Amazing Facts About Tigers Blew My Mind…But The Last 5 Brought Me To Tears

Tigers are some of the most amazing creatures on the planet.  In fact, Animal Planet recently voted tigers to be one of the world’s most favorite animal.  But a great deal of what we think we know about tigers is colored by common misconceptions or confusion with other large cats.  Perhaps if we grow better informed about these powerful beasts that are on the brink of extinction, we can help grow their numbers once again.

Here are amazing facts about tigers you probably do not know…

1.         A tiger’s legs are so powerful that they can remain standing even when dead…

Tigers have been known to have been shot, bleed out, and die, all while standing up. Pretty crazy.

2. They are the largest of all the big cats, weighing up to 300k (700 pounds)…

Just a little size comparison for you. Look at its paws. 

3. If you look a tiger in the eyes he is less likely to kill you…

Tigers prefer to hunt by ambush, so by looking a tiger in the eyes you are showing him you know he is there. Now he has lost the element of surprise, and will most likely go find something else to feast on. Because of this, men in India often wear masks on the back of their head with a second face.

 4. Tigers are completely blind for the first week of their life. About half do not survive to adulthood…

5. The white spot on the back of their ears is called an ocelli…

6. Tigers have antiseptic saliva…

7. Tiger’s tongues make our tongues look pretty sad…

The tiger’s tongue is covered with numerous small, sharp, rear-facing projections called papillae. These papillae gives the tongue is rough, rasping texture and is designed to help strip the skin, feathers, fur and meat right off its prey. They have been known to lick the paint right off the walls of their enclosures in the zoo.

8. Tigers are solitary creatures…

Tigers are solitary animals, and it actually fairly rare to see them group together in the wild. The exception to this, of course, is a mother and her cubs.

9. They’re nicer than lions…

Unlike lions, who would fight to the death over a kill, when a tiger crosses paths with another tiger while hunting, they often share the meal together. Also, when several tigers are present at a kill, the males will wait for females and cubs to eat first, again, unlike lions, which do the opposite. Tigers rarely argue or fight over a kill and simply wait turns.

10. Tigers have very diverse diets…

Tigers feed on deer antelope, wild boar, and buffalo. But did you know they also eat a variety of birds, fish, rodents, small elephants, rhinos, crocodiles, and even leopards

11. Tigers do not normally view humans as prey…

Tigers will only attack a human if they feel threatened. Or if they’re really really hungry and you look delicious.  But seriously, if you were to ever encounter a tiger in the wild, slowly back far, far away while keeping eye contact with him. Chances are you’re in his territory and he wants you to leave more than he wants to eat you.

12. Tigers can leap distances of over 6m, and jump up to 5m vertically…

13. A backhand from a tiger can kill you…

14. Tigers have been known to imitate the call of other animals to successfully attract prey…

15. Tigers have a brain that weighs over 300g..

It is the 2nd largest brain of all carnivores, the largest being the brain of a polar bear

16. Tigers are adept swimmers…

Unlike almost all other big cats, they enjoy bathing and often play in the water. As adults, they often swim several kilometers to hunt or to cross rivers. The only other big cat that doesn’t mind getting wet is the Black Panther. However, they don’t seek out water or play in the water like tigers do

17. They have an amazing short term memory…

Cats in general have been found to have a better memory than any other animal, including humans, being several hundred times better than dogs and dozens of times better than primates. Tigers’ short-term memory alone lasts about thirty times longer than humans’, and their memories are made with stronger brain synapses, meaning that they can remember more and do not forget things as easily as we do.

18. There were once nine subspecies of tigers: Now only 6 remain…

Three subspecies of tiger have been killed off in the last 80 years.

19. The Balinese tiger was purposely hunted to extinction…

Due to the Balinese cultural belief that tigers represent evil and destruction. Above is one of the only known photographs of a Balinese tiger.

20. There are a greater number of tigers in captivity in the US alone than there are wild tigers left on earth…

21. The white tiger has become even rarer in the wild due to trophy hunting or capture for the exotic pet trade…

There have been no recorded sightings of these elusive predators in the wild for the past 50 years. Today, the white tiger can still be found in a handful of zoos and animal sanctuaries.

22. It has been estimated that all the last remaining subspecies of tigers could become extinct in the wild in as little as 15 years…

We have lost 97% of the wild tiger population in the last century, and numbers continue to get lower.

Please help us spread the word about these majestic beasts by sharing this story.  With your help, we can spread awareness about the decline of these wonderful creatures.

Did Sex Drive lead to Mammal Evolution?..

How new species are created is at the core of the theory of evolution. Mammals may be a good example of how sex chromosome change drove major groups apart.

How new species are created is at the very core of the theory of evolution. The reigning theory is that physically separated populations of one species drift apart gradually.

But changes in chromosomes, particularly sex chromosomes, can interpose drastic barriers to reproduction. Mammals may be a good example. Comparisons of the sex chromosomes of the three major mammal groups show that there were two upheavals of sex chromosomes during mammal evolution.

The first corresponded to the divergence of monotreme mammals (platypus and echidna) from the rest, and the second to the divergence of marsupials from placental mammals (including humans).

In a paper published in Bio Essays, I propose that drastic sex chromosome changes could have played a direct role in separating our lineage (placental mammals), first from the egg-laying monotremes, and then from marsupials.

In humans and other placental mammals, such as mice, dogs and elephants, sex is determined by a pair of chromosomes. Females have two copies of the X while males have a single copy of the X and a small Y that contains the male-determining gene SRY.

Other vertebrate animals also have sex chromosomes, but they are different. Birds have an unrelated sex chromosome pair called ZW, and a different sex determining gene called DMRT1.

Snakes also have a ZW system, but again it is a different chromosome with different genes. Lizards and turtles, frogs and fish have all sorts of sex chromosomes that are different from the mammal system and from each other.

The rise and fall of sex chromosomes

Sex chromosomes are really weird because of the way they evolved. They start off as ordinary chromosomes, known as autosomes. A new sex gene arises on one member of the pair, defining either a male-determining Y as in humans or a female-determining W as in birds.

The acquisition of a sex factor on one member of the pair is the kiss of death for that chromosome, and it degrades quickly. This explains why only a few active genes remain on the human Y and the bird W.

When old sex chromosomes self-destruct, a new sex gene and sex chromosomes may take over. This is fraught with peril because the interaction of old and new systems of sex determination is likely to cause severe infertility in hybrids.

Rival sex genes may be at war with each other, causing intersexual development, or at least infertility. For instance, what will be the sex of a hybrid that has both a male-determining Y and a female-determining W?

Added to this are problems with gene dosage because the degenerate Y and the W have few genes. If an XY male mates with a ZW female, most of the progeny will be short of genes. There may also be problems with gene dosage because genes on the X and the Z are used to working harder to compensate for their single dosage.

Rearrangement of sex chromosomes with autosomes also causes severe infertility because half the reproductive cells of a hybrid will have too many, or too few, copies of the fused chromosome.

Such hybrid infertility poses a reproductive barrier between populations with the new and the old sex system. So could such barriers drive apart populations to form distinct species?

Reproductive barriers and new species

The idea that chromosome change could drive the formation of new species was popular 50 years ago.

But it was thoroughly dismissed by evolutionary geneticists in favor of the idea that speciation, the formation of new and distinct species, must occur in populations already separated by a physical barrier such as a river or mountains, or behavior such as mating time, and occupied different environments.

Small mutations would accumulate slowly and the two populations would be selected for different traits. Eventually they would become so different that they could no longer mate with each other and would form two species. This allopatric speciation relied on external factors.

The alternate view, that sympatric speciation can happen within a population because of intrinsic genome changes, fell out of favor. Partly this was because it is hard to demonstrate speciation of populations sharing the same environment, the argument always being that the environment could be subtly different.

The other problem was imagining how a major chromosome change that occurred in one animal could spread to a whole population. Sex chromosome change is especially drastic because it directly affects reproduction. But our comparisons show that sex chromosomes have undergone dramatic changes throughout vertebrate evolution.

It is important to examine closely examples of evolutionary divergence that were accompanied by drastic sex chromosome change. Strangely, mammals may offer us a window into this evolutionary past. Their sex chromosomes are extremely stable, yet they have undergone rare dramatic changes, each of which lines up near when one lineage became two.

Sex chromosome change and mammal divergence

Placental mammals all share essentially the same XY. Marsupials, too, have XY chromosomes, but they are smaller; genes on the top bit of human X are on autosomes in marsupials.

Comparisons outside mammal’s shows that this bit was fused to ancient marsupial-like X and Y chromosomes before the different lines of placental mammals separated 105-million years ago.

Monotreme mammals (platypus and echidna) have bizarre multiple X and Y chromosomes. Surprisingly, comparing the genes they bear showed that they are completely unrelated to the XY of humans and marsupials. In fact, platypus sex chromosomes are related to bird sex chromosomes.

The human XY pair is represented by an ordinary chromosome in platypus. So our XY and SRY are quite young because they must have evolved after monotremes diverged from our lineage 190-million years ago.

Sex chromosome change has occurred very rarely in mammals, so it seems significant that each change corresponds to a major divergence. That’s why I propose that sex chromosome turnover separated monotremes from the rest of the mammals, and sex chromosome fusion occurred later to separate our lineage from marsupials.

Strengthening the argument that sex chromosome turnover begets speciation is evidence of a new round of sex chromosome change and speciation.

In Japan and Eastern Europe, species in two rodent lineages have completely eliminated the Y chromosome and replaced SRY with a different gene on a different chromosome. In each lineage the Y-less rodents have recently diverged into three species.

What does this mean for our own lineage? The primate Y seems to be more stable than the rodent Y. But if it continues to degrade at the same rate, it will disappear in about 4.6 million years.

Will it be replaced by some different gene and chromosome? And if so, will this unleash a new round of hominid speciation? We may have to wait another 4.6 million years to find out.