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Portrait of a Tiger (34)
pankajbajpai
![Gold Star Critiquer/Gold Star Workshop Editor/Gold Note Writer [C: 1558 W: 105 N: 4679]](http://i1.treknature.com/misc/g-g-g.gif) (16507) | This post is of a tiger and surprisingly its not a plain tiger this time :-). A real tiger at nandanwan zoo at Raipur.
Tigers (Panthera tigris) are mammals of the Felidae family and one of four "big cats" in the Panthera genus. They are superpredators, the largest, and the most powerful feline species in the world (other than the crossbreed "liger"), comparable in size to the biggest fossil felids. The Royal Bengal Tiger is the most common subspecies of tiger, constituting approximately 80% of the entire tiger population, and is found in the Indian subcontinent. An admirer of the tiger, author and conservationist, Jim Corbett remarked, "The Tiger is a large hearted gentleman with boundless courage.
Tigers are the largest and heaviest cats in the world. Although different subspecies of tiger have different characteristics, in general male tigers weigh between 200 and 320 kg (440 lb and 700 lb) and females between 120 and 181 kg (265 lb and 400 lb). At an average, males are between 2.6 and 3.3 metres (8 feet 6 inches to 10 feet 8 inch) in length, and females are between 2.3 and 2.75 metres (7 ft 6 in and 9 ft) in length. Of the living subspecies, Sumatran tigers are the smallest, and Amur or Siberian Tigers are the largest.
Most tigers have orange coats, a fair (whitish) medial and ventral area and stripes that vary from brown or hay to pure black.
The white tiger has far fewer apparent stripes. White tigers, however, are not a separate sub-species; they are leucistic Bengal tigers. The form and density of stripes differs between subspecies, but most tigers have in excess of 100 stripes.
The now-extinct Javan tiger may have had far more than this.
The pattern of stripes is unique to each animal, and thus could potentially be used to identify individuals, much in the same way as fingerprints are used to identify people. This is not, however, a preferred method of identification, due to the difficulty of recording the stripe pattern of a wild tiger.
It seems likely that the function of stripes is camouflage, serving to hide these animals from their prey. The stripe pattern is found on a tiger's skin and if shaved, its distinctive camouflage pattern would be preserved.
Like most cats, tigers are believed to have some degree of colour vision.
Several obscure references to various other tiger colours have also been found, including most notably, the reference to the "blue" or slate-coloured tiger.
source : wikipedia |
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