The South China tiger is a critically endangered subspecies that once inhabited dense forests in southern China. In the 1950s, there were an estimated 4,000 individuals in the wild, but unregulated hunting, habitat loss, and other factors caused populations to plummet to just 30-80 individuals by the 1990s. Extensive surveys since then have failed to reliably confirm any wild South China tigers still exist, so the subspecies is considered functionally extinct in the wild.