Asia’s striped Panthera that lost ninety-three percent of its range
Panthera tigris still stalks Asian forests from Russian taiga to Sumatran tropics, but early twentieth-century maps have lost at least ninety-three percent of historic ground. Local extinctions erased West and Central Asia, much of China, Java, and Bali; IUCN lists the species Endangered.
Linnaeus named the animal Felis tigris in 1758, drawing on earlier naturalists such as Conrad Gessner and Ulisse Aldrovandi, and Reginald Pocock moved it into Panthera in 1929. The English word passed through French and Latin from Greek; an old link to an Armenian or Persian word for arrow, and to the river Tigris, is now doubted. Genetics puts the tiger closest to the snow leopard, the two lineages parting between 2.7 and 3.7 million years ago. All tigers alive today trace back to a common forebear dated to roughly 108,000–72,000 years before the present, following a glacial population crash; modern tigers spread across Asia from a refuge in Indochina once the last ice age eased.
How many subspecies exist is still argued. Nine were proposed, from Bengal and Siberian to Javan and Bali, but a 1999 critique noted they rested on museum skins that might not represent whole populations, and a 2015 analysis backed just two, mainland tigris and the smaller Sunda sondaica, which the IUCN cat taxonomists adopted in 2017. A 2018 genome study of 32 samples then found six living forms to be distinct lineages, and a 2023 study supported all nine, so the question is formally under review.
Size varies enormously. Head and body run 1.4 to 2.8 metres, with a tail up to 1.1 metres; male Bengal tigers weigh 200 to 260 kilograms, while male Sumatrans manage 100 to 140, probably a case of island dwarfism. The canines, 6.4 to 7.6 centimetres long, are the longest of any cat, and Siberian tigers grow winter hair up to 105 millimetres against the usual 35. Because populations differ so much, the tiger may on average be smaller than the lion.
Tigers hunt hoofed mammals by ambush and live alone, defending home ranges against rivals of their own sex; cubs, usually two or three, stay with their mother for about two years. Their range is thought to have fallen by 53 to 68 per cent since the late 1990s, driven by deforestation, poaching for skins and body parts, and conflict when they take livestock where wild prey has thinned.
Source: Tiger
