A Tiger Reply to a Reader.

The photo is taken from Wikipedia. It is not my property.

Dear Liu:

First of all, thank you for sharing your knowledge on tigers, it's really a great help. Here's something a little extra fun facts on them and hopefully you'll learn more about those big cats.

All feline family, including tigers, do tend to have this tendency on at least try to catch a stick with feathers, as you have mentioned in your comment, since to them, those sticks are like prey. By waving the feathered sticks in front of the tigers triggers their hunting instinct, that's why they wave their paws and try to get them down.

While feeling threatened, also like you have mentioned, and as well as hunting, all felines stay as low as they can to their stomach for camouflage and of course, reducing the chance of being seen. That's why they are excellent stealth hunters.

Well, I hope you have a great time enjoying this blog and hope you'll visit again.
Tammy

Tigers

The photo is taken from Wikipedia, I do not claim it as my property.

There are four lucky animals symbols for good luck in Chinese belief, one is the giant tortes, one is the phoenix, one is the dragon and the last, but not least, is the tiger and you know what? 2010 is the year of a Tiger in Chinese calendar and also for the Vancouver winter Olympic! Then of course, today's topic is going to be the biggest cat on earth: Tigers.

Every cat in the feline family is an excellent hunter, but the Panthera tigris, also commonly known as the tiger, is the true King of the Jungle, the males can weigh more than 1/3 of a ton, or at least there was a record on it, and it can grow up to 12 ft. (3.6m) long, including the tail.

Despite their massive size, the tigers can stalk nearly silently while hunting. Like all cats, except for the cheetahs, their front claws are retractable. Their fur is striped and do you know what happens if we shave the fur? Their skin matches to their fur patterns! That means, their skin is also striped according to their fur! They are usually orange with black stripes, but on rare occasion in the wild, they do have white tigers.

Also like all cats, this time except for the lions, the tigers are solitary, they only can be seen with company under 2 normal circumstances: 1) Mating season 2) A mother with cubs. A female tiger can have 3~4 cubs per litter, weighing about 2.2 pounds, all those cubs are born blind. The mortality of the cubs are really high, about half of those cubs won't survive through their first year due to perhaps hunger, drought, illness, or attack from predators and so on. When a male cubs grows to 4~5 years of age and with females from 3~4 years old, they can start reproduce.

Tigers can live about 15 years in the wild, but they can also live more than 20 years in captivity.

The diet of a tiger is of course usually meat, the water buffalo is their favorite food. But sometimes tigers do eat some vegetations for digestion. While hunting, the tiger can speed up to 49-65 kilometers per hour (35-40 miles per hour) and can leap up to 10 feet!

Sadly, due to lack of habitat, illegal hunting and perhaps global warming, those beautiful big cats are much less than 7,000 today.

Lion and its Pride: The Female Lion

I did not take the photo and I do not claim it as my property.

Alrighty! So now we've had enough of the male lions, let's start with the females.

Although some times a female lion lives alone but she is usually in a group called a "Pride" (as I have mentioned earlier already.) surrounded by blood related female family members such as sisters, mothers, grandmothers, aunts, cousins, daughters and nieces. The only males that can stay in the pride are the male lion cubs and the adult male lion (Or the male lions, depending on the size of the pride.).

There are average of 15 lions in a pride, including the cubs, although sometimes it could double the family members if the hunt and rain are plentiful, but this large numbers of family, every lioness needs to hunt for almost everyday before everyone goes hungry. When drought comes and push comes to shove, it is always the young male lions (not cubs though.) go hungry or thirsty.

Lionesses hunt in stealth, camouflage and stalking, they won't attack within 30 meters between themselves and the prey. When occasionally meeting up a large difficulty hunt, the males would show up and help out.

When mating season arrives, a male lion and female lioness would stay together closely for several days and can mate from 20 to 40 times per day. That's a lot of sex! But that's how the lioness gets pregnant, they need be stimulant to ovulate, that's also the reason why the tip of a male lion's penis has spikes and it can hurt the females when pulling out, and that cause the scene of the female roars and scratches the male on the face.

After birth of the cubs, the mother often changes dens to prevent other predators from attacking and killing them. The cubs are born blind and won't start seeing after a week.

The lions communicate through mainly on smell and touch, but sound can also help, too.

Lion and its Pride: The Male Lion

I did not take this photo so I do not claim this photo as my property.

Take a guess on what Disney animated movie that I still enjoy today, that involves a large group of big cats that's called a "Pride" and all the females are related? Besides Beauty and the Beast, there are also 101 Dalmatians, Rescuers: Down Under and The Jungle Book that I can't get tire of, but none of those are on my subject of what I'm going to discuss today. Of course, it's none the less, The Lion King.

The lion, or if you want to be a professional on this, you can use Panthera leo (Doesn't it sound like the panther lion when it comes down to plain meaning?), can exceed more than 250 kg (550 lb) in weight for some male lions and grow up to 10 feet (3 meters) long, including the tale. They are the second largest feline in the family, running right behind the tiger.

A lion can live up to 14 years of age in the wild, that is, if nothing much happens to them but they can live as long as 20 in captivity.

Ok, let's talk about the boys here in detail first, shall we?There's usually just only one male lion per pride, but if the numbers in the pride is too great, this lion king needs a partner or two to help him for mating, guarding and protecting the pride and its young. But sadly a male lion doesn't last a lifetime in this family, since there are younger and stronger male lions always challenging the current king. So, to answer the question to those who are wondering, the king's time is around 3 years. That means a lion reaches his prime at the age of 5 or 6 and he would "retire" at the age of 8 or 9 years old.

Unlike Simba, in the movie The Lion King, where he comes back home to Pride Rock to take his rightful place as king, a young male lion usually leaves home, mainly because his mother and the other relatives chased him away to prevent inbreeding, at the age about 2 to 2 1/2 years old to make him mature and grow up by joining up with a group of bachelors to gain experiences in life and become the king of another pride someday.

Here's something that it's called nature's course but cruel, when a male lion does defeat the previous king of the pride, he tends to kill the young cubs in order to make sure that his own cubs can live on. Survival of the fittest, so to speak.

To tell the difference between the male and the female is by the mane on the male's lion, while the female has none. The major reason why the males need the mane is because it's a protection for the head, like a helmet for a bike, from other males when they are fighting for the land, the pride and the right who mates first, that is if there are two males in a pride.

Lion Fish

Have any one of you seen the movie, Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo, where there's a lion fish in Antoine's home? If you have seen this movie, then you will know where I'm going at for this topic. You're absolutely right! It's going to be lion fish!

When it comes to the lion fish, or Pterois species in a professional term, we might think they come from warm places like Hawaii or some place like that and in a way, they are. Their origins are from Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean. Their size is typically around 12 in., or 30 cm.

Like a real lion, they are proud and eye catching, which made a lot of fish lovers try their best to get one of them to add their collections. Of course, also like a lion, those fish just won't back down when facing trouble, they tend to stand up for themselves and fight for their survival.

When they are under attack or under threat, they would spread their fan-shaped fins to their maximum size and sting the opponent with the tip of their fan-shaped fins. Which clears up an old misunderstanding, the fish itself doesn't have any poison, its their spiked fins that contains the dangerous dose.

You know, even I, myself, also had this misunderstanding when it comes to them being poisonous. It was actually kind of a relief for me to learn that the fish, itself, isn't as dangerous as it seems, because I thought to myself, "Well, if I must touch one of those lion fish, all I have to do is to touch the body, not the fins, so I would be safe."

As for their homes,they live on coral reefs and their diet includes smaller fishes and shrimps.

A post between animal posts.

Hi, everyone, this is a post not talking directly about animals, but it's still somewhat concerning them. Besides, I also need a short break from doing research and asking around for information for a few days.

For those who are wondering why I'm doing this kind of interactive blog is mainly because it's a passion of mine ever since I first started learning on how to read. I remembered when I was in first grade and I've asked my mom what she thought about me being a vet or an animal behavior specialist.

Sadly, as life moved on, I turned out to be a fine art graduate and became an English teacher in Taiwan, then one day I realized that those aren't my primary interest in life, so I quit my job and then moved to Vancouver with my husband. Here, I've found out a very pleasant and bright place called the Vancouver Aquarium, once I learned about this place, I decided to give it a visit. It was right there during the dolphin show in a bright sunny afternoon I've put my foot down and decided to become a volunteer right at that moment. Simply put, I have found where my heart lies. At first Johnny, my husband, didn't understand why I would spend my time volunteering, but after explaining to him that being a volunteer is a honorable thing to do and it is also a way to give back to the community, then he slowly turned from a skeptic to supportive.

Today, I have happily and contently been a volunteer for a bit more than a year now, and trust me, it's a dream come true in a personal point of view, I hope I could do something more for the animals and perhaps the environment by building and running a web page.

So, once again, enjoy and please don't be shy by sharing your knowledge and experiences with and about animals, I will be more than glad to read and post them out for everyone to share. Most of all, questions and requests about animals are more than welcome. Cheers!

Tammy

Polar Bears

Now let's see what we can talk about this time, umm... ah, yes! Polar bears! I remember when I was still training in the Vancouver Aquarium, I learned some fun facts about polars bears that was quite interesting to me. One thing for sure was their fur. They have two layers of fur, like a husky, the bottom layer is soft and dense to keep them warm and very coarse on the outside and that's not the part that strikes me as fun, the fun part is, their fur color isn't white, it's actually crystal clear, like snow!! Think about it this way, if snow is melted, it naturally turns into water and water is clear, right? Well, it's the same way as the poler bear's fur!

Here's something we can think about, since polar bear's fur is clear, how can they keep themselves warm during the harsh winter in the Arctic's? Give you a hint, it's their skin that can absorb heat from the sun.... No luck guessing? Well, their skin is actually black, so if we shave a polar bear naked, all we see is a pitch black bear standing in front of us.

When mating season arrives, males travel hundreds and hundreds of miles to find a mate. Here's something that's really painful for the males, the males actually have a bone inside their penises and they at least occasionally break during vigorous mating to impress the female. But don't worry about them though, I have asked around with the employees in the aquarium, which took days to get an answer I need, they all think that the fracture would heal up and start the cycle again, since their numbers, although decreasing because of global warming, are still quite many.

Polar bears, also known as Thalarctos Maritimus, are distributed in the Arctic regions, they can weigh as much as 650 lb (or 300kg) for females, at least double the weight for the males and can be as tall as 8 feet (or 2.4 meters) standing up or 5.5 feet (or 1.7 meters) on all fours.

Their diet includes fruits, roots, insects and meat. Females hibernate during the cold winter with their cubs and come out at spring while the males tend to be active all the time. They are great swimmers and can swim for hundred miles from one land to another. Their furry paws can give them a nice grip while traveling on slippery ice.