95 Fun Facts About Tigers

Which of these populations is often considered the largest of all tigers?

Siberian tiger is the traditional answer, and its shaggy winter coat, the longest of any tiger's, adds to the bulk, yet wild males weighed in recent decades average lighter than those of a century ago.

Which of these tigers is thought to have gone extinct by the 1980s?

Javan tiger: as farms spread across crowded Java it retreated to remote upland forest, the last sightings came from Meru Betiri in 1976, and it was declared extinct in 2008.

Wild tigers are native to which single continent?

Asia: no tiger has ever lived wild in Africa, where lions and leopards are the big cats; the tiger's range once ran from the Caspian Sea to Russia's Pacific coast and south to Indonesia.

Researchers count wild tigers, each with a one-of-a-kind coat pattern, mainly using which tool?

Camera traps photograph passing tigers and each flank is matched like a fingerprint; India keeps a national photo library of its cats, which also helps anti-poaching teams.

Unlike most cats, tigers are known to genuinely enjoy doing what?

Swimming: tigers lie half-submerged in pools and streams to stay cool in the heat, and rivers several kilometres wide are no barrier to them.

Shave a tiger and what would you still see on its skin?

A tiger's stripes are visible on its skin as well as its fur, because the pigment pattern lies in the skin and hair follicles, not only in the coat.

Which island is the only wild home of the smallest surviving tiger subspecies?

Sumatra's tigers were cut off from the continent when seas rose after the last ice age, some 6,000 to 12,000 years ago, and that isolation is thought to have kept them the smallest tigers alive.

What face does a tiger pull in the flehmen response, also seen when horses sniff a scent?

A curled-lip grimace with a wrinkled nose draws scent over receptors in the roof of the mouth, letting a tiger read from a scent mark who passed and whether a tigress is ready to mate.

About how far can a tiger's roar carry through the forest?

About 3 kilometres, nearly 2 miles: tigers seldom roar, saving it to announce themselves to distant rivals and mates, and a mother roars to summon her cubs.

Which island tiger, the smallest of them all, died out around the middle of the 20th century?

Bali tiger: hunters took the last known specimens in the 1930s and none was ever kept in a zoo, so a few museum skins and skulls are all that remain of the smallest tiger.

What is the primary hunting strategy that tigers use to catch prey?

Tigers stalk and ambush: a tiger creeps toward prey with its head lowered, using every scrap of cover to get close, then relies on one explosive rush rather than sustained speed.

Roughly how often does a wild tiger need to make a large kill?

About once a week: most hunts fail, with success estimates running from one in twenty to one in two, so a tiger gorges on a big kill and returns to the carcass for days.

About how long is a tigress pregnant before her cubs are born?

About 100 days, a little over three months: the cubs arrive helpless at around a kilogram each, and the mother hides them in thick cover, a cave or a rock shelter.

Unlike true albinos, white tigers keep dark stripes; what is their pale-coat condition called?

Leucism, not albinism: white tigers lack only the red and yellow pigment, so the dark markings stay, and a cub is white only if it inherits the recessive gene from both parents.

The 2020 Netflix true-crime series "Tiger King" followed which convicted former zookeeper?

Joe Exotic (Joseph Maldonado-Passage), the Oklahoma zoo owner, was convicted in 2019 of a murder-for-hire plot against his rival Carole Baskin and of wildlife crimes; his 22-year sentence was later cut to 21.

In Hindu mythology, which goddess is depicted riding a tiger?

Durga rides a tiger or a lion into battle against the buffalo demon Mahishasura; the male gods, who see her as their combined power, lend her their own weapons for the fight.

Unlike a house cat's vertical slits, a tiger's pupils are what shape?

Round: a tiger's pupils stay circular as they narrow in daylight, then open very wide after dark to pull in as much light as possible for night hunting.

Which breakfast cereal brand uses a cartoon tiger as a mascot?

Frosted Flakes has had Tony the Tiger on the box since 1952; Thurl Ravenscroft growled his 'They're Gr-r-reat!' for more than fifty years, until his death in 2005.

What are tiger cubs' eyes like when they are first born?

Closed and blind: a cub's eyes open only after one to two weeks, so the mother hides the litter and, if danger nears, carries the cubs one by one in her mouth to a new den.

Around what age do young tigers usually strike out to live on their own?

About 2 years: cubs join hunts well before then but stay with the family until 17 to 24 months; daughters tend to settle close by while sons roam much farther to find a range.

The tiger-haunted Sundarbans is the world's largest example of what?

Mangrove forest: the Sundarbans covers the delta of the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna, and its tigers are feared as man-eaters by the villagers who enter to fish and gather honey.

Which famous author wrote 'The Tyger,' a poem beginning with 'Tyger Tyger, burning bright'?

William Blake printed 'The Tyger' in Songs of Experience (1794), where it answers 'The Lamb' from Songs of Innocence by asking whether one maker could have formed both creatures.

The tiger's genus, Panthera, holds five living cats; which of these is one of them?

Jaguar: it joins the tiger, lion, leopard and one high-mountain cat in Panthera, while the cheetah and cougar, big as they are, sit on the house cat's branch of the family, the Felinae.

Genome studies show which cat is the tiger's closest living relative?

Snow leopard: although lions can interbreed with tigers, DNA studies make this smaller mountain cat the tiger's sister species, their lineages parting roughly three million years ago.

What is a 'liger'?

A male lion's cub with a tigress outgrows both parents, perhaps because growth-promoting genes from its lion father go unchecked by the tigress's, making ligers the largest living cats.

Which of these tigers takes its name from a river rather than a region?

Amur tiger: the Amur River forms a long stretch of the border between Russia and China, and the cats along it, once hunted close to extinction, recovered after the Soviet Union banned tiger hunting.

What is 'Project Tiger,' launched in 1973?

Project Tiger is an Indian government conservation scheme, launched in April 1973 as tiger numbers collapsed; it began with nine reserves and has since grown to more than fifty.

How do tigers typically kill large prey?

A suffocating bite to the throat crushes the windpipe and keeps the tiger clear of horns, antlers and hooves; small prey are killed with a bite to the back of the neck instead.

The extinct 'Tasmanian tiger' was not a cat at all but what kind of animal?

A marsupial: the thylacine raised its young in a pouch and owed its nickname to the dark bands across its back; the last known one died in a Hobart zoo in 1936, weeks after winning legal protection.

What is the collective noun for a group of tigers?

A streak is one name for it, though the word is rarely needed: adult tigers live alone, so a group seen in the wild is usually a mother with her cubs.

Which tiger shares Pi's lifeboat in Yann Martel's 'Life of Pi'?

The tiger is Richard Parker, named after the cabin boy killed and eaten in the 1884 Mignonette shipwreck case (and a similarly fated Poe character); he and Pi share the lifeboat for 227 days.

What has been the primary threat to wild tiger populations in the 21st century?

Habitat loss and poaching: tigers now hold less than a tenth of their historical range, and poachers still kill them, even inside reserves, to feed an illegal trade in their body parts.

Which tiger body part turns up most often in trafficking seizures?

The skin: whole pelts, prized as status symbols, were the most often seized item in TRAFFIC's records for 2000 to mid-2022, a haul that added up to at least 3,377 tigers.

Hodori, a friendly cartoon tiger, was the mascot of which city's 1988 Summer Olympics?

Seoul: 'ho' comes from the Korean word for tiger, the name was picked from 2,295 public suggestions, and the cat was drawn smiling to show off Korea's friendly, hospitable side.

Tigers once lived as far west as which present-day country?

Turkey: the Caspian tiger ranged from the country's eastern highlands across Iran to China's Xinjiang until hunting, and the clearing of riverside reed beds for cotton, had all but finished it off by the 1970s.

What famous tiger character appears as the villain in Rudyard Kipling's 'The Jungle Book'?

Shere Khan: Kipling glossed 'Shere' as tiger and 'Khan' as a chief's title, and the cat's own mother nicknamed him Lungri, 'the Lame One', for the crippled leg he was born with.

How does a tiger tell rivals where its territory begins?

By spraying urine on vegetation, rocks and tree trunks, a tiger leaves a musky message that tells others its sex and identity, and it backs the scent up with claw marks raked high on trees.

What first name was golfer Tiger Woods given at birth?

Tiger Woods was born Eldrick Tont Woods in 1975; his father Earl nicknamed him 'Tiger' after a South Vietnamese army friend, Colonel Vuong Dang Phong.

What is the name for the raised fifth toe on each of a tiger's front paws?

Dewclaw: a tiger has five toes on each front paw and four behind; the dewclaw sits too high to touch the ground, but cats use it like a thumb to hook and hold struggling prey.

Which small prey animal is notorious for wounding tigers so badly that some turn man-eater?

Porcupine: quills left in a paw or jaw can fester and cripple a tiger, and a cat that can no longer catch its usual prey may turn to people, who are easier to kill.

What reflective layer behind a tiger's retina boosts its night vision?

The tapetum lucidum, a mirror-like layer behind the retina, bounces light back through the eye for a second chance at detection; it is why a cat's eyes shine in a torch beam.

In the Chinese zodiac the Tiger comes third, straight after which animal?

Ox: in the folk tale of the Jade Emperor's great race, the Rat rode across the river on the Ox and leapt off to win, the Ox came second, and the Tiger, fighting the current, arrived third.

In which of Milne's Pooh books does Tigger first bounce into the Hundred Acre Wood?

The House at Pooh Corner (1928) introduces Tigger in its second chapter, when he turns up at Pooh's door in the middle of the night; he is missing from the first book altogether.

Which comic strip pairs a six-year-old boy with his stuffed tiger?

Calvin and Hobbes: Hobbes is a lifeless toy to everyone but Calvin, and Bill Watterson fought his syndicate to keep the pair off mugs and T-shirts, so almost no licensed merchandise exists.

Which hunter shot the Champawat Tiger in 1907, after she had reportedly killed 436 people?

Jim Corbett tracked the tigress after her last victim, a 16-year-old girl; her broken canine teeth had left her unable to catch her usual prey, which is why she turned on people.

Since 2017, IUCN cat specialists have recognised just two tiger subspecies, divided along which line?

Mainland versus island: one subspecies covers the continent and the other the Sunda Islands, because the older nine-way split rested on coat and size traits that vary within a single population.

At a 2010 summit in St Petersburg, the 13 tiger-range countries pledged to do what by 2022?

Double wild tiger numbers: the deadline was set for 2022 because it was the next Year of the Tiger, and by 2023 the Global Tiger Forum's count had risen by about three-quarters.

Carl Linnaeus first filed the tiger in 1758 under which genus, along with every other cat he named?

Felis: Linnaeus used the one genus for every cat species known to him, and only in the early 20th century did Reginald Pocock group the tiger with the other big cats in Panthera.

Which band recorded 'Eye of the Tiger' as the theme for Rocky III?

Survivor got the job after Queen refused Sylvester Stallone the use of 'Another One Bites the Dust', the track the fight scenes had first been cut to; he phoned the band himself.

Which Mongol ruler, Marco Polo's host, is reported to have kept tigers at his 13th-century court?

Kublai Khan: Marco Polo wrote that the Khan kept great 'lions' striped black, red and white, carried to the hunt in covered carts and loosed on boar, bears and stags, beasts that were almost certainly tigers.

Which scissor-like cheek teeth do tigers and other cats use to slice meat from a carcass?

Carnassials: an upper premolar and a lower molar slide past each other like shears; cats kept these blades but gave up most grinding teeth, so a tiger has 30 teeth where a dog has 42.

Hunting tigers find their prey mainly with which pair of senses?

Sight and hearing: a tiger makes little use of its nose on the hunt and saves its sense of smell mostly for reading the scent marks that other tigers leave.

On which parts of a tiger's body do the dark markings run horizontally rather than vertically?

On the limbs and forehead the dark markings run horizontally; on the trunk they run vertically, which helps break up the cat's outline among tree trunks, reeds and tall grass.

How may a tiger's orange coat look to its colour-blind prey animals?

Deer and boar are dichromats that cannot separate orange from green, so a tiger's coat reads as a dull green blending into foliage for the animals that matter.

What covers a tiger's tongue, letting it rasp the last meat from a bone?

Hard, sharp spines called papillae make the tongue as rough as coarse sandpaper, so once the teeth have done the cutting a tiger can scrape a bone clean with a few licks.

Where does a tiger carry a bright white spot ringed with black?

On the back of each ear: the spots are thought to act as false eyes that deter anything creeping up from behind, and a threatened tiger twists its ears to flash them forward.

What does a tiger usually do with a large kill it cannot finish at once?

Covers it with leaves and dirt: after dragging the carcass into cover, a tiger rakes leaves, grass and soil over it before going off to drink or rest, then comes back to feed for days.

Kaziranga National Park, a tiger and rhino stronghold on the Brahmaputra, lies in which Indian state?

Assam: when the river floods Kaziranga in the monsoon, its tigers, deer and the world's largest population of one-horned rhinos crowd onto raised ground, some of it built as refuges.

How does a tiger hold its tail to signal a friendly mood?

Up and swaying slowly signals a friendly mood; a loosely hanging tail means the cat is relaxed, and, far from being a happy wag, one lashing from side to side spells tension or aggression.

What is the usual name for the soft snorting greeting, also called prusten, that friendly tigers exchange?

Chuffing is a breathy puff blown through the nostrils with the mouth shut, traded by tigers that trust each other; a mother uses it to greet and comfort her cubs.

Which tiger body part is steeped in wine to make a traditional Chinese tonic?

Bones: tiger bone wine, long sold as a remedy for arthritis and aching joints, takes years to steep; China banned the trade in 1993, yet demand still drives poaching and tiger farming.

Two tigers support the shield on which country's coat of arms?

Malaysia: the two tigers were inherited from the arms of the Federated Malay States under British rule, which is why the design follows European heraldry; the Malayan tiger is also the national animal.

Which wild dog, hunting in large packs, is capable of killing a tiger?

Dhole packs have been seen fighting tigers and at times killing and eating one, though many of the pack die in the attempt, and a tiger normally dominates them.

Where do most of the world's tigers now live?

In captivity: by 2020 estimates, breeding farms, most of them in China, held over 8,000 tigers and the United States about 5,000 more, together well above the number left in the wild.

Which large wild cattle species is regular prey for tigers in India's forests?

Gaur, the largest of the wild cattle, are regular prey in India's forest reserves, but risky ones: a bull is a formidable opponent, and gaur have killed tigers in self-defence.

A tiger's scent marks are often said to smell like which snack?

Buttered popcorn: chemists traced the aroma of tiger marking fluid to 2AP, the same compound that gives basmati rice and fresh bread their smell.

In a seven-year study in Nepal's Chitwan park, what killed 12 of 56 tiger cubs and juveniles?

New males taking over a range killed them: with her cubs gone a tigress breeds again sooner, this time with the newcomer, whereas a resident father tolerates his cubs and even shares kills.

As of its 2022 assessment, the tiger as a species sits in which IUCN Red List category?

Endangered: the species as a whole sits one step short of the worst wild category, even though several regional tiger populations are rated Critically Endangered on their own.

Roughly how many tigers are estimated to have been killed by hunters between 1875 and 1925?

About 80,000 tigers are estimated to have been killed in those fifty years, the peak of trophy hunting in India, where shooting parties rode out on elephants and counted their kills.

Part of a tiger's roar is pitched too low for humans to hear; what is such sound called?

Infrasound: a roar reaches down to 18 hertz and below, under the floor of human hearing, and such deep tones travel far through forest, letting widely scattered tigers keep in touch.

In which British island colony were tigers reported to kill 200 to 300 people a year in the 1840s?

Singapore: as plantations pushed into the island's jungle, tigers preyed on the labourers, and man-eating stayed a serious problem there until the cats themselves were hunted out.

In 1986, Sundarbans villagers wore what on the back of their heads to deter tigers?

Villagers wore human-face masks on the backs of their heads, since tigers almost always attack from behind and avoid prey that seems to be watching; the trick worked for a while until the cats caught on.

The 2022 US law against keeping big cats as pets also outlawed which roadside-zoo attraction?

Cub petting: the Big Cat Public Safety Act bans public contact with big cats as well as private ownership; paid photo sessions had given breeders a reason to turn out a constant supply of cubs.

Siegfried & Roy's Las Vegas show ended in 2003 after a tiger attacked which performer on stage?

Roy Horn was seized by the neck and dragged offstage by a seven-year-old white tiger on his 59th birthday; he survived, partly paralysed, and the duo's long-running Mirage show never reopened.

Which actress voices Tigress, the tiger kung fu master, in the Kung Fu Panda films?

Angelina Jolie voices Tigress, the fiercest of the Furious Five; Lucy Liu is in the cast too, but as Viper, the snake of the group.

In a 2004 poll of 50,000 people, the tiger was voted favourite animal, narrowly beating which?

In Animal Planet's 2004 poll the tiger took 21 percent across 73 countries, just ahead of the dog on 20 percent and the dolphin on 13; a 2018 study again ranked it the most popular wild animal.

Which Chinese leader dismissed the atomic bomb as a 'paper tiger'?

Mao Zedong told the American reporter Anna Louise Strong in 1946 that the bomb looked terrible but could not decide a war; when his interpreter tried 'scarecrow', Mao insisted on 'paper tiger'.

Among China's Four Symbols of the constellations, the White Tiger represents which direction?

The White Tiger of the West rules autumn and the metal element, the counterpart of the Azure Dragon of the East, which rules spring; the Vermilion Bird and Black Tortoise take south and north.

Who wrote and illustrated the picture book 'The Tiger Who Came to Tea'?

Judith Kerr published it in 1968: a tiger rings Sophie's doorbell and eats and drinks everything in the house; Kerr herself had reached Britain as a child fleeing Nazi Germany.

Which Greek god was depicted riding a tiger?

Dionysus, god of wine, was shown riding a tiger or in a tiger-drawn chariot, a nod to the myth that he marched east and came home in triumph from the conquest of India.

In the Chinese classic Water Margin, how does the hero Wu Song kill a man-eating tiger?

With his bare fists: after eighteen bowls of wine at an inn, Wu Song ignores the landlord's warning, snaps his staff on a tree when the tiger springs, then pins the cat and beats it senseless.

Which southern Indian dynasty used the tiger as its official emblem on coins and seals?

Chola rulers stamped a tiger on their coins and seals as the royal emblem; a gold coin of Rajaraja I shows the cat seated beside two fish under a legend boasting of his conquests.

In Korean mythology, tigers serve as messengers of what?

The mountain gods: Korean shrine paintings show Sansin, the mountain spirit, as a white-bearded old man with a tiger at his side, the animal that carries out his will.

Tipu's Tiger, an automaton of a tiger mauling a European man, is held by which museum?

Tipu's Tiger has been in the Victoria and Albert Museum since 1880; it was seized from Tipu Sultan's palace at Seringapatam in 1799 and first shown in London at East India House in 1808.

What musical instrument is concealed inside the 18th-century Tipu's Tiger automaton?

A small pipe organ sits inside: turning a crank works bellows so the victim wails and raises an arm while the tiger grunts, and a flap on the flank lifts to reveal a keyboard.

In which country did officials shut down the monk-run 'Tiger Temple' in 2016, removing 137 tigers?

Thailand: wildlife officers cleared the temple in Kanchanaburi after years of trafficking claims that its monks denied, and found the frozen bodies of 40 cubs on the premises.

Machali, Ranthambore's celebrated tigress, earned fame in 2003 by killing which large reptile?

A mugger crocodile: the fight cost Machali two canine teeth, yet she went on raising cubs, lived to about 19 and was called the most photographed tigress in the world.

Which treaty's Appendix I bans international trade in tigers and their body parts?

CITES, the treaty that governs international wildlife trade, has banned cross-border trade in tigers since 1975, yet seizures show the illegal market carries on.

The tiger holds which record among living cats?

Longest canines: a big tiger's upper fangs can top 7 cm, long enough to slip between the neck vertebrae of smaller prey and sever the spinal cord in a single bite.

A 'golden tabby' tiger's markings are what colour?

Reddish-brown: a recessive 'wideband' gene limits black pigment as each hair grows, leaving rusty markings on a pale gold coat; captive golden tigers all seem to trace back to one white tiger, Bhim.

White tigers are not a separate breed but a rare colour form of which tiger?

Bengal tiger: the white coat needs two copies of one recessive gene, and many zoo white tigers descend from Mohan, a cub caught by the ruler of the Indian state of Rewa in 1951.

What eye colour do white tigers have?

Blue eyes and the white coat come from a mutation in the SLC45A2 gene that blocks red and yellow pigment; the same gene lightens horses to cream.

Inbred white tigers are especially prone to which visible condition?

Crossed eyes: the gene that whitens the coat also misroutes the optic nerves, so signals reach the wrong side of the brain; the fault is tied to the colour itself, not only to inbreeding.

How does a tigress give her half-grown cubs practice at making a kill?

She knocks prey down first: tigresses have been seen throwing a buffalo off its feet, then stepping back so the cubs can try to finish it; year-old cubs still fumble the killing bite.

The South China tiger was once known as the 'Amoy tiger', after the old name of which Chinese port?

Xiamen, one of the first Chinese ports opened to Western trade after the Opium War, was long called Amoy abroad, and the tiger's old subspecies label, amoyensis, still carries the name.