“Q: I certainly agree with your panda post, but I have a question. How do you feel about the big cat’s huge vulnerability to extinction? Are they a species that we should save instead of pandas or am I looking too far into it?”
The main difference between big cat conservation and panda conservation is that we are actually seeing progress from big cat conservation. Amur leopard populations have doubled since 2007 after their range was protected. Tigers have increased from ~1 500 to over 2 000 in India after similar changes in protected areas. Amur tigers - including cubs - were spotted in Chinese nature reserves for the first time since the species went into decline, meaning that they’re breeding and expanding, even if it’s by minute increments.
As a general rule, predators are extremely important for the survival of an ecosystem, and big cats are no exception. Predators regulate prey populations - usually many, many species of prey, which trickles down through the food web in a process that is known as a trophic cascade. Simply, it means that if the predator numbers decrease, their prey increases, which means the prey eat more, breed more, and can actually wipe out their own food sources - to the point that not only are the food species extirpated, but the prey population can collapse from lack of food and also vanish.
Photo from Geography Hunter
Big cats do breed easily in captivity and out (generally) - more easily than pandas - and they play a crucial role in ecosystems. They face some of the same problems that pandas do, since they, too, are charismatic megafauna, but they also have the benefits that aren’t really working with panda conservation.
Since big cats are large, wide-ranging predators, loads of other species can be protected within reserves set aside for them. They have the public eye, and can garner money and interest for conservation initiatives that otherwise wouldn’t get any attention. They are well-known and popular, bringing money in to zoos and other facilities so they can run conservation programs as well. People love them. People want to protect them. Conservation is actually working. And their loss would be much more detrimental to the environment than the loss of pandas
SOURCES YO
http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/big-cats-initiative/our-approach/
http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/15955/0 (+ the listings for a bunch of other big cats but I accidentally closed them all and I am TOO LAZY to open them again, fight me)
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/12/121226153034.htm