Amazing Facts You Didn’t Know about the Tiger’s Striped Skin – A tiger’s stripes help to break up the outline of its body and make it hard to see. They also look like shadows as the tiger stalks through long grass in the moonlight.
Tigers have striped skin not just striped fur. The stripes are like fingerprints and no two tigers have the same pattern.
Tigers are one of the easiest of the big cats to identify because of their dramatic striped coats. Jaguars and leopards have their rosette spots, lions have their golden fur, and male lions have their mane, but tigers are unique as they strut around jungles and grasslands with their vertical-striped markings, which range from brown to black.
We know nature doesn’t do much by accident or for no reason. Tigers, with their stripes, are instantly recognizable but endangered big cats. The IUCN Red List assessment recognizes six subspecies of tigers, with three of those species critically endangered.
Where Tigers are mostly Found
Found primarily in tropical Asia, they historically had a greater distribution across Central and Western Asia and Turkey. The Amur tiger subspecies still is found in a small portion of the Russian Far East.
Humans have long been fascinated with these cats, and it shows in areas from folklore to cereal boxes. Despite their outsized presence, there’s more to learn about these felines.
Habitation of the Tiger
Tigers are known to live in diverse environmental conditions, from rainforests to mountains. They live in places that are always warm and moist and locales where temperatures reach minus 40. As long as they have enough food, cover, and water, tigers can adapt to local conditions.
Having enough prey is the biggest problem: tigers eat between 50 and 60 large prey animals per year. They will eat smaller game-like birds, but they need to consume prey animals roughly the same size as themselves to successfully reproduce.
Hard Facts about the Tiger’s Striped Skin
A tiger’s skin still displays its stripes if you shave away the fur. Snow leopards, with their spots, are the same way. The reason is likely because the cats’ colored hair follicles embedded in the skin are visible, similar to beard stubble.
Other striped or spotted animals don’t exhibit this kind of coloring on their skin. Zebra skin, for instance, is black underneath their black-and-white striped coats.
Each tiger’s stripes are unique to the animal. As a result, identifying and tracking tigers for conservation purposes can be performed through a visual inspection. Despite their uniqueness, the stripes all serve the same goal: break up the tiger’s silhouette and make it harder for would-be prey to spot them before they pounce.
A Tiger’s Stripes Provide Camouflage
Since tigers are apex predators at the tip-top of the food chain, they don’t need to worry about hiding from animals that might eat them. But as a solitary cat (tigers are not pack animals and do not hunt in a groups like lions do), the tiger relies on pure stealth for its hunting. Here’s where the tiger’s markings become very handy.
They work in a way that biologists call “disruptive coloration,” breaking up a tiger’s bulky shape and large size so that this magnificent creature can blend in better with trees and tall grasses. When in the forest or the jungle, its black stripes and brown fur imitate dappled sunlight.
These stripes help it to camouflage with filtered sunlight and the shadow of trees so that it can’t be easily spotted by its prey.
Some may say, in a dark green jungle, bright orange and black stripes are completely obvious?
While this color combination makes a tiger relatively easy to spot for human eyes, recent research published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface used computer simulations and image processing techniques to see how detectable a species is in its natural environment to other native animals in the same habitat.
Humans have what is called a trichromat eye, meaning our vision can process red, blue, and green-based colors, giving us the ability to see tigers appearing as orange. Mammals that tigers hunt, like deer, are only able to process blue and green, making them obliviously colorblind to orange.
So for an unsuspecting deer, a hunting tiger would blend into the environment fairly seamlessly.
Further evidence that tiger markings are for camouflage is that stripes vary among the six tiger subspecies. The Sumatran tiger subspecies, for example, has stripes that are a lot more narrow than other tigers’ stripes, and it also has a larger quantity of stripes.
It tends to hang out in dense jungles, and these kinds of stripes are very well adapted to its specific environment.
Fun fact:
it’s not just a tiger’s fur that has black stripes. If you were to shave off all of the fur, its skin underneath would show the same markings, almost appearing as though they were tattooed! Also, each tiger’s stripe patterns are unique, as distinct as human fingerprints.
Their Stripes are unique as a Fingerprint
Looking at different tigers up close, you’ll see that each of their stripe patterns is unique, just like a zebra’s. No two are the same. They’re as distinct as human fingerprints.
This allows researchers who study them in the wild to identify and count individual tigers. They use remote cameras to take pictures of the animals when they walk by. Using this method, tiger experts estimate that only about 3,400 wild tigers remain across their Asian homeland.
Conclusion
Well, surprisingly, It’s not just their fur that’s inked with black stripes. When we have to sedate a tiger to treat an injury or do dental work, we shave their fur. It’s always surprising to see that their skin almost looks like it’s been tattooed: It has the same striped pattern as its fur.
