Video of Bengal tigers having a pool party to tolerate the heat

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Bearing in mind global warming and also bearing in mind that tigers love water, it is unsurprising to see a party of them lounging around in a nice pool in a reserve. The wildlife ranger who posted the video to Twitter via a colleague says that river sources sometimes start in tiger reserves and therefore tiger conservation in India is key to their water and food security. What I think he is saying is that if you protect the Bengal tigers in India you by necessity protect their reserves and in protecting the reserves you protect the water source which keeps billions of Indians alive! Does that sound right?

Note: This is an embedded tweet. Sometimes they are deleted at source which stops them working on this site. If that has happened, I apologise but I have no control over it.

I've always been interested in why the rear half of a tiger sometimes loses its orange background colouration so you end up with a black and white tiger in that part of the body. You can see this in the video. I don't see anybody mentioning this. And the books that I have on tigers don't mention it either. And I am wondering whether this is a problem with health.

Tiger pool party
Tiger pool party. Screenshot.

The image that we have of a tiger is of an orange background with dark stripes which is meant to be good camouflage in the kind of habitat in which they live. In fact, the dried-out habitat that we see in the video indicates how effective this coat can be as camouflage.

Although, tigers often live in green jungles and it makes you wonder how their coat can be camouflage in that environment. The answer, as I understand it, is that to tiger prey animals the orange tiger coat does not look orange because their eyesight does not detect reds very well and therefore the colours are muted and so perhaps, they see predominantly the markings which provide adequate camouflage to the tiger. I explore this in the linked page below.

RELATED: Why are tigers orange and not green?

Tigers are very good swimmers and they sometimes end up swimming in the sea. They can swim for miles. Perhaps of all the cats they are the best swimmers and certainly they have a very different attitude towards water and swimming than lions. That's probably partly because where they live it can be quite wet (subject to global warming) and in those parts of Africa where lions live it is much dryer.

RELATED: Can tigers swim and can tigers climb trees?

Location: India

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