The Sundarban Tiger

[Rishi]

(06-24-2019, 10:55 PM)BorneanTiger Wrote: As mentioned here (https://wildfact.com/forum/topic-on-the-...1#pid83221), there's a study on tigers, including the Sundarban tiger, that demonstrates that the genetic difference between Bengal tigers in the Sundarbans and those in the Himalayan region (northern India, Nepal and Bhutan) are not as closely related as Caspian and Siberian tigers are to each other. The closest relatives of the Sundarban tiger are Southern Indian tigers and a number of Central Indian tigers, with Northern Indian tigers being genetically different to them in a significant manner.

Singh et al.: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/article...8846.g002/

*This image is copyright of its original author

Median-joining network created from four mtDNA genes (cytb, ND2, ND5 and ND6) (in total, 2600 bp) depicting genetic relationship between all haplotypes found in tigers.

(a) haplotypes found in Sundarbans tigers (in black) and all other six tiger subspecies (in yellow and green color, from Luo et al. 2004) [2], (b) all haplotypes found in Bengal tiger populations from this study and Mondol et al. [22]. Pink: North India, Yellow: Central India, Blue: South India, and Green: Sundarbans. The sizes of the circles are proportional to the haplotype frequencies.

Credit, Soumyajit Nandy: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:..._Tiger.jpg

*This image is copyright of its original author

That's intriguing, because Sunderban tigers look most dissimilar to the so south-central Indian tigers though.
On the other hand a north/northeastern tiger could easily be mistaken for a Sundarban tiger but for the habitat in the background giving it away.

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