12 Facts About Tigers You Didn't Know About One of Nature's Most Charming Animals

1. Tigers have stripes on their skin and fur, which are a result of pigmentation. We often say that no two people's fingerprints are the same, and in nature, no two tigers have the same stripes.

2. The tiger's tongue is covered with sharp, tiny barbs called "lingual papillae", which bend towards the tiger's throat.

The essence of the papilla is keratin, just like our fingernails. Some people say that if a tiger licks the arm, a layer of skin will fall off. In fact, whether the skin will fall off depends entirely on the attitude of the tiger.

3. The tiger has a white spot behind its ear that looks like a pair of eyes from a distance. It's unclear what the spot does, but it's most likely to intimidate animals that try to sneak up on them.

4. The tiger's roar can instantly paralyze the prey, making it difficult to move. Even an experienced animal trainer will become stiff after hearing the "tiger roar".

When tigers roar, they emit low-frequency sound waves below 18 hertz, which scientists believe may be responsible for the paralysis.

5. There is not much difference in size between tigers and lions, but tigers have greater muscle density, so their average weight is more than 40 kilograms heavier than lions.

When fighting lions, tigers usually have the upper hand because their strong hind legs can support their entire bodies while their front claws can attack from the top down.

In 2011, a tiger at the Ankara Zoo in Turkey escaped from a gap in the enclosure and came to the lion's enclosure, where it severed the lion's carotid artery with one paw.

6. Tigers are one of the most vengeful animals, and many real-life cases show that they will seek revenge on hunters who are unfriendly to them.

The most famous case concerns the Russian hunter Markov, who in the winter of 1997 injured and robbed a tiger of its prey. The tiger later found his house, destroyed the facilities in the room, and waited until Markov came home, before killing him.

7. Siberian tigers often prey on powerful brown bears, and brown bear hair has been found many times in their fecal samples. According to statistics, 2.1% of the Amur tiger's food comes from the Ussuri brown bear and the Asiatic black bear.

Bears are not the main food of Amur tigers, but tigers sometimes imitate the sounds of Asian black bears to attract bears, then kill them and eat them.

8. Tigers are solitary animals. They usually live alone and only briefly interact with the opposite sex during the breeding season. After that, the male tiger starts to wander around again, while the female gives birth and raises the cubs by herself.

9. There is an extremely rare species of tiger called the "Golden Tiger," sometimes also called "Golden Spotted Tiger" or "Strawberry Tiger," and this color variation is caused by a recessive gene.

This gene is very rare, so far no wild golden tiger has been found. The emergence of golden tigers is actually the result of inbreeding, and the 30 or fewer golden tigers that survive today were born and raised in captive conditions

10. The offspring of a male tiger and a female lion are called ligers, and the offspring of a male lion and a female tiger are called ligers. A liger is about the same size as its parents, and a liger can grow in size indefinitely until the body can't handle it.

11. About 373,000 people were killed by tigers from 1800 to 2009. At the beginning of the 20th century, a single tiger killed 436 people in Nepal and India.

Known as the "Champawat Tiger", the Bengal tiger is also listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the tiger that killed the most humans.

12. The stripes on the tiger's forehead are very similar to the Chinese character "king", so the tiger is one of the animals with the highest status in our traditional culture.