Saturday 5 October 2013

The Bengal Tiger's

The Bengal tiger's coat is yellow to light orange, with stripes ranging from dark brown to black; the belly and the interior parts of the limbs are white, and the tail is orange with black rings.
Male Bengal tigers have an average total length of 270 to 310 cm (110 to 120 in) including the tail, while females measure 240 to 265 cm (94 to 104 in) on average. The tail is typically 85 to 110 cm (33 to 43 in) long, and on average, tigers are 90 to 110 cm (35 to 43 in) in height at the shoulders. The average weight of males is 221.2 kg (488 lb), while that of females is 139.7 kg (308 lb).[11] The smallest recorded weights for Bengal tigers are from the Bangladesh Sundarbans, where adult females are 75–80 kg (170–180 lb).

A white Bengal tiger at the Cougar Mountain Zoo
The white tiger is a recessive mutant of the Bengal tiger, which is reported in the wild from time to time in Assam, Bengal, Bihar and especially from the former State of Rewa. However, it is not to be mistaken as an occurrence of albinism. In fact, there is only one fully authenticated case of a true albino tiger, and none of black tigers, with the possible exception of one dead specimen examined in Chittagong in 1846.
Two tigers shot in Kumaon and near Oude at the end of the 19th century allegedly measured more than 12 ft (370 cm). But at the time, sportsmen had not yet adopted a standard system of measurement; some would measure between pegs while others would round the curves.
In the beginning of the 20th century, a male Bengal tiger was shot in central India with a head and body length of 221 cm (87 in) between pegs, a chest girth of 150 cm (59 in), a shoulder height of 109 cm (43 in) and a tail length of 81 cm (32 in), which was perhaps bitten off by a rival male. This specimen could not be weighed, but it was calculated to weigh no less than 272 kg (600 lb).

A heavy male weighing 570 lb (260 kg) was shot in northern India in the 1930s.[16] However, the heaviest known tiger was a huge male killed in 1967 that weighed 388.7 kg (857 lb) and measured 322 cm (127 in) in total length between pegs, and 338 cm (133 in) over curves. This specimen is on exhibition in the Mammals Hall of the Smithsonian Institution. In 1980 and 1984, scientists captured and tagged two male tigers in Chitwan National Park that weighed more than 270 kg (600 lb).
Bengal tigers are defined by three distinct mitochondrial nucleotide sites and 12 unique microsatellite alleles. The pattern of genetic variation in the Bengal tiger corresponds to the premise that they arrived in India approximately 12,000 years ago. This is consistent with the lack of tiger fossils from the Indian subcontinent prior to the late Pleistocene and the absence of tigers from Sri Lanka, which was separated from the subcontinent by rising sea levels in the early Holocene.
In 1982, a sub-fossil right middle phalanx was found in a prehistoric midden near Kuruwita in Sri Lanka, which is dated to about 16,500 ybp and tentatively considered to be of a tiger. Tigers appear to have arrived in Sri Lanka during a pluvial period during which sea levels were depressed, evidently prior to the last glacial maximum about 20,000 years ago. In 1929, the British taxonomist Pocock assumed that tigers arrived in southern India too late to colonize Sri Lanka, which earlier had been connected to India by a land bridge.
In the Indian subcontinent, tigers inhabit tropical moist evergreen forests, tropical dry forests, tropical and subtropical moist deciduous forests, mangroves, subtropical and temperate upland forests, and alluvial grasslands. Latter tiger habitat once covered a huge swath of grassland and riverine and moist semi-deciduous forests along the major river system of the Gangetic and Brahmaputra plains, but has now been largely converted to agriculture or severely degraded. Today, the best examples of this habitat type are limited to a few blocks at the base of the outer foothills of the Himalayas including the Tiger Conservation Units (TCUs) Rajaji-Corbett, Bardia-Banke, and the transboundary TCUs Chitwan-Parsa-Valmiki, Dudhwa-Kailali and Sukla Phanta-Kishanpur. Tiger densities in these blocks are high, in part a response to the extraordinary biomass of ungulate prey.
The tiger population in the Terai of Nepal is split into three isolated subpopulations that are separated by cultivation and densely settled habitat. The largest population lives in Chitwan National Park and in the adjacent Parsa Wildlife Reserve encompassing an area of 2,543 km2 (982 sq mi) of prime lowland forest. To the west, the Chitwan population is isolated from the one in Bardia National Park and adjacent unprotected habitat further west, extending to within 15 km (9.3 mi) of the Sukla Phanta Wildlife Reserve, which harbours the smallest population.[34] The bottleneck between the Chitwan-Parsa and Bardia-Sukla Phanta metapopulations is situated just north of the town of Butwal.
As of 2009, an estimated 121 breeding tigers lived in Nepal. By 2010, the number of adult tigers had reached 155.[36] A survey conducted from December 2009 to March 2010 indicates that 125 adult tigers live in Chitwan National Park and its border areas covering 1,261 km2 (487 sq mi). Between February and June 2013, a camera trapping survey was carried out in the Terai covering an area of 4,841 km2 (1,869 sq mi) tiger habitat. The country’s tiger population was estimated at 163–253 breeding adults comprising about 127 tigers in the Chitwan-Parsa protected areas, about 54 in the Bardia-Banke National Parks and about 17 in the Sukla Phanta Wildlife Reserve.

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