Where tigers used to live?

wildlenschronicleswlc:

The tiger's range in 1900: most of Asia.

Turkey through Iran, across India, through Southeast Asia, into China, down through the Indonesian archipelago to Bali and Java. An animal so broadly distributed it adapted to tropical rainforests, mangrove swamps, temperate deciduous forest, boreal taiga, and grassland.

Today: approximately 7% of that historical range.

Three subspecies are already gone. The Bali Tiger: extinct by the 1940s. The Javan Tiger: extinct by the 1970s. The Caspian Tiger: extinct by the 1970s. The South China Tiger: functionally extinct, with no confirmed wild sightings since the 1990s.

Total wild tiger population today: approximately 4,500–5,000. There are more tigers in private captivity in the United States alone — estimated 5,000–10,000 animals — than exist in the wild globally.

What's left is fragments. Small isolated populations in national parks and tiger reserves, surrounded by agricultural land and human settlements. Populations too small and isolated to sustain genetic diversity without human-managed corridors.

The world's largest cat. Now living in the margins of the world it used to own.

Collection: range - Tags: tigers, asia - Source: instagram.com