In the human history, if human has ever feared any animal the most, it was tiger. Once it was the danger that made people loose their sleep in the middle of night, but time has changed a lot.
Now, what once was feared to be the most dreadful creature of the world, is itself in fear of losing its existence.
Humans not only got over their fear for tiger by developing guns and darts, they have created fear in tigers for their existence. Their endanger level can be seen as a fact that today there are more tigers as pet than there are in the wild.
Tigers has evolved for more than 2 million years, and adapted to the changes to survive but there population has been on downfall and close to extinction in the past decade.
A little hope rose for tigers when various nature organizations declared this species endangered and worked out various steps to protect it.
Image Source: Pexels
When you visit a wildlife sanctuary or zoo, the most awaited thing to see is a tiger. If you can't see it because it is sleeping, because of his illness or due to bad weather, you get sad. You don't get to see your favourite animal. Wonder what will happen when there will be no tigers in this world and maybe anyone will not see one of the iconic creature in this world in the next 20-30 years.
It is quite possible that tigers could be extinct as out of nine sub-species of tigers 3 are extinct, and only Bengal in India and South China holds some hope for their survival.
Let's read some more about tiger, what it faces in its life, how it hunts and how it survives.
Features.
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Tiger is the biggest member of the cat family and can be easily recognized by their black stripes on orange coat. Every tiger in this world is unique as each tiger has a unique pattern of stripes on its coat and no two pattern matches just like human fingerprints.
The life span of tiger is usually 10 years in wild and about 15-20 in zoo.
Tigers communicate with their tails, a tiger is relaxed if its tail is loosely hanging, angry when the tail is moving side to side or holding low with intense twitches.
It can weigh up to 363 kg (more than 660 pounds) and measure upto 3.3 m. They are renowned for their strength, power and size.
But instead of huge size and weight, they are not sluggish and can run up to 65 km/hr (40 m/h) for a few seconds and can make a 6 m long jump. And that's an interesting thing that tigers can do considering their huge weights and size.
Opposed to the basic nature of the most of the big cats, tigers like water and they can be seen often cooling off in pools and streams and can swim easily up to 6 km (3 miles).
Its claws could be 4 inches long and retractable, carnassial teeth are so strong that could shatter bones easily.
When a tiger wants you to hear, he can do that from over a mile. Yes, its roar can be heard from a mile.
Survival.
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Tigers live a very hard life. Around half of the cubs don't live beyond two years of life.
When the cubs are born, they are completely blind for a week and totally depend on their mothers. Male tigers have little to no help in bringing up the cubs. As tigers are lone hunters and don't live or hunt in packs. All the responsibility to bring up the cubs depend upon mother.
Female tiger has to hunt to feed her and the cubs, keep the cub safe from other cats and hyenas. As only 10% of the hunts end successfully for the tiger, there are very high chances that cubs would die either due to hunger or could be killed by other animals while their mother is out on hunting for food.
When the tigers are around 2 years of age, they leave their mother and are there out in jungle on their own. Even if a tiger makes it to 2 years of age, still there are high chances of it being dead due to unsuccessful hunts or being in an ambush with bigger cats or hyenas.
As tigers depend solely on their carnassial teeth, if they loose their teeth due to an impact in hunting or ambush or due to old age, they will die because of hunger.
Hunting.
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Tigers usually hunts alone. In its adulthood, tiger is one the most supreme killer in nature.
Tiger uses his patterned coats as camouflage to get very close to his prey. They take a leap and bite into the neck, breaking the windpipe and shattering the neck bones.
If you would ask anyone who has seen or witnessed tiger attack, he would say that it came out of nowhere.
The most important thing tiger uses while hunting is the element of surprise. Once it looses element of surprise, it may not even attack its prey and move on to find a new prey to surprise and kill it.
It is believed that if you stare a tiger in its eyes, he will not attack you. Maybe due to this belief, a lot of farmers used to wear masks on the back of their heads while going to fields in Asia, to break the element of surprise and let tiger think they are looking at it.
One tiger alone killed 430 people in Nepal and India in 19th century.
Tigers wait for night to hunt as because of their retinal reflection, they could see 6 times better than human. Their skeleton structure is made up in a way to give them super strength. So they can kill an animal twice their weight.
Once they kill their prey and if they can't finish it in one go, they might drag it and bury it nearby with leaves to come again and finish it later.
Tiger preys on antelopes, zebras, giraffes, small elephants, deer, wild pigs.
Tigers are the only predators known to prey on adult bears.
Tigers can eat up to 60 pounds( 27 kg) of meat in one go in a night.
Between 1800 to 2009 tigers have killed more than 3,73,000 humans, on the other hand humans have surely taken revenge from them by decreasing their numbers from nearly 1,00,000 to 10,000 in the last century.
While tigers killed because of human expansion into their areas or seldom for food, humans kill tiger for their skin, a dead adult tiger is sold for $10,000 or more in black markets.
There are also rare white tigers whose gene are found 1 in a 10,000.
As opposed to the common assumption, tigers are not found in South Africa and and only found in Asia.
Big cats, especially tigers have strong memory, as compared to all the other species including humans. Tigers short term memory is half hour better than humans.
There is no end to the interesting facts of this beautiful creature. No matter how dreadful to the humans this creature has been in the past, it is still one of the most beautiful creature our world ever had and we should try everything to protect it.
Image Source: Pixabay
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