yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Tigers 101 | National Geographic


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

With their signature orange fur and black stripes, tigers have become icons of beauty, power, and the importance of conservation. Tigers have evolved into six subspecies. The tiger's tale of evolution can be traced back to about two million years ago when the earliest known tiger ancestor left Africa and ventured into Asia. Over time, the big cat split into nine subspecies, with six still alive today.

The most numerous subspecies is the Bengal tiger, accounting for approximately 50 percent of the tiger population worldwide. Tigers are the world's largest cats; on average, the big cats weigh about 450 pounds. But the largest is the Siberian tiger subspecies, measuring up to 13 feet long and weighing up to 660 pounds. This extra weight is primarily because of large, powerful muscles. Unlike lions, the second largest of the big cats, tigers have more muscle mass and are therefore heavier.

Tigers have webbed toes, often living near bodies of water. Tigers have adapted for a semi-aquatic lifestyle. They appear to enjoy being in the water, unlike most cats, and are excellent swimmers, using their powerful muscles to propel their bodies in the water. They've also evolved to have webbing between their toes. The webbing allows the big cats to push around a greater volume of water with each stroke of their paws.

White tigers are a type of Bengal tiger. The classic black and orange coloration of most tigers is caused by the pigments eumelanin, which turns fur black, and pheomelanin, which turns fur orange. The production of pheomelanin is triggered by the gene SLC45A2. White tigers carry a mutated version of this gene, which prevents them from producing orange pigmentation.

Fewer than 4,000 tigers remain in the wild. At the turn of the 20th century, approximately 100,000 tigers roamed the wild, living as far west as Turkey and as far north as Russia. But due to deforestation, human development, and poaching, their range severely decreased, and within 100 years, the world's tiger population declined by about 96 percent.

Over the past few decades, programs have been put in place to protect tigers and their habitats. With the help of the global community, tiger populations may slowly rebound.

More Articles

View All
LA 92 - Official Film Trailer | National Geographic
We’re southbound on Pon. It appears to be three male blacks in the vehicle; it’s a white Hyundai. [Applause] I believe at any time during this evening, did it go through your mind that this was not a human being that you were beating? The police approach…
IGTV...is this the end of YouTube?
There we have it, you guys! Shots fired! I thought it was relatively unfeasible for a company to potentially disrupt and take market share away from YouTube, which pretty much has a monopoly on long form user-generated content. That is until now. Now, for…
Lateral & total surface area of triangular prisms | Grade 8 (TX) | Khan Academy
We’re asked what is the lateral surface area of the triangular prism and what is the total surface area of the triangular prism. Pause this video and try to solve this on your own before we work through this together. All right, so first let’s just remin…
Subtracting integers find the missing value | 7th grade | Khan Academy
So if I were to ask you if I were to tell you that negative 3 minus blank is equal to negative 4, can you pause this video and figure out what this blank is? All right, now let’s do this together, and I’m going to do this by drawing out a number line bec…
How the delivery of a speech affects the impact of the words | Reading | Khan Academy
Hello readers. Today we’re talking about how the delivery of the speech affects the impact of the words. So what do I mean by that? It’s all the ways that how a person says something affects what they mean. Words on a page may have a certain definition, b…
We Have To Talk About Weed
Cannabis has been vilified to a ridiculous degree for the last century, but it’s now finally being decriminalised in more and more places around the world – it’s just recently been legalized in Germany. And for very good reasons! Compared to legal drugs l…