Why a rare 'golden' tiger photographed in India is worrying conservationists

Source: CNN

Why a rare ‘golden’ tiger photographed in India is worrying conservationists

By Rebecca Cairns, CNN
5 minute read
Published 8:29 PM EST, Wed February 14, 2024

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That’s what Ramnarayanan and his tour guests were looking for that night. Sitting in the safari jeep in the late afternoon, the group suddenly heard an alarm call from a deer — the sound an animal makes when it sees a predator, says Ramnarayanan. He began driving, turning a corner before stopping the car in its tracks: around 700 meters away, there was a tiger on the road.

“Initially when I saw him, he looked really white and didn’t look like a normal (Bengal) tiger,” says Ramnarayanan, who has been guiding wildlife tours and photographing big cats since 2016, when he founded his travel company The Wildside. “I’ve seen enough tigers to realize at the first glance that this one was not regular.”

His suspicions proved right when he looked at the predator through his camera lens: with strawberry-blonde stripes, the big cat was unmistakably a rare “golden” tiger.

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In the wild, less than one in 10,000 tiger cubs are born with the white fur trait, and the golden trait is even rarer.

That’s why conservationists are concerned that the appearance of these tigers could be a symptom of inbreeding in isolated tiger populations.

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Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/15/world/golden-tabby-tiger-kaziranga-india-hnk-spc-intl-scn