The Tiger

There would appear to be two factors which influence when tigers living in the wild are most active: Human activity Prey activity Human activity In a way this behaviour is reminiscent of the leopard. The tiger, in many parts of their range, have become totally nocturnal as a response to human activities. In other words, in areas where the human is active during the daytime, this has put off tigers being active themselves during the daytime and in order to avoid humans they have become nocturnal. It shows that tigers can be both nocturnal and daytime hunters. It also shows us that tigers are wary of people and don't really want to get involved with them. This might surprise some people who think that tigers prey on humans. They don't. The human is not a prey animal for the tiger. Tigers have quite nice dispositions (character). You will find that where tigers attack people it is often because they can no longer attack large prey animals (which they need to attack to survive) bec...

The infographic says it all. When I prepared this infographic, I was thinking of the challenges given to the men competing in the television competition The World's Strongest Man. A lot of their tests are about dragging and carrying huge weights for as far and as fast as they can. It is a good test of brute strength. None of the past champions would have been able to move a 1,697-pound gaur on rough ground an inch. A tiger did. He 'dragged away a gaur bull'. Or drag a cow two miles up a slope in a wood!! A tiger did. That is almost unbelievable. The source is impeccable and mentioned at the base of the infographic. Infographic on why the tiger is endangered

This is a video from Twitter which indicates to me that the managers of this tiger reserve (and I don't know which one it is) have got things wrong. They have allowed too many tourists in vehicles to visit the reserve which is disturbing the tigers.  Striking a balance between tourism to raise money for tiger conservation against disturbance to tigers. The pictures are from different reserves. Image by MikeB of PoC. These disturbances cause stress in tigers. Tourists in vehicles can upset the behaviour of tigers. And I'm going to suggest that the stress element can become so serious that it can prevent matings and of course successful breeding is part of tiger conservation. A critical part. There is a very difficult balance to be struck between allowing tourists to visit a tiger reserve to raise money to maintain the reserve to, in turn, benefit the conservation of tigers in India and the negative impact that tourists can have on tiger conservation if there are too many of them...

This is a classic and very instructive video from India showing how roads and traffic carve up a tiger's home range fragmenting it and killing tigers both through traffic accidents and creating small, unviable sub-populations where genetic diversity is problematic leading to inbreeding and health issues plus sterility. The following quote comes from the IUCN Red List. The people who run the database are the experts on species becoming extinct. The text in brackets is the source of the information. These are scientific studies. "Habitat fragmentation driven by linear infrastructure development, land-use change, and urbanization can drive the extinction of tiger subpopulations (e.g., Mondal and Nagendra 2011, Joshi et al. 2016). Tigers can become locally or functionally extinct in areas where habitat connectivity is severed or severely compromised (Gopal et al. 2010; Harihar et al. 2018b, 2020)." They talk of habitat connectivity being compromised. This means that areas of ...

This is a cross-post. The world of tigers is misogynistic by human standards by which I mean it is the male dominating and demanding easy access to females to procreate. And one way they achieve this is by having a home range which is much bigger than that of females and which encompasses the home ranges of several females. This allows them easy access for procreation.  It is a symbol, as I see it, of male domination, a bit like a harem in human society. It is a bit surprising to me that harems still exist in the world in the 21st century in third-world countries or perhaps illegally where they are accepted.  In ancient times kings and potentates in Asia tended to have multiple wives simultaneously. Wikipedia tells us that a harem may house a man's wife or wives and other unmarried female relatives and unmarried female daughters. Within a home the women live in a separate area and the male owns the home. It looks very similar to tiger social organisation. The seclusion of wome...