50 Fun Facts About Siberian Tiger

The Siberian tiger is also named after which river that forms part of the Russia–China border?

Amur is the river, and the name 'Amur tiger' was used in 1933 for cats shot beside it for an exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History.

The Siberian tiger is often called the biggest cat, but which lion–tigress hybrid grows even larger?

Liger is the name for the cub of a male lion and a tigress, and it typically grows larger than either parent, unlike the reverse cross.

Hodori, a friendly cartoon Siberian tiger, was the mascot of the 1988 Summer Olympics in which city?

Seoul's mascot drew on the tiger's place as a national symbol of the Korean people, and the name Hodori was picked from 2,295 public suggestions.

In 2015 a Siberian tiger in a Russian safari park befriended which animal put in his pen as food?

A goat named Timur stood his ground with horns forward and ended up sleeping in the tiger's own shelter, until the pair fell out in 2016.

To the colour-blind deer it hunts, a Siberian tiger's orange coat probably looks like which colour?

Green is how the tiger's prey may perceive its orange fur, so the cat blends into the vegetation instead of standing out.

The mark on a Siberian tiger's forehead is said to resemble the Chinese character for which word?

King is the meaning of the character the forehead mark resembles, one reason the Udege and Chinese people revere the animal.

Which tiger population now outweighs the wild Siberian tiger on average, according to a 2005 study?

Bengal males now average more, because today's wild Siberian tigers are lighter than those weighed before 1970, perhaps through scarcer prey.

Which animals steal about a third of Siberian tiger kills in Russia's Sikhote-Alin reserve?

Bears often follow tiger tracks to reach a carcass, and the tiger tends to walk away or leave part of its kill behind rather than fight.

Which sense do newborn Siberian tiger cubs lack during their first days in the den?

Sight comes later: cubs are born blind in a sheltered den, and their eyes open between three and 14 days after birth.

Which pack hunters grow scarce where Siberian tigers thrive, a fact used to win over local hunters?

Wolves, locals recalled, were absent from Sikhote-Alin until tiger numbers fell in the 1930s, and tigers take fewer deer than the packs would.

How does the coat of a Siberian tiger, which lives among snow, compare with other tigers' coats?

Paler orange fur with fewer stripes helps the Siberian tiger blend into snowy forest, and it grows longer and thicker than any other tiger's.

How do adult Siberian tigers usually live, scent-marking large territories to keep rivals away?

Alone is the rule for adult tigers, and a mother raises her cubs with little or no help from the male.

Which feature of the toes helps Siberian tigers, like all tigers, swim powerfully across rivers?

Partial webbing between the toes makes tigers excellent swimmers, and they will cross a river if there is prey on the far bank.

Tigers such as the Siberian have the longest teeth of which type in the whole cat family?

Canines in a tiger are gently curved and sit in a set of 30 robust teeth.

What marks the back of each Siberian tiger ear and is flashed during aggressive encounters?

A white spot ringed with black sits on the back of each ear, and tigers swivel their ears to show it between mothers and cubs too.

A bite to which body part lets a Siberian tiger kill large prey while staying clear of antlers?

Throat bites are held until the prey suffocates, which keeps the tiger out of reach of antlers, tusks and hooves.

Scat from the Russia–China border showed Siberian tigers ate mostly deer and which other animal?

Wild boar remains topped the list with sika and roe deer in 115 samples left by nine tigers over the winter of 2014–15.

Siberian tigers mostly hunt deer but sometimes take hares, pikas and even which fish?

Salmon is among the smaller prey, but big animals matter most: tigers in one study made a kill roughly once a week.

Which IUCN Red List status does the Siberian tiger hold, even as its numbers in Russia have risen?

Endangered is the listing, yet Russia's count grew from about 331–393 adults and subadults in 2005 to roughly 756 tigers in 2022.

Which country banned tiger hunting in 1947, helping Siberian tiger numbers recover by the 1960s?

USSR law banned the hunt in 1947 and tightened protection in the 1950s, while China prohibited hunting the cats in 1962.

Siberian tigers vanished from the Korean Peninsula between 1910 and 1945 under which country's rule?

Japan ruled the peninsula in those years; today an unknown number of tigers may survive near Baekdu on the Chinese border, judging by tracks found there.

In 2010 Russia and the 12 other tiger range countries pledged to do what to wild tiger numbers?

Double them was the goal, known as TX2, with a 2022 deadline chosen because it was the next Year of the Tiger.

About how much meat can a hungry Siberian tiger eat in a single night after a successful hunt?

60 pounds in one night is possible for a hungry tiger, though it usually eats less and returns to a carcass over several days.

What weight does National Geographic's fact file list for the Siberian tiger?

660 pounds is the listed weight, beside a length of 10.75 feet; wild males in the 1980s typically ranged from about 400 to 675 pounds.

Museum-specimen DNA revealed which other tiger to be the Siberian tiger's closest relative?

Caspian tigers, extinct since the 1970s, shared an ancestor with the Siberian that reached Central Asia less than 10,000 years ago.

Which naturalist named the Siberian tiger's species Felis tigris in his 1758 work Systema Naturae?

Carl Linnaeus placed every cat in the genus Felis, so the tiger began as Felis tigris before it was moved to its present genus in 1929.

The Siberian tiger shares which genus with the lion, leopard, jaguar and snow leopard?

Panthera holds all five big cats, and genetic analyses point to the snow leopard as the tiger's sister species.

Tungusic peoples of the Russian Far East respectfully called the Siberian tiger 'Old man' or what?

Grandfather was the other title, because the Tungusic peoples regarded the tiger as a near-deity.

What is the soft, snorting greeting called that Siberian tigers and other tigers make when friendly?

Chuffing, also known as prusten, is made with the mouth closed by blowing air through the nostrils, often with a bob of the head.

In northeastern China, the activity of wild Siberian tigers peaks at which times of day?

Dawn and dusk are the peaks because the tigers keep much the same hours as their prey, and they stay active through the night.

Well-protected Siberian tiger mothers end up sharing their home ranges with which grown relatives?

Their daughters settle beside them once mature, while young males wander farther and earlier, which exposes them more to poachers.

A female Siberian tiger signals she is ready to mate by leaving urine and what else on trees?

Scratch marks and urine advertise her, and she then spends five or six days with the male, receptive for three of them.

When do Siberian tigers mate, with cubs arriving three to three and a half months later?

Year-round mating is the rule for Siberian tigers, and a litter can hold as many as six cubs.

Which city in Heilongjiang province is home to a huge Siberian tiger breeding park opened in 1986?

Harbin's park was set up by the Chinese government as the world's largest breeding base for the cats, meant to keep a diverse gene pool.

Siberian tigers may once have ranged as far west as Mongolia and the area around which Russian lake?

Baikal marks the suggested western edge of the old range, which also covered northeastern China and the whole Korean Peninsula.

Which Central Asian country brought in Siberian tigers in 2024 to restore its long-lost wild tigers?

Kazakhstan housed two tigers from a Dutch sanctuary in a semi-wild enclosure, hoping their offspring could be released in the Ile-Balkhash reserve.

Global Tiger Day, held every 29 July, was created in 2010 at a tiger summit in which Russian city?

St Petersburg hosted the summit, and Russian law sets long prison terms for poaching, trading, transporting or storing tigers.

What did the Siberian Tiger Project, founded in 1992, fit to captured tigers to follow their lives?

Radio collars let the project map how the tigers use land, feed, breed and die, and it also trains Russian conservation biologists.

Which Oscar-winning Kurosawa film has a hunter shoot a Siberian tiger and then fear a forest spirit?

Dersu Uzala follows a real trapper who guided the explorer Vladimir Arsenyev, and it won the 1976 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.

A Siberian tiger in Russia's Bastak reserve was found in 2014 to have killed which smaller wild cat?

Eurasian lynx compete with tigers for prey, and this one was ambushed and only partly eaten, as if the aim was to remove a rival.

In the early People's Republic of China, Siberian tigers were often sent abroad as what?

Diplomatic gifts of tigers went abroad as zoo animals; in earlier times, loggers in the northeast would not even say the word 'tiger' in the forest.

In Korean mythology, the tiger, long a national symbol there, serves as messenger of which deities?

Mountain Gods send tigers as their messengers, and tiger images guarded Korean homes, tombs and clothing against evil spirits.

Besides Korean tiger and Ussurian tiger, which regional name has the Siberian tiger also carried?

Manchurian tiger was one of several names that depended on where the animals were seen; 'Siberian tiger' itself was coined in the 1830s by James Cowles Prichard.

In Korea's founding myth, a tiger fails to stay 100 days in a cave eating only mugwort and what?

Garlic, twenty cloves of it, came with the mugwort, and the tiger gave up after about twenty days and never became human.

Sikhote-Alin reserve, now a Siberian tiger stronghold, was founded in 1935 to protect which animal?

Sable, valued in the fur trade since the early Middle Ages, was the reason for the reserve, where hunting and fishing are now forbidden.

Who wrote The Tiger, a 2010 bestseller about a 1997 man-eating Siberian tiger in Russia's Far East?

John Vaillant's book won several awards and was translated into 16 languages, and Brad Pitt's company optioned the film rights.

A golden walking tiger appears on the flag of which Russian region, home to most Siberian tigers?

Primorsky Krai also puts the tiger at the centre of its coat of arms, and the flag's diagonal stripe stands for moving forward to new heights.

Which name do the Udege and Nanai peoples of the Russian Far East give the Siberian tiger?

Amba is their word for the tiger, and Bikin National Park was created in 2015 partly to protect the forest culture of both peoples.

In a 2004 poll across 73 countries, the tiger narrowly beat which animal as the world's favourite?

The dog ran it close: the tiger took 21% of more than 50,000 votes, and a 2018 study again found it the most popular wild animal.

Besides a longer, thicker coat than other tigers, what insulates a Siberian tiger against the cold?

A layer of fat adds insulation under the fur, because the Siberian tiger lives in a very cold climate.