Tigers – A Symbol of Royalty
Tigers are a sign of royal power.
They are the national animals of India because they represent royalty, strength, and wonder. There’s no doubt that we’re talking about the tigers. At the moment, they are listed as endangered animals because humans hunt them for their beautiful skin, which is worth a lot of money, and because their claws and teeth are used to make decorations.
The population of their beautiful animal has dropped so much because of all the killing that it is almost extinct. There are many wildlife reserves and national parks all over the world to protect this beautiful animal from going extinct.
Tigers are called Panthera tigris by scientists. They are part of the Chordata and Mammalia groups. The Carnivora and the Felidae make up the whole address of the tiger. Tiger is an animal that lives in southern and eastern Asia. It is the top predator and can only eat meat. An adult tiger has a body length of about 3.3 metres and can weigh up to 300 kg. Tigers are often easy to spot because they have dark stripes on their orange-white fur and lighter fur on their undersides.
The Bengal tiger is the subspecies with the most important tiger population, and the Siberian tiger is the subspecies with the most tigers. They do well in their natural environments and are easy to find in the Siberian taiga, open grasslands, and mangrove swamps. They make their own territories and like to live alone. To get food, they hunt animals that are much bigger than them.
When there aren’t enough animals to eat, they won’t think twice about attacking people. Three of the nine subspecies of modern tigers are no longer alive, so the six that are still around are all considered endangered. The main reasons why their numbers are going down are hunting and the splitting up of their habitats. Tigers are one of the most famous and interesting animals in the world.
The word “tiger” comes from the Greek word “tiger,” which means “arrow.” This is a reference to how fast this animal is.
In the past, tigers lived all over Asia, from the Caucasus and the Caspian Sea to Siberia and Indonesia. During the 19th century, these animals went extinct in western Asia. They are now only found in a few small areas nearby.
At the moment, Sumatra is the only island where tigers are living in large numbers. Tigers also live in India, China, and Southeast Asia. Borneo is famous for being the only place where tiger fossils have been found. Tigers like to sleep in places where there is enough green cover, a lot of food, and water. Bengal tigers can live in a lot of different places.
They live in the wet, evergreen and semi-evergreen forests of Assam, the mangrove forests of the Ganges Delta, the deciduous forests of Nepal, and so the thorn forests of the Western Ghats. They can swim well and like to play in cold water. They can swim for up to 4 miles straight.
Tigers are thought to have come from Panthera palaeosinensis, a tiger-like cat whose bones have been found in China and Java. People think that these cats lived two million years ago, during the Pleistocene, and that they were smaller than tigers today.
True tiger fossils are thought to be between 1.6 and 1.8 million years old. Tigers are the most beautiful members of the cat family. They need rusty-reddish to brown-rusty fur coats with a white belly, a hint of white around the face, and black or dark brown stripes on top of the rusty-reddish coat. The number of stripes varies by subspecies, but on average, every tiger has about a hundred stripes.
The pattern of the stripe is unique to each subspecies of the tiger, and it is used to tell the difference between subspecies.
The tiger’s stripes help it hide from its prey and blend in with its surroundings. So, the tiger doesn’t have to work as hard to catch its prey.
Tigers have a white spot called an ocellus on the back of their ears. This is a sign of friendship that all big cats use. On the other hand, tigers, like lions, have strong legs and shoulders that help them grab and pull prey that is bigger and heavier than their bodies.
Each species has a different body size and, by extension, a different weight. Males are usually 1.7 times bigger than females because females are always smaller than males. This is a difference between all of the different kinds of tigers. The tiger’s skull is similar to that of the lion, but there are some differences, like a longer area behind the eyes.
At the moment, we know there are nine subspecies of tigers, but three of them are extinct. This group includes the Bengal (also called the Royal tiger), the Indochinese, the Malayan, the Sumatran, the Siberian, and the South China tigers.
There are still these kinds of tigers, and they are looking for ways to increase their numbers like they used to. In 1977, China’s government passed a law that stopped this royal animal from being killed in large numbers. But it was too late, and a few subspecies were already in danger of going extinct.
Tiger subspecies like the Bali tiger, the Javan tiger, and the Caspian tiger are all extinct. In the 1800s, lions and tigers were bred together, and their offspring were called ligers and tigons.
This is how the name “hybrid tiger”
This was first done in zoos, and the Chinese government is very strict about it. When a male lion mates with a female tiger, they have a liger. When a male tiger mates with a female lioness, they have a tigress. Tigon was born to a tiger male and a lioness female.
The white colour of white tiger is caused by chinchilla albinism, which is a well-known change in the genes. This caused the white colour.
Because white tigers are so popular, they are raised in zoos because they are so rare in the wild. When white tigers are bred, this can also happen. The white tiger is not its own kind. Instead, it’s caused by differences in colour, especially in Bengal tigers. Every 10,000 live births, only one white tiger is born. This kind of mutation could be caused by a gene that comes from either parent. Genes change in a different ways to make golden tabby tigers. They have light golden fur, straw legs, and very thin orange stripes. Only 30 golden tabby tigers live in the world today.
Tigers are very solitary animals, but they have clear boundaries around where they live. Their range depends on how much food there is and how easy it is to get to the females. The tigress’s territory can be up to 20 square kilometres big, but a male’s territory can be up to 60–100 square kilometres.
When a young tigress sets up her territory, she does so near that of her mother. On the other hand, young males like to set up their territories where there aren’t any other males.
Men can be very violent, and they will sometimes fight for women. When the female is in oestrus, males often fight very hard, and the weaker of the two can even die in these fights. Tigers mark their territory by spraying urine, scatting, and letting fluid from their anal glands come out. They also roar to defend their homes.
Most of the time, tigers eat large and medium-sized animals like chital, gaur, sambar, deer, boar, and buffalo. For food, they sometimes hunt leopards and pythons.
People are often eaten by tigers that are too old or hurt to hunt, just like the tigers in Sunderbans, India, which also eat people.
Tigers also eat plants to get the fibre they need to stay healthy. The match tree is a favourite source of this fibre. Tigers like to hunt at night, either alone or in groups, and they can run between 49 and 65 kilometres per hour. Only one out of every twenty hunts kills the animal. When they hunt bigger animals, they usually grab the throat with their forelimbs, which strangles the animal to death.
They usually bite the back of the neck, break the medulla spinalis, or pierce the spinal cord when they eat smaller animals.
Tigers can mate at any time of the year, but most do so in November and April. The females are only fertile for a short time, so mating has to happen during this time. As with other cats, when a pair is mating, they do it often and loudly, and the pregnancy lasts 16 weeks. There could also be 3–4 blind, helpless babies, each of which weighs 1 kg. Since the tigress helps care for the cubs, the father doesn’t have to do anything.
If the first set of cubs dies, the tigress will have another set of cubs five months later.
When the babies are 8 weeks old, they can leave the den and go with their mother. There is one male who is in charge and one female who is in charge. They stay with their mother until they are 2 and a half years old. The females reach adulthood between 3 and 4 years old, while the males do so between 4 and 5 years old. Over the course of her life, the female gives birth to the same number of male and female cubs.
Tigers are becoming less common because people kill them for their fur and destroy their natural environment. At the start of the 20th century, there were only 2,000 wild tigers left, down from 100,000 at the turn of the century.
India is thought to have the most tigers of any country in the world. A report from the World Wildlife Fund says that 1,400 of the 3,500 tigers in the world live in India. Gandhi helped start “Project Tiger” in 1973, which was a serious plan to save many of these royal animals. This project is going well even now.
There are already many national parks in India that are set up to protect tigers. Not just in India, but all over the world, people are working to keep this beautiful animal from going extinct.
Tigers are scary and show that you are strong and powerful. But even though they look scary, they make our jungles look beautiful. Come, let’s save our tigers from extinction.
