St. Petersburg hosts the International Tiger Forum on November 21-24.
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© RIA Novosti . Mikhail Tsiganov
St. Petersburg hosts the International Tiger Forum on November 21-24.
The Amur tiger (Panthera tiger altaica), known also as Ussuri, Siberian or North Chinese, mainly lives in the Primorsky Krai and Khabarovsk Krai, in Far Eastern Siberia and partly in northeast China and North Korea. There are now about 400 Amur tiger species which can be found in the wild.
The Indochinese tiger or Corbett's tiger is found in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam. The population is put at between 1,200 and 1,800.
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© RIA Novosti . Mikhail Tsiganov
The Sumatran tiger is found only on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. The population is evaluated as 400-500 individuals. Most of them live on the territory of national parks and nature reserves.
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© RIA Novosti . Valery Titievskiy
The first hybrids of tigers appeared in the 19th century. There are hybrids between a lion and a tiger (between the Amur and Bengal subspecies). The liger is a hybrid cross between a male lion and a tigress. Female ligers are fertile and this is very unusual for hybrids. Photo: liger.
Tigers can mutate and turn into totally white species – the Bengal tigers with dark brown or black stripes on a white background color and blue eyes. The white tigers are born from one species per 10,000 with normal color.
The golden tiger subspecies is very rare and is caused by a recessive gene.
There were reports on the existence of the Bengal tigers with smoky or entirely black fur and tigers with blue-grey fur (the Maltese tiger). These types of color are caused by unstable mutations. Photo: the Maltese tiger.
