Bengal tiger
The Bengal tiger, a population of the subspecies Panthera tigris tigris, was counted for decades by its footprints. Through the 20th century, Indian censuses identified individual tigers by their pug marks, a method later criticised as deficient and inaccurate. Then the national census of 2007-2008 brought in camera traps. It found only 1,411 Bengal tigers living wild in India, down from about 3,600 reported in 2003. The real number was less than half of what the Forest Department had claimed.
India and Bangladesh both name the Bengal tiger as their national animal, and it ranks among the largest of the wild cats. How did such a conspicuous animal get miscounted so badly? Where does it still live, from Himalayan snowfields to a delta of tidal mangrove islands? What does it hunt, and what hunts it in turn? And what are governments, scientists and villagers doing in forests they share with the tiger to keep it from disappearing?
In 1758, Carl Linnaeus published the name Felis tigris for the tiger. Reginald Innes Pocock moved it into the genus Panthera in 1929. Bengal is the traditional type locality of the species, so the nominate subspecies became Panthera tigris tigris.
A challenge to the tidy list of tiger subspecies arrived in 1999. Tigers from different regions of continental Asia differ little in body form, and genes could have flowed between their populations during the Pleistocene. Researchers therefore proposed recognising only two subspecies. One, P. t. tigris, covers mainland Asia. The other, P. t. sondaica, covers the Greater Sunda Islands and possibly Sundaland. Within the mainland group, a northern clade holds the Siberian and Caspian tigers, and a southern clade holds every other continental population. Since a revision of cat taxonomy in 2017, extinct and living continental tigers have all been placed under P. t. tigris.
A genetic analysis of 32 tiger samples showed Bengal tigers grouping apart from Siberian tigers. Three mitochondrial nucleotide sites and 12 unique microsatellite alleles define the Bengal tiger. Its pattern of variation fits the idea that tigers reached India about 12,000 years ago. That timing matches the absence of tiger fossils on the subcontinent from before the late Pleistocene. It also helps explain why Sri Lanka has no tigers, since rising seas in the early Holocene had already cut the island off.
One bone complicates the picture. In 1982, a sub-fossil right middle phalanx turned up in a prehistoric midden near Kuruwita in Sri Lanka. It dates to about 16,500 years ago and is tentatively considered a tiger's. If the identification holds, tigers reached the island during a wet period when sea levels were low, before the last glacial maximum about 20,000 years ago. The wider view is that tigers probably arrived in southern India too late to colonise an island that a land bridge had once joined to the mainland.
A phylogeographic study of 134 samples from across the global range set the historical northeastern limit of the Bengal tiger in the Chittagong Hills and the Brahmaputra River basin, where its territory meets that of the Indochinese tiger.
Seen up close, a Bengal tiger's coat runs from yellow to light orange, striped in dark brown to black. The belly and inner limbs are white, and the tail is orange ringed with black. Fourteen skins in the collection of the Natural History Museum in London carry between 21 and 29 stripes each.
Rarer colours turn up now and then. The white tiger is a recessive mutant, reported from time to time in Assam, Bengal, Bihar and especially the former State of Rewa. It is not albinism, and only one fully authenticated true albino tiger is known. The golden tiger, another recessive mutant, has pale golden fur with red-brown stripes. Both are very rare in nature. Black tigers have never been confirmed, apart from a possible specimen examined in Chittagong in 1846.
The skull and teeth are formidable. The greatest skull length is 351 mm in males and 293 mm in females. The canines run 7.5 to 10 cm, the longest of any cat.
Body size varies sharply from place to place. In Panna Tiger Reserve, males measure 183-211 cm from head to body and females 164-193 cm, with a tail of roughly 85-110 cm. Shoulder height is typically 90-110 cm. In central India, 42 adult males averaged 190 kg, spanning 167-234 kg. Thirty-nine adult females averaged 132 kg, with a maximum of 156 kg.
The tigers of the Terai are heavier. Seven adult males captured in Chitwan National Park in the early 1970s averaged 235 kg, ranging from 200 to 261 kg, and the females averaged 140 kg. Two males captured there in the 1980s each topped 270 kg. They remain the largest free-ranging tigers reported to date.
The lightest tigers live in the Bangladesh Sundarbans, where adult females weigh 75-80 kg. Three tigresses there had a mean weight of 76.7 kg. Their skulls and bodies differed from those of tigers in other habitats, hinting at adaptation to the mangroves. Fierce competition among tigers and small prey, compared with the larger deer found elsewhere, probably explain their size.
Old measurements need careful reading. The Leeds Tiger, now at Leeds City Museum, was shot in 1860 near Mussoorie and measured 12 ft 2 in at death. In those days sportsmen had no standard method, and some measured between the pegs while others measured over the curves. A male shot in Nepal weighed 320 kg and measured 10 ft 9 in over the curves. The heaviest wild tiger was possibly a male killed in 1967 in the Himalayan foothills. It measured 323 cm between pegs and 338 cm over curves, and it weighed 388.7 kg after eating a buffalo calf. Without that meal it would likely have weighed about 324.3 kg. On average weight, the Bengal tiger rivals the Siberian tiger.
Another male, shot in central India early in the 20th century, measured 221 cm between pegs. Its tail was only 81 cm long, perhaps because a rival male had bitten part of it off.
Until the early 19th century, Bengal tigers roamed as far west as the Indus River valley. Their historical range took in almost all of India, eastern Pakistan, southern Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan and southwestern China. Khairpur was the last stronghold in Pakistan by the late 19th century, and the final animals were shot in 1906 in the Indus riverine jungles of Bahawalpur.
Today the tiger lives in India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan and southwestern China, across a startling range of habitats. These include tropical moist evergreen forest, dry forest, moist deciduous forest, mangroves, upland forest and alluvial grassland. That last habitat once formed a huge belt of grassland and riverine forest along the Gangetic and Brahmaputra plains. Most of it is now farmland or badly degraded. The best remnants sit at the foot of the Himalayas, in units such as Rajaji-Corbett-Pilibhit and Bardia-Banke. Tiger densities there are high, partly because of the extraordinary weight of hoofed prey.
The moist deciduous forests of Kaziranga-Meghalaya, Kanha-Pench, Simlipal and Indravati are probably the most productive tiger country. Wet evergreen forest is the rarer type. It is found mostly in the uplands of the Western Ghats, at reserves such as Periyar and Bandipur.
A census in 2008 surveyed six landscape complexes in India. The Central Indian highlands held 17 populations, an estimated 437 to 661 tigers across 48,610 km2 of forest. The Eastern Ghats held a single population of 49 to 57. Sundarbans National Park offered about 1,586 km2 of mangrove. By 2014, India was estimated to hold 2,226 adult and subadult tigers over 89,164 km2, with Corbett Tiger Reserve the largest single population at about 215. The estimate rose to 2,603-3,346 by 2018 and 3,167-3,682 by 2022.
Tigers also turn up in surprising places. In the Mishmi Hills in 2017, one was recorded at 3,630 m in snow. Ranthambore National Park hosts India's westernmost population. In February 2019, a tiger sighted in Lunavada, in Gujarat's Mahisagar district, was found dead soon afterwards. Officials assumed it came from Ratapani Tiger Reserve, walking about 300 km over two years, and that it probably starved. That May, camera traps recorded tigers in Goa, the first records there since 2013.
In Bangladesh, tigers are now confined to the Sundarbans and the Chittagong Hill Tracts. The Sundarbans tigers, shared with India, are the only ones in the world living in mangrove forest, and they swim between the delta's islands to hunt. The Indian side held an estimated 86-90 in 2018. The first camera-trap survey on the Bangladesh side, run from October 2005 to January 2007 across six sites, found 3.7 tigers per 100 km2. Across the 5,770 km2 of the Bangladesh Sundarbans, that implied around 200 tigers. Adult females keep home ranges of just 12-14 km2, among the smallest recorded. That suggests one of the densest tiger populations anywhere.
Estimates for Bangladesh have still wandered. The country was put at 200-419 tigers in 2004, the Sundarbans alone at 335-500 by 2009 and 84-158 by 2017, and the country at 114 in 2018 and around 125 by 2022. The nearest other tiger population lies up to 300 km away. Climate change adds a deadline. Rising seas are projected to destroy about 50% of suitable habitat by 2050 and all of it by 2070.
In Nepal, the Terai tigers are split into three isolated groups, divided by farmland and dense settlement. The largest lives in Chitwan and Parsa National Parks, which cover 2,543 km2 of prime lowland forest. Bardiya National Park holds a second group, and Shuklaphanta holds the smallest. A camera-trap survey from February to June 2013, covering 4,841 km2 in 14 districts, estimated 163-235 breeding adults. The third nationwide survey, between November 2017 and April 2018, put the total at 220-274.
Bhutan has documented tigers in 17 of its 18 districts, from subtropical foothills at 200 m in the south to temperate forest above 3,000 m in the north. The stronghold seems to be the central belt between the Mo River and the Kulong River. In 2008, a tiger was recorded at 4,200 m in Jigme Dorji National Park, the highest elevation known. Royal Manas and Jigme Singye Wangchuck National Parks form the largest contiguous conservation area. A 2015 survey of 28,225 km2 estimated 89-124 tigers, and by 2022 the estimate stood at 131. In 2017, a tiger appeared in Bumdeling Wildlife Sanctuary, probably using a wildlife corridor to reach northeastern Bhutan.
In 1995, livestock losses in Mêdog County, in southeastern Tibet, led investigators to tiger paw prints around several villages. One tiger was shot in 1996, and officials reported four to five by 1999. A survey from 2013 to 2018 found that only one to three non-resident tigers might enter the area south of the Yarlung Tsangpo river, and only in the dry season from October to March. Then, in early 2019, a Bengal tiger was photographed twice at 2,000 m in broadleaved forest in the Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon National Nature Reserve.
The Bengal tiger prefers large hoofed animals such as gaur, sambar, chital, barasingha, water buffalo, nilgai, serow and takin. Wild boar, Indian hog deer, Indian muntjac and northern plains gray langur fill the medium-sized range. Porcupine, hare and peafowl make up only a small share. Where people have pushed into tiger habitat, livestock also becomes prey.
Tigers occasionally kill other predators, among them the Indian leopard, mugger crocodile, Asian black bear, sloth bear and dhole. Adult elephants and rhinoceros are rarely attacked, but it happens. In Kaziranga National Park, tigers killed 20 rhinoceros in 2007. Two attacks on adult elephants were recorded, in 2011 and 2014. One victim was a 20-year-old cow in Jim Corbett National Park. The other was a sick 28-year-old in Kaziranga, which several tigers ate at once. In the Sundarbans, stomachs and scat have held king cobra, Indian cobra, Asian water monitor, rhesus macaque, fish and crabs. One tiger in Chitwan National Park reportedly hunted three gharials.
In Nagarahole National Park, scat analysis found gaur remains in 44.8% of samples, sambar in 28.6%, wild pig in 14.3% and chital in 10.4%. Tigers there preferred prey above 176 kg, though prey averaged 91.5 kg. In Bandipur National Park, gaur and sambar together made up 73% of the diet.
A tiger usually approaches from the side or behind, as close as it can get, and grips the throat. It then drags the carcass into cover, sometimes for several hundred metres. This style of hunting produces a feast or famine pattern, with 18-40 kg of meat eaten at one sitting. In a Nepal study, tigresses made about 40-50 kills a year and ate at least 5-6.3 kg a day. Two males made a similar number of kills and ate at least 6.3-7.8 kg daily.
Most young tigers in India are born in December and April, although there is no definite birth or mating season. Observations at Kanha National Park in the 1960s put peak sexual activity from November to about February. Males mature at 4-5 years and females at 3-4. A female comes into estrus every 3-9 weeks and is receptive for 3-6 days. After 104-106 days of gestation, one to four cubs are born in a shelter of tall grass, thick bush or caves.
Newborns weigh 780-1600 g, with closed eyes and ears and a woolly coat that is shed after 3.5-5 months. Milk teeth appear at 2-3 weeks. Solid food begins at about 2 months, and by 5-6 months the cubs join hunts. Between 2 and 3 years of age they gradually leave the family group and look for a home range of their own. Young males travel farther than young females. Once the family splits, the mother comes into heat again.
Radio-collared subadult tigers in Chitwan National Park began leaving their birthplaces at 19 months. Of 14 subadults studied, the four females stayed nearer their mother's range than the ten males, which dispersed between 9.5 and 65.7 km. None crossed open cultivation more than 10 km wide. Adults otherwise live alone, and the basic social unit is a female with her cubs. They gather only briefly, when food is plentiful.
In Panna Tiger Reserve, one radio-collared male's home range covered about 200 km2 in summer and 110 km2 in winter. It enclosed the much smaller ranges, 16-31 km2, of a tigress with cubs and a subadult tigress. A male holds large ground so that he keeps mating rights with several females. Male territories rarely overlap, though a resident may tolerate a transient or subadult male for a time. Females overlap partly, each with a more exclusive core. New animals become residents only when a vacancy opens, and there are more places for resident females than for males.
Seven years of watching a 100 km2 patch of Chitwan National Park showed how unstable this system can be. Of 11 resident females, seven were alive at the end, two had vanished after losing territories to rivals, and two had died. One female left her territory to a daughter and displaced another female next door. Of four resident males, three were pushed out by rivals. The early loss of two resident males, and the takeover of their ranges by new males, caused two years of social instability. Five litters were killed by infanticide, and two more died because their mothers died while they were too young to fend for themselves. The remaining young reached dispersal age, and two became residents. One juvenile was presumed dead after being photographed with severe injuries from a deer snare.
In 2004, poachers killed every tiger in India's Sariska Tiger Reserve. Five years later, none of the 24 tigers living in Panna Tiger Reserve remained. Both losses trace to the illegal trade in skins and body parts between India, Nepal and China, the most significant immediate threat to wild tigers. Governments failed for years to respond adequately, and wildlife crime stayed a low political priority.
Well-organised gangs of professional poachers move from place to place and camp in vulnerable areas. Skins are rough-cured in the field, handed to dealers and sent to Indian tanning centres. Buyers then smuggle them through a complex network, mainly to markets in China. For at least a thousand years, tiger bones have been an ingredient in traditional medicines prescribed as a muscle strengthener and for rheumatism and body pain. That demand fuels the unrelenting pressure on tigers across the subcontinent.
Between 1994 and 2009, the Wildlife Protection Society of India documented 893 tigers killed in India, a fraction of the true toll. In 2007, police in Allahabad raided a meeting of suspected poachers, traders and couriers. One person arrested was the biggest buyer of Indian tiger parts, who sold to Chinese buyers using women from a nomadic tribe as couriers. In 2021, Bangladeshi police arrested a man suspected of killing 70 Bengal tigers over 20 years. From January 2020 to June 2025, seizures in India, Nepal and Bangladesh comprised 332 tigers, 313 of them in India.
Not every death is organised crime. In Bangladesh, professional poachers, local hunters, trappers and villagers all kill tigers, with motives from profit and excitement to safety. Farmers who blame tigers for killing cattle shoot them. In November 2011, two tigers were found dead in Maharashtra. One was caught in a wire snare, and a tigress died of electrocution after chewing a cable that powered a water pump. A third, a tigress found dead in the Kanha landscape, was suspected of poisoning.
None of the Tiger Conservation Landscapes in the range is large enough to hold an effective population of 250 tigers. India's Forest Rights Act of 2006 grants some of the country's most impoverished communities the right to own and live in forests. That likely brings them into conflict with wildlife and with under-resourced, under-trained and ill-equipped forest staff.
At the start of the 19th century, tigers were so numerous that killing them was officially rewarded in many localities. After the 1950s, paddy fields replaced natural habitat in the Terai and pushed tigers into marginal land. Some followed livestock that wintered on the plains, then were left without prey when the herds scattered back to their villages. These tigers were old, young or disabled, mostly by gunshot wounds or porcupine quills.
In the Sundarbans, 10 of the 13 man-eaters recorded in the 1970s were males, and they accounted for 86% of victims. Some were dedicated man-eaters that hunted people on purpose. Others were opportunistic and attacked only when they met someone. Most victims died in the honey-gathering season, when people entered tiger territory in search of wood, honey or fish. In Nepal, man-eating has been sporadic. No cases were recorded in Chitwan National Park before 1980, but 13 people were killed and eaten there and nearby in the following few years, often linked to competition among male tigers.
An interview survey of 499 people in Chitwan found that lower caste Hindus and people with less than eight years of formal education held negative attitudes to the tiger. Most of them owned livestock and had heard of attacks on people and animals. In December 2012, the Kerala Forest Department shot a tiger on a coffee plantation at the edge of Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary. Mass protests over livestock losses had prompted the hunt, which used a 10-member Special Tiger Protection Force and two trained elephants brought from Bandipur Tiger Reserve.
Project Tiger was launched in India in 1973, and its first census counted 1,827 tigers. Planners saw the reserves as breeding nuclei from which surplus animals would spread into neighbouring forests. By the late 1980s, the initial nine reserves covering 9,115 km2 had grown to 15 reserves covering 24,700 km2. More than 1,100 tigers were estimated to live in them by 1984. The decline reversed at first, then resumed. The Wildlife Institute of India estimated falls of 61% in Madhya Pradesh, 57% in Maharashtra and 40% in Rajasthan. The Indian Wildlife Protection Act of 1972 gives agencies strict powers to protect the animal.
When the camera-trap census exposed the shortfall, the government set up eight new tiger reserves. It pledged US$153 million to Project Tiger, created a Tiger Protection Force and funded the relocation of up to 200,000 villagers to reduce contact between people and tigers. In January 2008, India launched a dedicated anti-poaching force of experts from the police, forest officials and environmental agencies. Officials often cite Ranthambore National Park as a major success against poaching. In 2022, Ranipur Wildlife Sanctuary was declared the 54th tiger reserve. Kuno-Palpur in Madhya Pradesh may also serve as a tiger sanctuary, where tigers could help keep down the leopards that target the main prey of reintroduced cheetahs.
The Terai Arc Landscape in the Himalayan foothills of northern India and southern Nepal covers 49,000 km2 and includes 11 protected areas. The aim is to manage its tigers as a single metapopulation, so that dispersal between core refuges keeps the population genetically, demographically and ecologically sound. In Nepal, a community-based tourism model stresses sharing benefits with local people and regrowing degraded forest. It has reduced poaching, restored habitat and built a local constituency for conservation. Banke National Park was established there in May 2010, covering 550 km2.
At the Global Tiger Summit in 2010, Nepal aimed to double its tigers by 2022. The population reached 355 in 2022, almost triple the 121 counted in 2009. In May 2010, WWF partnered with Leonardo DiCaprio on a campaign called Save Tigers Now, with the goal of doubling wild tigers by 2022. It began in 12 WWF priority landscapes.
In the Bangladesh Sundarbans, WildTeam works with local communities and the Forest Department on a conflict that has lasted over 100 years. In recent decades, up to 50 people, 80 livestock and 3 tigers have died in a single year. A boat-based Tiger Response team now gives first aid, transport and body retrieval for people killed in the forest. WildTeam has also set up 49 Village Response Teams, with over 350 volunteers, trained to save tigers that stray into villages. The volunteers also help with anti-poaching work and conservation education. WildTeam also helps communities claim government compensation for lost livestock and for injury or death.
The population is listed as Endangered in Nepal, India and Bhutan, and as Critically Endangered in Bangladesh and China. In April 2023, India signed a memorandum of understanding with Cambodia to help reintroduce tigers there. At least 90 acres of the Cardamom Mountains in Tatai Wildlife Sanctuary could host tigers imported from India. The last tiger in Cambodia was photographed by a camera trap in 2007, and in 2016 the government declared the Indochinese tiger population functionally extinct.
Bengal tigers have been bred in captivity since 1880 and widely crossed with tigers from other range countries. In July 1976, Billy Arjan Singh acquired a hand-reared tigress from Twycross Zoo in the United Kingdom. With the permission of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, he reintroduced her to the wild in Dudhwa National Park. In the 1990s, some Dudhwa tigers had a large head, pale fur and wide stripes, and were suspected to be Siberian-Bengal hybrids. Mitochondrial analysis showed that their mothers were Bengal tigers. A microsatellite study of 71 zoo tigers, including two from Dudhwa, found two with alleles from both Bengal and Siberian tigers. Two hybrids were too small a sample to prove that the hand-reared tigress, Tara, was the source.
The 1997 International Tiger Studbook listed 210 captive Bengal tigers, all in Indian zoos except for one female in North America. Completing the Indian Bengal Tiger Studbook is a prerequisite for a captive management program in India.
In 2000, John Varty started a re-wilding project called Tiger Canyons in South Africa. With zoologist Dave Salmoni, he trained captive-bred cubs to stalk and hunt, and to link hunting with food. They claimed that once the tigers proved they could sustain themselves, they would be released into a free-range sanctuary. Investors and conservationists later accused the project of manipulating the tigers' behaviour for a film, Living with Tigers. Stuart Bray, an early investor, said that he and his wife, Li Quan, watched the film crew "chase the prey up against the fence and into the path of the tigers just for the sake of dramatic footage." The four tigers involved were confirmed to be Siberian-Bengal crossbreeds, which should neither breed nor be released into the Karoo.
The tiger is one of the animals shown on the Pashupati seal of the Indus Valley Civilisation. A tiger crest marks Chola coins. Many coins also carry a fish and a bow, the emblems of the Pandya and Chera dynasties, and Chola copper plate inscriptions show all three together. This suggests the Cholas had achieved political supremacy over their rivals. Bangladeshi banknotes feature a tiger, and the Muslim League of Pakistan uses it as its election symbol.
Tipu Sultan, who ruled Mysore in the late 18th century, was a great admirer of the animal. The famed automaton Tipu's Tiger was made for him, and the tiger was his dynasty's symbol. During the Indian Rebellion of 1857, Punch ran a political cartoon showing the rebels as a tiger attacking a victim.
In fiction, the Bengal tiger Shere Khan is the main antagonist of The Jungle Book story collection. The Man-Eaters of Kumaon draws on man-eating tigers and leopards in the Kumaon Division. In the novel Life of Pi and its 2012 film adaptation, a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker is the lead character. The Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo is based on a real tiger that escaped from the zoo in 2003. The BBC documentary The Lost Land of the Tiger follows tigers in Bhutan, and the 2014 Indian film Roar - Tigers of the Sundarbans centres on a white Bengal tigress.
Individual tigers have earned their own names in the record. They include the Tigers of Chowgarh, the Chuka man-eating tiger, the Bachelor of Powalgarh, the Thak man-eater, the Tiger of Segur, the Tiger of Mundachipallam and the Wily Tiger of Mundachipallam.
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Common questions
How many Bengal tigers are left in the wild?
As of 2022, the Bengal tiger population was estimated at 3,167-3,682 in India, 355 in Nepal and 131 in Bhutan. Bangladesh held around 125, and the species is listed as Endangered in Nepal, India and Bhutan.
How big do Bengal tigers get?
Adult male Bengal tigers in central India averaged 190 kg, while adult females averaged 132 kg. Males captured in Chitwan National Park in the 1980s exceeded 270 kg, and the Bangladesh Sundarbans holds the smallest tigers, with adult females at 75-80 kg.
Where do Bengal tigers live?
Bengal tigers live in India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan and southwestern China. Their habitats range from mangroves and alluvial grassland to moist deciduous forest and Himalayan upland, and one was recorded at 4,200 m in Bhutan.
What do Bengal tigers eat?
Bengal tigers prefer large hoofed animals such as gaur, sambar, chital and water buffalo. In Nagarahole National Park, gaur remains appeared in 44.8% of scat samples and sambar in 28.6%.
What is the biggest threat to the Bengal tiger?
The most significant immediate threat is the illegal trade in poached skins and body parts between India, Nepal and China. Habitat loss, habitat fragmentation and conflict with people add to the pressure.
When did India start Project Tiger to protect the Bengal tiger?
India launched Project Tiger in 1973, and its first census counted 1,827 tigers. By the late 1980s, the initial nine reserves had grown to 15 reserves covering 24,700 km2.
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