Tiger King

Tigers are the biggest cats in the world, and they kill more people globally than any other mammal. The Champawat Tiger, a tigress found in Nepal and then India, was responsible for an estimated 430 human deaths, the highest ever total for a single animal!

The best place to find tigers is India, and I’ve been on tiger safaris at Ranthambore, Bandhavgarh and Tadoba.

If you want a few tips on how to shoot a tiger, just take a look at my blog post.

Basic facts

Order: Carnivora

Family: Felidae

Species: Tiger

Scientific name: Panthera tigris

Subspecies: Bengal/Siberian/South China/Indochinese/Malayan tiger (Panthera tigris tigris) and Sumatran tiger (Panthera tigris sondaica).

Mass: males 90-300 kg (200-660 lb), females 65 to 167 kg (143 to 368 lb)

Height at shoulder: 1.2 m (male adult), 1.1 m (female adult)

Total length: males 250-390 cm (8.2-12.8 ft), females 160-184 cm/63-72 in

Appearance: Big cat with a generally yellowish or reddish orange coat with black stripes. There are also other colour variants caused by mutant genes and pseudo-melanism: white with brown stripes, golden with reddish-brown stripes, stripeless snow white and black).

Top speed: 49–65 km/h (30–40 mph)

Gestation period: from 93 to 114 days, with an average of 103 to 105 days

Lifespan: 10-15 years in the wild (16-20 years in captivity)

IUCN Red List Status: Endangered

Population: 2,154-3,159 mature individuals (or 4,593-5,515), decreasing

Habitat: Forest, shrubland, grassland

Distribution: Indian subcontinent, the Indochinese Peninsula, Sumatra and the Russian Far East

Habitat

Tigers are mainly found in forested areas where there are stable populations of prey animals such as deer, bovids and wild boar.

The particular type of forest depends on the location:

• India: tropical and subtropical moist broadleaf forests, moist evergreen forests, tropical dry forests and the swamp forests of the Sundarbans

• Eastern Himalayas: temperate forest

• Thailand: deciduous and evergreen forests

• Laos: semi-evergreen and evergreen forest interspersed with grassland in Nam Et-Phou Louey National Protected Area

• Sumatra: lowland peat swamp forests and rugged montane forests.

Tigers can also be found at high altitudes up to 4,200 m (13,800 ft) in Bhutan and 3,630 m (11,910 ft) in the Mishmi Hills.

Territory

The tiger is a long-ranging species, and individuals travel distances of up to 650 km (400 mi) to reach other tiger groups.

Adult tigers lead largely solitary lives. They create and keep territories but have much wider home ranges.

Tigers sharing the same area know about each other's movements and behaviour.

Tigers rarely climb trees, but they are powerful swimmers and can often be seen in water holes or rivers cooling down during the heat of the day.

The size of the home range mainly depends on prey abundance, geographic area and whether the tiger is male or female:

• India: 50 to 1,000 km² (19 to 386 sq mi)

• Manchuria: 500 to 4,000 km² (190 to 1,540 sq mi)

• Nepal: 19 to 151 km² (7.3 to 58.3 sq mi) for males and 10 to 51 km² (3.9 to 19.7 sq mi) for females.

Young female tigers establish their initial territories close to their mothers’, but any overlap between the female and her mother's territory reduces over time.

Males migrate further and set out at a younger age to mark out their own area. A young male acquires territory either by seeking out an area with no other male tigers or by living as a transient in another male's territory until he is older and strong enough to challenge the resident male.

Young males seeking to establish themselves have the highest mortality rate (30–35% per year) amongst adult tigers.

To identify their territories, tigers mark trees by spraying urine, making anal gland secretions, marking trails with faeces and marking trees or the ground with their claws.

Scent markings of this type allow an individual to pick up clues to another's identity, sex and reproductive status. Females in oestrus will signal their availability by scent marking more frequently and increasing their vocalisations.

Although for the most part avoiding each other, tigers are not always territorial and relationships between individuals can be complicated. An adult of either sex will sometimes share its kill with others, even those who may not be related.

Unlike male lions, male tigers allow females and cubs to feed on the kill before the male is finished with it, and feeding is much less hierarchical.

Male tigers are generally more intolerant of other males within their territories than females are of other females.

Territory disputes are usually solved by displays of intimidation rather than actual aggression. Typically, the subordinate tiger will signal defeat by rolling onto its back and showing its belly in a submissive position.

Once dominance has been established, a male may tolerate a subordinate within his range as long as they do not live in too close quarters.

The most aggressive disputes tend to occur between two males when a female is in oestrus, and this sometimes results in the death of one of the males.

Hunting

Tigers are almost exclusively carnivorous, killing and eating a wide range of animals from monkeys, peafowl, hares, porcupines and fish all the way up to gaurs, water buffaloes, Asian elephants and Indian rhinos.

Worldwide, the preferred prey animals are the sambar deer, wapiti (elk), barasingha (swamp deer) and wild boar.

They also prey on other predators, including dogs, leopards, pythons, bears, and crocodiles.

In areas that are close to human settlements, tigers will sometimes kill domestic animals such as cattle, horses and donkeys.

They will also sometimes eat vegetation such as the fruit of the slow match tree to get dietary fibre.

Tigers generally hunt alone at night, and around 5-50% of hunts are successful.

They are ambush predators and rely on their strength and bodyweight to overpower larger prey, knocking or wrestling it to the ground and then grabbing it by the neck in order to suffocate it to death.

With smaller prey, they generally grab them by the nape, breaking the spinal cord, the windpipe or the jugular/carotid artery.

Like other cats, the tiger will usually drag the carcase under a bush or into long grass to conceal and protect it.

Tigers can go up to a fortnight without eating, but they can then eat up to 34 kg (75 lb) of flesh in one sitting!

As a rough guide, they eat 3 to 6 kg (6.6 to 13.2 lb) of meat a day in captivity.

Breeding

Young females reach sexual maturity at three to four years, males at four to five years.

Tigers can mate all year round, but most cubs are born from March to June, with a second peak in September. Gestation periods are around 103 to 105 days.

A female is only receptive for three to six days, and mating is frequent and noisy during that time.

Unrelated nomadic males often kill cubs to make the female receptive since the tigress may give birth to another litter within five months if the cubs of the previous litter are lost.

The female gives birth in a sheltered location such as tall grass, in undergrowth, a cave or a rocky crevice.

Litters consist of two or three cubs, but sometimes as many as six.

Cubs weigh from 780 to 1,600 g (1.72 to 3.53 lb) at birth and are born with their eyes closed. They open their eyes when they are six to 14 days old.

Their milk teeth break through at the age of about two weeks, and they start to eat meat at the age of eight weeks. This is when females usually move them to a new den.

Mothers nurse their cubs for five or six months. When they are fully weaned, they start to accompany their mother on territorial walks, and she teaches them how to hunt.

The father generally takes no part in rearing them.

A dominant cub emerges in most litters, usually a male. The dominant cub is more active than its siblings and takes the lead in their play, eventually leaving its mother and becoming independent earlier.

The cubs start hunting on their own at the age of 11 months and become independent at around 18 to 20 months of age.

They separate from their mothers at the age of two to two-and-a-half years but continue to grow until they’re five years old.

Half of tiger cubs die in the first two years, but few other predators attack tiger cubs due to the diligence and ferocity of the mother. Apart from humans and other tigers, the most common causes of cub mortality are starvation, freezing and accidents.

Communication

Facial expressions include the "defense threat", where an individual bares its teeth, flattens its ears and enlarges its pupils. Both males and females show a flehmen response, a characteristic grimace, when sniffing urine markings, but this is more often associated with males sniffing the markings made by tigresses in oestrus.

Like other cats in the Panthera genus, tigers roar, particularly in aggressive situations, during the mating season or when making a kill.

There are two different roars:

• The "true" roar is made using the hyoid apparatus and forced through an open mouth as it progressively closes.

• The shorter, harsher "coughing" roar is made with the mouth open and teeth exposed.

The "true" roar can be heard up to 3 km (1.9 mi) away and is sometimes emitted three or four times in a row.

When tense, tigers will moan, a sound similar to a roar but softer and made with the mouth either partially or completely closed. Moaning can be heard 400 m (1,300 ft) away.

Chuffing—soft, low-frequency snorting similar to purring in small cats—is heard in more friendly situations.

There are also a number of other vocal communications:

• grunts

• woofs

• snarls

• miaows

• hisses

• growls.

Threats

The world tiger population is low and in decline although numbers in India are actually growing (by 30% from 2011 to 2014).

The tiger used to be found from eastern Turkey and Transcaucasia to the coast of the Sea of Japan and from South Asia across Southeast Asia to the Indonesian islands of Sumatra, Java and Bali.

Currently, it occurs in less than 6% of its historical range, as it has been driven out of Southwest and Central Asia and large parts of Southeast and East Asia.

The IUCN deems the lion to be in its ‘endangered’ category, and it faces many threats to its existence:

• poaching (particularly to meet demand for tiger skins and tiger parts in amulets and traditional Chinese medicines)

• habitat fragmentation and destruction (due to deforestation and human settlement)

• reduction in prey (due to human hunting)

• retaliatory killing by humans.

Sources: Wikipedia, IUCN, Loadstar’s Lair

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