Tiger Facts: 7 Amazing Things You Didn’t Know About Tigers
Tigers are amazing and charismatic animals. They draw the attention from wildlife enthusiasts across the globe, making them one of the most sought after wild encounters for any predatory mammal. If you’ve lucky enough to see tigers in the wild, you may not even be aware of just how fascinating these creatures really are. Discover 10 tigers facts that will have you appreciating just how impressive the tiger is even more.
Tigers Can Mimic The Sounds of Prey
Despite little recorded evidence of the phenomenon, many witness accounts report tigers in India mimicking the sound of prey to lure their targets out into the open. The tigers can send out calls that sound similar to that of their prey, which attracts the poor unsuspecting animals. Very few animals are able to deploy this advanced hunting strategy, making tigers one of the most effective predators alive today.
Tigers Can Run at 40 MPH
For their size and weight, tigers are incredibly agile. Able to reach speeds of 40 MPH (64 KPH) the tiger can easily outstrip most prey animals, which is one of the reasons it's such a successful hunter. For comparison, 40 MPH is roughly the speed of a race horse at rule gallop.
Tiger Stripes Are Highly-Advanced Camouflage
The famous stripes of a tiger are designed to blend in with the tall grass of their surroundings. With over 100 stripes, they seamlessly blend into the background of their habitat to make it incredibly difficult to be spotted, even when moving. Every tiger’s stripes are unique to them, like a human fingerprint.
White tigers have not developed their coats to be camouflaged in snowy environments. Their white stripes are purely due to a lack of pigmentation caused by a genetic mutation.
Tigers are The Largest Big Cat
Despite the male lion being considered the largest big cat, tigers are actually the undisputed champion. Lions are slightly taller, but the length and weight of a tiger clearly outmatches a fully-grown lion. The largest recorded wild lion weighed 313 kg, which sounds impressive until you compare it to that of the near 400 kg of the largest wild tiger.
Tigers Have White Spots on Their Ears To Guide Young
Tigers have big white spots on the backs of their ears. For a long time their existence was a mystery, as the bright patches contrast with the highly camouflaged nature of the rest of a tiger’s colours. Biologists now believe that the presence of these white spots is to allow young tiger cubs to follow their mothers through dark and dense forests by giving them a clear and obvious marker to look out for.
In the 20th-Century, a Single Tiger Killed Over 400 People
The Champawat Tiger is known as being the single-most successful animal to hunt humans on record. Between the years of roughly 1899 to 1907, the Champawat Tiger killed and ate approximately 436 people in the regions of Nepal and India. Several attempts at tracking and killing the animal - a massive tigress - ended in failure, although she was eventually stopped.
A post-mortem revealed she had sustained injuries from a gunshot as a young tiger, which likely stopped her hunting typical tiger prey and instead focused on easier, more widely available human targets. All her attacks were in broad daylight, and her presence in the local area would bring civilisation to a standstill as people feared leaving their homes. The tigress would often move around from place to place, aware she was being hunted and moving to random locations to evade her perusers.
An incredibly intelligent animal, the Champawat Tiger that managed to outsmart, bait and ambush hundreds of people, this legendary animal will go down in history, if not for the best reasons.
White Tigers are Not Natural
White tigers are not a subspecies of tiger. They are exactly the same as Bengal tigers, just with a white coat. They get this coat when two tigers with a recessive gene that lacks pigmentation in fur breed together. This is exceptionally rare in the wild, but far more common when humans force big cat inbreeding. The result is many genetic abnormalities, as you’d expect with inbreeding. White tigers tend to be in poor health and suffering from a range of health conditions.
We’ve come to associate white tigers as being a beautiful variant of the traditional orange-striped tiger. In reality, there is little beauty behind the origin of these animals. They’ve bred specifically for their white coat to attract money from tourism. If you are a fan of tigers, it’s important not to support organisations that bred white tigers. They are not a subspecies that need protecting; they are the result genetic manipulation through inbreeding that should be stopped.
