Tiger

The tiger... wait, I should be careful with that wording. Here is the introduction:

"Tigress" also leads to this page. For other uses, see Tiger (disambiguation) and Tigress (disambiguation).

The tiger (Panthera tigris) is a large cat and a member of the genus Panthera. It is native to Asia. The tiger has a powerful, muscular body, a large head and paws, a long tail, and orange fur that fades to white in some places. Its coat has black stripes that are mostly vertical. Tigers are traditionally sorted into nine subspecies, though some experts recognise only two: the mainland Asian tiger and the Sunda Islands tiger.

Tigers live mainly in forests across a wide area. Their range stretches from coniferous and temperate broadleaf and mixed forests in the Russian Far East and Northeast China to tropical and subtropical moist broadleaf forests on the Indian subcontinent and in Southeast Asia. The tiger is an apex predator, which means it sits at the top of its food chain. It hunts mainly hooved mammals and often catches them by ambush. Tigers usually live alone. Each one has a home range that it defends from others of the same sex. A male's range overlaps with those of several females, and he mates with them. Females usually give birth to two or three cubs. The cubs stay with their mother for about two years. When they are independent, they leave her home range and make their own.

Since the early 20th century, tigers have lost at least 93% of their historic range. They are now locally extinct in West and Central Asia, in large parts of China, and on the islands of Java and Bali. Their remaining range is badly broken up into separate patches. The tiger is listed as Endangered on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, because its range is thought to have shrunk by 53% to 68% since the late 1990s. The biggest dangers to tigers are habitat destruction and fragmentation caused by deforestation, hunting for their fur, and illegal trade in their body parts for medicine. Tigers also face human–wildlife conflict, because they sometimes attack and prey on farm animals in areas where their natural prey is scarce.

Tigers are legally protected in every country where they live. These countries use conservation measures such as action plans, anti-poaching patrols, and programmes that monitor tiger numbers. Several countries have set up wildlife corridors, and plans exist to bring tigers back to places where they have disappeared.

The tiger is one of the most popular animals in the world's charismatic megafauna. It has been kept in captivity since ancient times and has been trained to perform in circuses and other shows. The tiger has played a big part in the ancient mythology and folklore of cultures across its historic range, and it continues to appear in culture around the world.

Etymology

The Old English word tigras comes from Old French tigre, which came from Latin tigris. The Latin word was borrowed from the Ancient Greek word τίγρις. Since ancient times, people have suggested that tigris may come from an Armenian or Persian word meaning 'arrow'. This may also be where the name of the river Tigris came from. Today, however, the two names are thought to be homonyms, which means they only sound the same by chance, and the connection between the tiger and the river is doubted.

Taxonomy

In 1758, Carl Linnaeus described the tiger in his book Systema Naturae and gave it the scientific name Felis tigris. His scientific description was based on earlier naturalists such as Conrad Gessner and Ulisse Aldrovandi. In 1929, Reginald Innes Pocock placed the tiger in the genus Panthera. Between the early 1800s and early 2000s, nine recent (Holocene) tiger subspecies were proposed: the Bengal, Malayan, Indochinese, South China, Siberian, Caspian, Javan, Bali and Sumatran tigers. In 1999, the validity of several of these was questioned, because they were based on specimens in natural history museum collections. It was then proposed to recognise only two valid subspecies: P. t. tigris in mainland Asia and the smaller P. t. sondaica in the Greater Sunda Islands. This idea was supported again in 2015, and in 2017 the Cat Classification Task Force of the IUCN Cat Specialist Group followed it when it revised felid taxonomy. A 2023 study found all nine subspecies valid, and the subspecies classification is still under review.

The tiger shares its genus with the lion, leopard, jaguar and snow leopard. Genetic studies show that the tiger and snow leopard are sister species, whose lineages split apart between 2.70 and 3.70 million years ago. Early fossil species such as Panthera palaeosinensis, from Pleistocene northern China, were once thought to be tiger ancestors, and the oldest modern tiger fossils are jaw pieces from Lantian County in China. Fossils have also been found in China, Sumatra, Java, Borneo and Palawan. Genetic studies suggest that all living tigers share a common ancestor that lived between 108,000 and 72,000 years ago, and that modern tigers spread across Asia from a refugium in Indochina after the Last Glacial Maximum. Tigers can interbreed with other Panthera cats. The liger is the offspring of a female tiger and a male lion, and the tigon is the offspring of a male tiger and a female lion. Ligers grow far larger than either parent, which often leads to health problems, so breeding these hybrids is regarded as unethical.

See also: Bornean tiger

Further information: Felid hybrids and Panthera hybrid

Description

The tiger has a muscular body, short legs, strong front legs with wide paws, a large head, and a tail about half the length of its body. Each front foot has five toes, including a dewclaw, and each back foot has four. All of its toes have retractable claws that are curved and can reach 10 cm (3.9 in) long. Its ears are rounded, and its snout has a pink tip with small black dots that increase in number as it grows older. Its skull has a cranium with a large sagittal crest, orbits that are small and oval, and nasal bones that are long. Its canine teeth are the longest of any cat, at 6.4–7.6 cm (2.5–3.0 in). Tigers vary in size. Siberian and Bengal tigers are the largest, and island tigers are the smallest, likely because of insular dwarfism. Male Bengal tigers weigh 200–260 kg (440–570 lb), while females weigh 100–160 kg (220–350 lb).

The tiger's coat is usually short, though the fur of the Siberian tiger can grow much longer, and this tiger also grows a thick winter coat. The coat is orange, which varies from yellowish to reddish, with white fur on the underside, inner legs, and parts of the face. Each tiger has black or dark brown stripes, and each one's pattern is unique. The stripes are mostly vertical, which helps the tiger camouflage itself in plants with up and down patterns of light and shade. A Fourier analysis study supports this idea. The orange colour may also help hide the tiger, because its prey is colour blind and may see the tiger as green. Bengal tigers have three colour variants: the nearly stripeless snow-white, the white tiger with sepia-brown stripes, and the golden tiger with reddish-brown stripes. These are now almost gone in the wild but still live in captivity.

Distribution and habitat

The tiger once ranged from eastern Turkey, northern Iran and Afghanistan to Central Asia, and from northern Pakistan through the Indian subcontinent and Indochina to southeastern Siberia, Sumatra, Java and Bali. As of 2022, it lives in less than 7% of its old range, in scattered areas of the Indian subcontinent, the Indochinese Peninsula, Sumatra, northeastern China and the Russian Far East. As of 2020, India had the most tiger habitat in the world, with 300,508 km² (116,027 sq mi), followed by Russia with 195,819 km² (75,606 sq mi).

Tigers mainly live in forests and can adapt to many kinds of them. In Central Asia, they mostly lived in Tugay riverine forests and in hilly and lowland forests of the Caucasus. Across the Amur-Ussuri region, they live in Korean pine and temperate broadleaf and mixed forests, where riparian forests act as dispersal routes that bring food and water to tigers and their prey. Tigers also live in mangrove forests of the Sundarbans and other forests in India. Population studies show that numbers vary a lot from place to place. In Jim Corbett National Park in northern India, the tiger population density was stable at 12–17 individuals per 100 km² between 2010 and 2015. In Thailand's Huai Kha Khaeng Wildlife Sanctuary, it was estimated at 2.01 tigers per 100 km², while nearby Mae Wong and Khlong Lan National Parks, where logging and poaching had occurred in the 1970s and 1980s, had much lower numbers.

Behaviour and ecology

Tigers are active at different times depending on where they live. In Chitwan National Park, camera traps showed that tigers avoided places often visited by people and were more active at night. In Sundarbans National Park, six radio-collared tigers were most active from dawn to early morning. A three-year survey in Shuklaphanta National Park found tigers most active from dusk until midnight, and in northeastern China tigers were crepuscular. Tigers are strong swimmers who can cross rivers 8 km wide and often enter water on hot days. Cubs under 16 months old may climb trees, and an adult was recorded climbing 10 m up a smooth pipal tree. Adults live mostly alone within home ranges or territories, whose size depends mainly on prey, area and sex. Males and females defend their ranges from others of the same sex, and a male's range covers several females' ranges. In Panna Tiger Reserve, ranges changed between winter, summer and the monsoon, and in Sikhote-Alin Biosphere Reserve males had much larger ranges than females. Young tigers can travel up to 650 km to find other tiger populations, and radio-collared tigers in Chitwan wandered varying distances. Tigers mark their ranges by spraying urine, scent rubbing, leaving faeces and anal gland secretions, and scratching trees. Males usually settle disputes by intimidation rather than fighting, once dominance is clear. Disputes are most serious between males competing for a female in oestrus. Tigers greet each other by rubbing against each other, and they show a flehmen response when smelling markings. They roar over long distances, and they also use growling, snarling, prusten (a soft snort similar to purring), and miaows to talk with their cubs.

The tiger is a carnivore and an apex predator. The abundance and body weight of prey are the main factors in what it hunts. It mostly eats large and medium-sized hooved mammals such as sambar deer, Manchurian wapiti, barasingha, gaur and wild boar. It also eats smaller animals like monkeys, peafowl, porcupines and fish, and it has occasionally been reported attacking Asian elephants and Indian rhinoceroses. Tigers sometimes eat plants for dietary fibre. Tigers learn to hunt from their mothers, and they are ambush predators that wait, hidden, until prey is close. Their success rate ranges from 5% to 50%. Tigers share habitat with leopards and dholes, and they may be stealing kills from each other. Tigers, leopards and dholes live together by hunting different sized prey, as seen in Nagarhole National Park, Kui Buri National Park, Rajaji National Park and Jigme Dorji National Park. Tigers mate all year, especially from November to April, and a tigress is in oestrus for three to six days at a time. A tigress gives birth in a hidden place, and a litter usually has two or three cubs, though it can have as many as seven. Newborns are altricial, meaning they are blind and underdeveloped. Cubs can leave the den after about two months, and they stay with their mother until they are 18 to 24 months old. Females are sexually mature at three to four years, and captive tigers have lived up to 19 years, according to the Studbook. Tigers can carry parasites such as Diphyllobothrium erinacei, Taenia pisiformis, nematodes like Toxocara species, Physaloptera preputialis and Dirofilaria ursi. Canine distemper has been found in Siberian tigers, and a morbillivirus infection was the likely cause of death of a tigress in the Russian Far East. Blood samples from Nepalese tigers showed antibodies for canine parvovirus-2, feline herpesvirus, feline coronavirus, leptospirosis and Toxoplasma gondii.

Threats

The tiger has been listed as Endangered on the IUCN Red List since 1986. The number of tigers in the world has kept falling, from an estimated 5,000–8,262 in the late 1990s to 3,726–5,578 in 2022. The land where tigers live also shrank, from 1,025,488 km² (395,943 sq mi) to 911,901 km² (352,087 sq mi) between 2001 and 2020. Habitat destruction, habitat fragmentation, and poaching for fur and body parts are the major threats. Roads, railway lines, mining, and deforestation have broken up many tiger homes into smaller pieces, and tigers have been killed for their skins, bones, and other parts.

Demand for tiger parts for use in traditional Chinese medicine is also cited as a major threat. "Tiger farm" facilities that breed tigers for their parts appear to make the problem worse by increasing the demand for tiger products. In some countries, local people kill tigers in retaliation for attacks on them or on their livestock. This is a result of human–wildlife conflict, and it also adds to the decline of the tiger population.

Conservation

Further information: 21st Century Tiger

Internationally, the tiger is protected under CITES Appendix I, which bans trade in live tigers and their body parts. Many countries also have their own protections. In Russia, hunting tigers has been banned since 1952, and Bhutan has protected them since 1969. India's Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972 gives tigers the highest level of protection. Nepal, Bangladesh, Malaysia, and Indonesia also protect them by law. In 1973, the National Tiger Conservation Authority and Project Tiger were founded in India to gain public support, and since then 53 tiger reserves covering 75,796 km² (29,265 sq mi) have been set up there, up to 2022. Several countries also have tiger action plans. Myanmar's plan from 2003 focuses on restoring habitats and fighting illegal trade. Thailand's plan, ratified in 2010, aims to raise tiger numbers by 50% in the Western Forest Complex and Dong Phayayen–Khao Yai Forest Complex. Indonesia's plan for the Sumatran tiger covers North Sumatra and West Sumatra provinces.

Anti-poaching patrols have helped in several places. In Russia, patrols in four protected areas from 2011 to 2014 helped reduce poaching. In Taman Negara, patrols lowered the number of detected poaching incidents from 34 in 2015–2016 to 20 in 2018–2019. Wildlife corridors help tigers move between protected areas, including those in the Terai Arc Landscape and Sivalik Hills. In 2019, China and Russia signed a memorandum of understanding to work together on two protected areas, the Northeast China Tiger and Leopard National Park and the Land of the Leopard National Park. Rescued and rehabilitated tigers and orphaned cubs have been released into the wild. In Kazakhstan, preparations for tiger reintroduction in the Ile-Balkash Nature Reserve include habitat restoration and reintroduction of prey species. Coordinated breeding programs among zoos have built up enough genetic diversity in tigers to act as "insurance against extinction in the wild."

Relationship with humans

The Champawat Tiger was responsible for over 430 human deaths in Nepal and India before she was shot by Jim Corbett. Tigers kept in captivity have also been part of human entertainment for a very long time, with tigers shown in ancient Rome and kept by Kublai Khan. Today, there are more tigers in captivity than in the wild. Tigers are also popular in the exotic pet trade, and many countries now restrict or ban their use in shows.

Main article: Cultural depictions of tigers

The tiger is among the most famous of the charismatic megafauna. In a 2004 online poll, it was voted the world's favourite animal. In many Asian cultures, the tiger stood for power. In ancient China, it was seen as the "king of the forest" and symbolised the power of the emperor. Tigers also have religious and folk meanings, such as in Hinduism, where the tiger is the vehicle of Durga.