorial predators. A single Sumatran tiger needs at least 500,000 acres of connected habitat to survive — territory large enough to support enough prey animals for it to hunt. But palm oil plantations, paper mills, and human settlements have carved up Sumatra's forests into fragments too small and isolated to support tigers.

The story of the Sumatran tiger is the story of wildlife in the age of palm oil. As plantations expand, tigers lose habitat. As prey animals are hunted by humans, tigers starve. As forests fragment, tigers are forced into conflict with farmers — and they always lose that confrontation.