Research overview: the critically endangered Asiatic cheetah

The Asiatic cheetah survives only in Iran, reduced to a few dozen individuals, the last remnant of a subspecies that once ranged across southwest Asia and India. This overview surveys genetic studies confirming its distinctiveness from African cheetahs and its extremely small effective population size, the implications for inbreeding and disease vulnerability, and the debate over whether African cheetahs could supplement the population. It discusses the conservation genetics challenges of working with so few animals, the use of noninvasive sampling to monitor the population, and how the Asiatic cheetah represents both a unique evolutionary lineage and an extreme case of conservation urgency.