India, May 12 -- Tourism and human activity is stressing India's tigers and even affecting choice of breeding sites, according to a worrying new study by the CSIR-Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), Hyderabad.

A team of scientists from CCMB led by G Umapathy followed tigers in different parts of India through four seasons over two years to understand how human presence impacts tiger well-being.

In this study, in a marked departure from his previous ones, Umapathy and his team combined non-invasive stress and reproductive hormone analysis from tigers across five major Indian tiger reserves. These include:

Corbett (Uttarakhand)

Tadoba-Andhari (Maharashtra)

Kanha (Madhya Pradesh)

Bandhavgarh (Madhya Pradesh)

Periyar (Ker...