Tigers are majestic wild cats, of which there are not so many left on the planet. Hunters killed them because of the beautiful striped hide, which in all ages was considered one of the best trophies.
Tiger stripes - facts and hypotheses
The answer to the question why a tiger has stripes on its skin has been of interest to scientists for a long time. As a result of their research, they found that the main population of tigers lives in the jungle - tropical forests with dense vegetation. Sunlight rarely reaches the ground there. It is reflected on the grass and trees with bright highlights. These highlights paint the flora in a variety of colors. The trunks turn orange, the leaves black. Freaky long shadows appear on the ground.
In such conditions, it is easiest for a cat with a striped color to remain unnoticed. She can successfully hunt and hide from other predators and people. That is why in the process of evolution, striped predators survived, which, creating pairs, gave birth to even more striped offspring. This happened for quite a long time, until the tigers with the same color skin disappeared altogether. The evolutionary process has been going on for many years. Wild cats with light fuzzy stripes were discarded, giving way to bright black-orange predators.
What are the tigers
Currently, there are six types of tigers - Amur, Bengal, Indo-Chinese, Malay, Chinese and Sumatran. Unfortunately, they are all on the verge of extinction. Some subspecies no longer exist in the wild. They remained only in national parks, zoos, circuses. Tigers are the largest predators of the feline family. And among other animals, they are in third place, inferior in body weight only to white and brown bears.
Three subspecies of tigers have already been completely destroyed by humans. They lived in Transcaucasia, on the islands of Bali and Java.
All subspecies of tigers live in Asia. In Russia - in the Far East, Afghanistan, Iran, India, China, Indonesia and some other countries of Southeast Asia. Tigers in the wild hunt fallow deer, monkeys, large birds, and also feed on carrion.
In zoos, there are hybrids of tigers - ligers (born from a tigress and a lion) and tigers (born from a tiger and a lioness).
Tigers can have spots and streaks. Their mane rarely appears, and if it grows, it is always smaller than a lion's.
The liger has an interesting feature - it grows all its life, since the tigress and the lion lack genes that are responsible for limiting growth. Only the lioness and the tiger have them, respectively. And since these animals do not participate in obtaining offspring, their genes do not enter the embryo, and a liger is born, which grows all life. Its length, excluding the tail, can reach three meters.
