That’s spelled correctly, or it would be if this year was 1794 and William Blake had just published his famous poem about the big cat that scientists call Panthera tigris, and the rest of us,”Oh Look A Tiger!”
Or simply, “Gulp.”
Unfortunately, the eighteenth century was also a time when some other influential Western people, who thought themselves “practical,” began to treat tigers as pests, stepping up the trophy hunting as well as breaking up or destroying tiger habitat with settlements, livestock pastures, and agriculture.
By the twentieth century, only a few thousand tigers were left (compared to the estimated 100,000 in William Blake’s day).
People in all walks of life realized that they soon might not be able to say “Oh Look A Tiger!,” and gradually the world’s focus on this, perhaps the most beautiful of all wild cats, shifted from “pest” to “endangered species,” a trend that continues today.
In 2010, for the first time in history, some national governments united to save a single species.
One cat at a time, if need be.
Countries in the tiger’s range endorsed the St. Petersburg Declaration on Tiger Conservation.
Some program goals have yet to be achieved, but by 2022 the wild tiger population did increase to almost six thousand.
Here is a review of the overall situation today.
And here are three more facts about tigers!
Sumatran tiger, by Ondrej Chvatal/Shutterstock
40. In terms of evolution, tigers are both old and new.
To the surprise of many researchers, genetic studies suggest that snow leopards are closely related to tigers, not to leopards.
It seems strange. Lightweight, agile snow leopards have a totally different thing going on from the massive tigers that prowl through Nepalese grasslands, Asian mangrove swamps, and Siberian forests.
Tigers seem to shake the ground as they walk; snow leopards dance on mountain crags.
Yet DNA studies suggest a connection that goes back almost four million years to an as-yet unidentified common ancestor of theirs who apparently turned its back on the rest of Panthera and went its own way.
Since then, its line has turned into two big cats — P. tigris (tiger) and P. uncia (snow leopard).
But P. tigris is young, too — just 108,000 years old or less by DNA studies. (Luo et al.)
How can that be?
According to those researchers something reset the modern tiger’s genome during the last 72,000 to 108,000 years.
What sort of near-extinction event was it?
Hypothetically, it could have been almost anything from disease to ecological changes of some sort. Proving the case for any particular cause, though — that’s another story.
A very dramatic possibility is hinted at by one of the molecular clock dates: roughly 70,000 years ago, a supereruption occurred in tiger country at Toba, on the island of Sumatra.
Did that blast almost wipe out tigers?
Some studies support the idea, and the Cat Specialist Group mentions it on their website at the time of writing.
Other researchers argue that the timing is only a coincidence.
They point out, for example, that orangutangs on Sumatra somehow survived that supereruption without any harmful effects to their genome. Why should it have hit the tigers over on mainland Asia harder?
The tiger crises, they argue, likely were caused by other, more complex factors.
The debate continues.
41. Its flamboyant fur conceals this huge predator.
To us, the tiger’s orange/white/striped appearance is a big “Wow!” in motion.
Scientists try to be a little more objective. Here, for instance, is how Sunquist and Sunquist describe a tiger’s coat:
The background color of the tiger’s fur is reddish brown to ocherous. The insides of the limbs and the belly, chest, throat, and muzzle are white or light cream-colored. There is a white area above the eyes, which extends onto the cheeks. A white spot is present on the backs of the ears. The tail is ringed with several bands. The flanks and shoulders are marked with dark vertical stripes that vary in width, spacing, length, and whether they are single or double. The stripes also extend onto the belly, and stripe patterns differ from one side of the cat’s body to the other. The dark lines above the eyes tend to be symmetrical, but the marks on each side of the face can be different…
Still an absolutely fabulous cat, but when you see it written out that way, doesn’t it seem as though Nature has gone a little overboard on this one?
That can’t be right.
Evolutionary extremes tend to die out fast, and whatever the tiger’s challenges may have been in recent geologic time, it has been around for millions of years.
What advantage could that flashy coat possibly give tigers over other predators?
To see how the unique camouflage works, let’s head out into tiger country — your choice whether it is grassy reed beds, a lowland tropical rainforest, mangrove swamp, or mixed hardwoods and conifers in the Russian Far East.
In each place, the natural world is a mess, pretty (usually) but full of vegetation, wood, rocks and pebbles, mud, etc.
And muddy tigers — upwind of the oblivious prey.
Very briefly, what the tiger’s multicolored and striped coat does is mimic the haphazard play of light and dark in grassland and forest settings, breaking up the big cat’s outline so effectively that prey seldom see it until the attack comes.
It also helps when the prey has limited color vision:
Some images at the Cat Specialist Group page show that this effect even tricks the camera!
In zoos, to our eyes tigers are spectacular. Outdoors, they are close to invisible to prey.
But the big cats occasionally do need to be noticed by other tigers —
42. Tigers have a social network.
A tiger’s facial marking and body stripe patterns are unique.
Conservationists and zoologists use them to identify individual cats.
Of course, no one knows if the tigers see the coat patterns as “nametags” or something else.
Most of the time these magnificent cats exist in majestic solitude but there is strong evidence that they do get together now and then:
Those cubs have a daddy — out in the wild it’s probably the resident male whose territory, like that of most male cats except lions, overlaps with as many female territories as possible.
Male or female, tigers do need a lot of room.
A resident male might have 100 square miles or more of territory in the Himalayan foothills to almost 400 square miles in the Russian Far East, where tigresses (who base their ranges on prey abundance) spread out more.
Regardless, Mr. Tiger patrols his range each day just as other cats do. And he defends it when he must.
Usually things are peaceful in tiger country, meaning that we only see one feline giant at a time because the cats have arranged it that way.
How do they do this?
Both males and females do scent marking at communal “platforms” and read the various messages that other tigers have posted.
This information probably shows occupancy of an area as well as conveying personal information.
Tigers also do social messaging by scratching the ground, leaving claw marks on trees, and roaring.
They roar differently from lions but the sound still carries more than a mile through dense vegetation.
Both male and female tigers have various other calls that range from a reassuring chuff to a stress-releasing moan during tense situations.
These calls are accompanied by body postures and facial expressions that make the meaning, whatever it might be, perfectly clear.
From the vast expanses of Siberian woodlands to the grassland that rolls up against the Himalayas in green waves, tigers are doing their version of “I heard it through the grapevine” and adjusting their lives accordingly.
Next time, we’ll climb up the towering heights above tigers and see what their distant relatives are up to…
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