Mary Allen
The Siberian tiger is a mammal. It is a subspecies of tiger and belongs to the cat family. It is a large, fast, and powerful predator. Siberian tigers are the largest striped cats in the world.
They live to be 15 to 20 years old. The males can be more than two meters long and weigh between 180 and 300 kilograms and females between 100 and 170 kilograms. The Siberian tiger’s fur is reddish and its belly is white. The stripes are black or brown. The Siberian tiger is usually significantly lighter in color than the southern subspecies of tiger found in India and Southeast Asia.
Where the Siberian tiger is at home, people hunt a lot of game. Therefore, there is often too little food for the tigers. The tigers themselves are also hunted to sell their skins and bones. That’s why there are only 500 Siberian tigers left in the world. About 400 of them are adults, and about 100 are young animals.
Siberian tigers live in cold regions. They like forests with dense undergrowth for better sneaking and hiding. They live in the Far East of Russia and in the adjacent areas of North Korea and China. Despite being cats, Siberian tigers love the water. They are excellent swimmers and mark their habitat with scratch marks.
They usually live alone and only meet during the mating season. A female tiger can have children every two to three years. She then gives birth to three to four young. A mother tiger can have 10 to 20 cubs during her lifetime. The young are usually born in spring. Only about half of the young survived. The suckling period of young tigers lasts two months. From about the third month they get meat from their mother.
Siberian tigers spend a lot of time hunting. Deer, roe deer, elk, lynx, and wild boar are on their menu. With their powerful bodies, they can also carry heavy prey over long distances. Because they are carnivores, Siberian tigers eat up to 10 kilograms of meat per day. They need so much food to keep them strong in the cold winter of Siberia, their homeland.