Few animals arouse as much fascination as tigers . They are the largest felids in the world, and one of the largest land predators. A common mistake is to call them ‘cats’ when, in fact, they are not. The Felidae family is made up of several subfamilies; the one that receives the name of Felinae is the subfamily to which cats, lynxes, pumas, cheetahs or servals, among others, belong; tigers, along with lions, leopards, jaguars, and clouded leopards, form a separate subfamily, called the Pantherinae . Therefore, tigers are not ‘felines’ but ‘pantherines’.
A very large territory
Tigers are extraordinarily territorial and solitary animals. An adult male tiger may spend long periods of his life guarding his territory to prevent meddling by other tigers. Females are also territorial, but cover much smaller areas. The size of the territory can vary depending on various factors, especially depending on the population density of their prey. There is a negative correlation between the abundance of herbivores and the size of the territory, that is, the more available food a tiger finds, the smaller its territory, and when prey is scarce, the area over which it has dominion increases.
An adult tiger can consume between 50 and 60 large animals per year. Their diet includes cervids such as the chital, the sambar or the muntíaco, wild pigs and large bovids such as the Indian bison, the banteng or the water buffalo, much larger animals. However, when large prey populations become scarce or depleted, they feed on rodents, primates, porcupines, birds, amphibians, fish, and even insects.
In territories of animals of the same sex there is usually very little overlap, especially at the edges, and over a minimal extension of the total area. However, the territory of one male can overlap with that of between one and three females. The territory of a female tiger varies, depending on the availability of prey, from 20 to 80 km². In the case of males, its extension ranges from 100 to almost 400 km². In other words, in its natural environment, an area the size of Soria can house between 120 and 500 females, or between 25 and 100 males.
excellent swimmers
The natural habitat of tigers is the tropical, subtropical and temperate forests of South and Southeast Asia, and the temperate evergreen forests of the palearctic regions of China and Russia. Among its native distribution are, therefore, the tropical forests of India and Sumatra, including mangroves. This type of ecosystem is a kind of bridge between the mainland and the marine environment, and any animal that enters it and is unable to fly will need to swim.
Fortunately, tigers are excellent swimmers. In fact, in its natural environment, a tiger can swim up to 30 kilometers a day, staying in the water for hours. They even have the ability to dive if they need to.
This behavior is so ingrained in the biology of the tiger that in captivity, when it has pools or lagoons with clean water as a recreation area, it shows significantly higher levels of well-being.
Moving towards extinction
In the past, tigers ranged across much of Asia, from eastern Turkey and northern Iran, through southern Kazakhstan, much of Pakistan, most of India, the eastern third of China, and the Korean peninsula, to Siberia, and throughout Southeast Asia, to the islands of Sumatra and Java. But the deforestation of its habitat, and above all, hunting have decimated the population of this beautiful animal to the point of reaching extinction.
Currently, the tiger has disappeared from much of the regions where it was originally distributed. Although efforts are being made for its conservation, the territory occupied by tigers continues to decrease year by year. In 2001 it was just over 1,000,000 km²; in 2020, it is estimated to have dropped to 978,293 km².
In the late 1990s, the tiger population was estimated at more than 8,000 individuals; the latest assessments estimate that the current population is around 3,140 mature individuals. This population decline in less than three decades means that the tiger is considered an endangered species, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). This body updated the status for the entire species in its latest review of December 2021 (published in 2022), but prior to this update, it considered the various tiger subspecies separately. Apart from three prehistoric subspecies, it is considered that there are a total of nine subspecies of tiger.
Bengal ( Pt tigris ), Siberian ( Pt altaica ), and Indochinese ( Pt corbetti ) tigers are considered endangered subspecies. On the other hand, populations of the Malayan tiger ( Pt jacksoni ), Sumatran tiger ( Pt sumatrae ) and especially Amoy ( Pt amoyensis) are critically endangered, the most worrying of the threat levels.
The remaining three subspecies are extinct. Hunting and deforestation caused the Bali tiger, the smallest variety of the species, to become extinct in the late 1930s. The last wild Caspian tiger ( Pt virgata ) was sighted in the early 1970s. And the same causes drove the Javan tiger to extinction; the last living specimen was sighted in 1979.
References:
Biolatti, C. et al. 2016. Behavioural analysis of captive tigers (Panthera tigris): A water pool makes the difference. Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 174, 173-180. DOI: 10.1016/j.applanim.2015.11.017
IUCN. 2022. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Version 2021-3. Mazák, V. 1981. Panthera tigris. Mammalian Species, 152, 1-8. DOI: 10.2307/3504004
Simcharoen, A. et al. 2014. Female tiger Panthera tigris home range size and prey abundance: important metrics for management. Oryx, 48(3), 370-377. DOI: 10.1017/S0030605312001408
