| Home | Plight of the Tiger | Vanishing Range | Our Store | Gallery |
| How to Help | Articles | Friends of F.T. | Links | Contact |
Biology of Tigers
Tigers are specialized stalking predators of ungulates, or hoofed animals (a category which comprises two distinct orders of mammals, the Perissodactyla, which consists of horses, rhinoceroses and tapirs, and the order Artiodactyla which consists of deer, pigs, camels, antelopes and cattle). Their preferred viands include wild pigs; various species of deer including sambar, axis deer and reindeer; and wild cattle such as guar and buffalo. However, tigers, as both opportunistic and unrivaled hunters, have also been known to eat sloth bears, baby elephants and rhinos, monkeys, birds, fish, crocodiles, and even humans. Tigers have retractable claws, like house cats, and kill with a bite either to the back of the neck or to the throat of their unlucky quarry. Only about five to ten percent of all attempted kills are successful, often about one per week. When a kill is successful they will typically eat thirty to forty pounds of meat, but have been known to eat as much as eighty pounds at one sitting. While young cubs may sometimes be vulnerable to predation, adult tigers are apex predators: they have no natural enemies, and unlike the lions, leopards, and cheetahs of Africa, who must compete both amongst themselves and with jackals, hyenas and vultures, tigers face little competition from anything with four legs or feathers. Humans, however, more than make up for this immunity, both targeting and competing with tigers everywhere they coexist.
Photo
of Sambar Deer and Wild Boor:
Copyright Nirmal Ghosh
Picture may not be duplicated without
consent of the artist.
Tigers are the largest of all living cat species, but not quite the biggest cat that ever lived, a distinction belonging to the cave lion Panthera leo spelaea a European subspecies of lion featured prominently in many continental cave paintings. (The cave lion became extinct about two thousand years ago). Tigers range in size from the smallest subspecies, the Sumatran; male: ~ 220-300 lbs, female: ~160-240lbs (the extinct Bali tiger was slightly smaller) to the largest, the Siberian tiger; male: ~420-600lbs (rarely 800 lbs), female: ~220-370lbs.
Tigers are unique among cats in their genuine affinity for water; not only enjoying a cool splash on a hot day, or an occasional ablution, but even swimming several miles --reportedly from island to island in Malaysia and Indonesia. Tigers have also been known to hunt along the coasts of lakes and rivers, preying on crocodiles and wading ungulates.
Man-eating behavior is rare among tigers, being usually the result either of
defensive or protective instincts on the part of tigers who perceive a threat to
themselves or their cubs, or of desperation brought on by sickness, starvation
or loss of home range. An adult male tiger may patrol a range as large as 50sq
miles; when territory shrinks overlapping of ranges leads to stress and
increased belligerence. However, a small population of Bengal tigers in the
Sundarbans reserves (mangrove forests fringing the Bay of Bengal in India and
Bangladesh) do seem to have acquired a taste for human flesh, and are
particularly aggressive -- even reportedly swimming into the water to pull
people out of boats. Tigers prefer a sneak attack from behind and fishermen and
honey-gatherers entering the Sundarbans have learned that wearing a mask painted
with a human face on the back of their heads helps protects them from becoming
tiger food - a trick which may have been learned from the tiger itself, as the
prominent white spots on the back of their ears is thought to protect cubs from
predators, and perhaps other tigers, by sowing precisely this sort of confusion.
Male tigers are generally solitary, but not entirely anti-social and
cooperative hunting has been observed. Most commonly, the male's only social
imperative is mating, which usually occurs sometime between November and April.
Gestation lasts about 103 days and a typical litter consists of two or three
cubs. Raising and feeding cubs is almost entirely the responsibility of the
tigress. Cubs nurse for three to six months and become fully independent usually
after about two years with their mothers. Females reach sexual maturity at about
three years old, males at about four, and can theoretically continue to breed
every two years or so, until about the age of fourteen. In the wild, however,
tigers typically live to be only about eight to ten, rarely fifteen, and given
the high infant mortality rates (perhaps a third or more in the first year
alone) and the relentless difficulties of survival from both natural and human
hazards, tigers on average produce only two breeding offspring each during the
entire course of their lives. Unfortunately, even these numbers may be overly
optimistic, as poaching has led to negative population growth in many tiger
reserves.
References
Barnes, N. Sue and Curtis, Helena. Biology. Worth Publishers, Inc., New York. 1989
Campbell, Neil A. Biology. The Benjamin/Cummings Company, Inc. Menlo Park. 1996
Cox, Barry; Gardiner, Brian; Harrison, Colin; and Savage, R.J.G. The Simon and Schuster Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Creatures. Simon and Schuster, New York. 1999
Gould, Steven Jay. Wonderful Life. Norton & Company, New York. 1990.
Gould, Steven Jay; et al. The Book of Life. W.W. Norton and Company, New York. 2001
Macdonald, Dr. David. The Encyclopedia of Mammals. Facts on File Inc., New York. 1999
Matthiessen, Peter. Tigers in the Snow. Introduction and photographs by Maurice Hornocker. North Point Press, New York. 2000
Mitchell, Larence G.; Mutchmor, John A.; and Dolphin, Warren D. Zoology. The Benjamin/Cummings Publishing Company, Inc. Menlo Park. 1988
Seidensticker, John. Tigers. Voyageur Press, Stillwater MN. 1996
Turner, Alan. The Big Cats and Their Fossil Relatives : An Illustrated Guide to Their Evolution and Natural History. Columbia University Press, New York. 1997
Wilson, Edward O. The Diversity of Life. W.W. Norton and Company, New York. 1992
View
Our Guestbook
Sign
Our
Guestbook
©
2002
Forever Tigers
Web site design by Gideon Egger and
Cliff Schwartz Web Design