Amur Tigers

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This is one good site to find interesting articles concerning Siberian tigers or Amur tigers, whatever people prefer. For me they are always Siberian tigers, since in my childhood they were my favorite animals... old habits are difficult to get rid of... Anyway here one article and link to this site.

Quote: 
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Doctor of Biological Sciences and Lead Researcher of the Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution, Sergei Naidenko, spoke about the results of the year and plans for preserving the Amur tiger in Russia in an interview entitled “RIA Novosti – the Year of the Environment.”
 
Question: Mr Naidenko, please tell us about the Amur tiger’s key features.
 
Sergei Naidenko: The tiger is the largest representative of the feline family, along with the lion. The Amur tiger is one of the largest tiger subspecies. We used to capture animals weighing 212 kilogrammes. However, an adult male may weigh up to 250 kilogrammes.
 
Also, the Amur tiger is the only of the surviving six subspecies that can handle cold winters, so it has the longest and thickest fur of them all.
 
Compared to the tiger groups in other countries, our tigers live in a common area. For example, tigers in India, some 2,000 in all, live in small groups in small isolated pockets. In Russia, the entire group of tigers, which includes up to 500 animals, lives on a vast territory in the Primorye Territory and southern Khabarovsk Territory.
 
Low genetic diversity is another hallmark of Amur tigers. There are two reasons for this. The first is that in the 1940s the tiger population was very low and, according to some estimates, it literally may have been between 30 to 40 tigers, but then began to recover. In biology, this is called a bottleneck effect, when the number of animals falls to a certain level, and the genetic diversity also decreases, but then, after a large population is born from these “founders,” the genetic diversity remains unchanged.
 
The second aspect is a very interesting hypothesis advanced by American researcher Carlos Driscoll in 2010. He assumed that the Amur tiger is genetically close to the Turanian tiger that lived within the territory of the Soviet Union. According to Driscoll, the Turanian tigers gradually resettled from Central Asia to the Far East. The initial number of tigers that resettled was small, and their genetic diversity was also low.
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Whole article and others here: http://programmes.putin.kremlin.ru/en/tiger/news/25563 Reply