The Amur or Siberian Tiger
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The Amur or Siberian Tiger lives primarily in the coniferous, scrub oak, and birch woodlands of eastern Russia, with a few tigers found in northeastern China and northern North Korea.
Amur tigers are the largest of the tiger subspecies. Males can grow up to 10' feet long and weigh up to 660 pounds. Females are smaller, measuring about 8 1/2 feet from head to tail, and weighing about 100 to 200 to 370 pounds.
The Amur tiger's orange coloring is paler than the coloring of other tigers. Its stripes are brown rather than black, and are widely spaced. It has a white chest and belly, and a thick white ruff of fur around its neck.
The primary prey of the Amur tiger is elk and wild boar.
At the beginning of this century it is estimated that there were 100,000 wild tigers, today the number is less than 8,000. Simply put, tigers are disappearing
in the wild. The main threats to tigers are poaching, habitat loss population fragmentation. Even though it is illegal to kill a tiger, wild tigers are still
being poached today because their bones, whiskers and other body parts can be sold on the black market for a lot of money. Tiger parts are used in traditional Chinese medicine because some people believe that tiger parts have special powers.
Forestry and wildlife departments are too understaffed and under budgeted to be effective against the onslaught of poachers. While the exact number of tigers being poached is unknown, some sources have estimated that one tiger a day is being killed in India.
Habitat Loss: Across all of Asia, once vast forests have fallen for timber or conversion to agriculture. Only small islands of forest surrounded by a growing and relatively poor human population are left. As forest space is reduced, the number of animals left in the forest is also reduced, and tigers cannot find the prey they need to survive. As a result, tigers begin to eat the livestock of villagers who live near them. Sometimes tigers even attack humans. People sometimes kill the tigers in order to protect themselves and their livestock
Another problem created by habitat loss is Population Fragmentation. As human populations move farther into the forest, groups of tigers become separated from each other by villages and farms. This means that tigers in one area can no longer mate with tigers in nearby areas. Instead, tigers must breed repeatedly with the same small group of animals. Over time, this inbreeding weakens the gene pool, and tigers are born with birth defects and mutations.
Panthera tigris altaica
It is estimated that only 300 exist in the wild. About 490 captive Amur tigers are managed in zoo conservation programs. To me, this is a travesty.
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