Tigers are the largest, strongest and most fearless of the big cats. They can grow to be 3.1m (10ft) long, including their tails, and can weigh anything up to 300kg (661lb). They rarely climb, but they can jump to a height of 3m (9ft). Tigers, unlike lions, have adapted to life in many different climates elsewhere, from the humid jungles of India and Burma to the freezing forests of Siberia. The world's largest tigers come from Manchuria. Tigers are usually solitary creatures but ours get on well with each other. In the wild, a male tiger can have a territory as large as 100 sq km (39 sq miles) to himself, and no other tiger will come near him except for during the mating season. The size of the tiger's territory depends on the food supply; the less food there is around, the larger the area he has to cover. When it is time to mate, the male only stays with the female for a short time, from a few days to a couple of weeks at most. After three and a half months, the cubs are born in a den - sometimes there is just one cub, sometimes three or four. Each cub weighs about 1kg (2lb). The cubs' stripes get darker as they grow, although there are white tigers with light stripes living in the Rewa district of India. The cubs stay with their mother for up to two and a half years, and in this time she teaches them how to hunt - a skill they must learn in order to survive in the wild, as tigers eat nothing but meat. Tigers have good hearing and excellent eyesight, making them deadly night-time hunters. They hunt alone, preying mainly on large antelope and deer, launching surprise attacks by approaching from downwind so that their prey cannot smell them coming. After the kill, tigers can eat up to 40kg (88lb) of meat in one go, and if they cannot eat the whole prey they often hide it and return to finish it later. A large kill can feed a tiger for several days. Hungry tigers have been known to attack young elephants, and sometimes even people, although they usually hunt deer and pigs in the wild. Tigers usually attack humans when they have become old or ill, but once they have attacked they are likely to do so again. Tigers are one of the world's most endangered animals. In 1940 there were eight different subspecies of tiger with a world population of an estimated 100,000. By the 1980s only five subspecies remained, with the population diminished to 7,380. Today there are even fewer tigers in the wild, as the table on the right shows.

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