Researchers of the Amur Tiger Programme in Russia’s Far East by the Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution at the Russian Academy of Sciences (IEE RAS) have obtained new data on Volodya, an Amur tiger returned to the wild in September 2010.

Volodya’s collar monitoring system stopped sending data in January 2011, after which it was impossible to monitor the tiger’s movements.

Researchers discussed various scenarios of what had happened. The versions varied from the collar failure to the tiger’s death. Later, the experts found the GPS collar dropped by the tiger and concluded that throughout 2011, Volodya safely moved around, hunted and lived in the Krasnoarmeisk District in the northern Primorye Territory.

The researchers are hoping that Volodya is still out there in the Primorye taiga and are working on obtaining more evidence of this with modern research technology.