Ripi Yanuar Fajar's Javan Tiger and the Hair on the Fence

The Javan tiger once roamed the forests of Java. The last confirmed record came in 1976, at Meru Betiri National Park. The species had been considered extinct since the 1980s, and the IUCN listed it as extinct in 2008. Expeditions since the 1990s found nothing. In 2017 a viral "Javan tiger" turned out to be a Javan leopard.

The night of 18 August 2019. Ripi Yanuar Fajar, a 20 year old local conservation activist, was riding home from Surade at about 11 pm. Four friends followed in a car. The road ran through Kampung Cikaramat, in the village of Cipeundeuy, past community forest and plantation.

Then the animal jumped. It leapt from the forest onto the road. It stood there, motionless, for about a minute. Its colour could be seen as yellow with black stripes, though it was dark and the colour was still hazy. Ripi stopped the motorbike, left it, and got into the friends' car out of fear. The animal leapt back into the forest.

Five people saw it. The group later told researchers they could tell a Javan tiger from a leopard.

27 August 2019. The site was revisited. Kalih Raksasewu found a single hair snagged on the fence between the road and the plantation, right where the animal seemed to have jumped. Some local accounts credit a resident, Pak Kaldi, with the find. There were footprints too. And claw marks on two rocks, three scratches on one, three smaller marks on the other. Bambang Adriyantho, a local forestry employee, is credited with finding them.

The hair went to West Java's BKSDA, then to BRIN, Indonesia's National Research and Innovation Agency. Answers were slow. BKSDA responded only in January 2022, three years later. Its camera traps in the area had captured only leopards.

March 2024. Wirdateti and colleagues published their analysis in Oryx. They compared the hair with a 1930 Javan tiger specimen at Museum Zoologicum Bogoriense, with Sumatran and Bengal tigers, and with a Javan leopard. Their conclusion was direct: "the hair sample from South Sukabumi belongs to the Javan tiger." The paper added a caution. Whether the tiger still occurs in the wild "needs to be confirmed with further genetic and field studies."

The story went around the world. Satyawan Pudyatmoko of the environment ministry said that if proven, "it will certainly become a protected animal." The ministry said it would seek more evidence with camera traps and DNA work.

Not everyone was convinced. In December 2024 a team including Luo Shu-Jin of Peking University argued in Oryx that the sequences were "more likely the nuclear copies of mitochondrial DNA." A second team, which included Wirdateti, sequenced the hair again. The new DNA nests among Sundaland tigers. But the gene used cannot tell a Sumatran tiger from a Javan one. Khan, the lead author, told Live Science: "I am now confident that the hair is from a tiger; however, we do not have the ability to assign it to subspecies." No one has alleged a hoax. The dispute is about the laboratory work, and about the leopard, the only big cat confirmed in the area.

WWF Indonesia's Muhammad Ali Imron urged caution "for fear of alerting hunters." Didik Raharyono, a Javan tiger researcher not involved in the study, looked ahead: "What's most important is the next steps that we take in the future." The reanalysis says the hair belongs to a tiger. Which tiger, nobody can yet say.