Danwei: Rare South China tiger photo a hoax?

A peasant from Shaanxi claims to have taken a photo of the South China Tiger (Panthera tigris amoyensis), thought to be extinct in the wild. [See "Fake tiger, real news?" By Jeremy Goldkorn. Danwei, 19 Oct 2007



Photo from Danwei.

Netizens believed that this photo was PS-ed (photoshoped) and the controversy is generating even more news. This is partly related to fake news scandals (like the fake bun story) that struck China in recent months, courtesy of state-owned news agency Xinhua.

A healthy dose of skepticism is always a good thing!

Update: 1. now a Chinese botantist wades in with evidence from the size of the leaves in the tiger photo.
2. China Daily editorial

Update 3: Eye of the Tiger

Update 4: and the saga continues, now the tiger story even made it to Science magazine.

China's ecological disasters

TV scenes of gazillions of field mice over-running rice fields in Hunan, reminded me of rabbits swarming in Australia. Although rising flood waters were blamed for the mice infestation, natural enemies like snakes and owls have been eaten out of existence by the Chinese. One report estimated that residents consumed 3 tons of wild-caught snakes in Changsha, the provincial capital of Hunan everyday!

Now it seems that hungry Cantonese in Guangdong are happily importing the field mice for their dining tables. I hope they won't trigger off another new epidemic like SARS!

the man who fed China

recognition by netizens for the man behind high-yield hybrid rice in China.

excerpt from China Daily:

"Yuan, dubbed the 'father of hybrid rice', is an eminent agricultural researcher and was the first in the world to discover that hybrid rice yields a larger harvest, better resists disease and grows faster than non-hybrid rice.

This discovery helped solve China's food shortage of the 1960s and 1970s, and answered the question of the world in the late 1990s when some western politicians and scholars were worried that China's large population would trigger a worldwide famine, according to a Xinhuah report published on February 18, 2005.

Yuan began his research on hybrid rice in the 1960s, and achieved a major scientific breakthrough when he successfully developed the genetic materials essential for breeding high-yielding hybrid rice varieties in 1973.

He and his team produced a commercial hybrid rice variety based on his 'three-line system' hybrid rice theory in 1974, and gave it to nearly half of the rice production area in China.

Rice production in China increased by 500 billion kilograms using Yuan's growing techniques. The annual increase in production was enough to feed 60 million people for one year.

In 1979, the hybrid rice technique became the first Chinese technical patent in agriculture that was exported to the US.

On November 24, 2006, Yuan released a new variety of 'super rice' at a news conference in Hunan Province, which could yield a record 800 kilograms every mu (one fifteenth of a hectare)."