White Tiger

White Tiger
Originally uploaded by Awsom Angelo

The white tiger (also known as the Bengal tiger) is about 3 meters long, and weighs approximately 180-285 kg (400-569 LB). It’s coat lies flatter than that of the Siberian tiger, the tawny color is richer and the stripes are darker.

White tigers are white colored bengals, they are not albinos and they are not a separate subspecies of tigers.

They have blue eyes, a pink nose, and creamy white furr covered with chocolate colored stripes. White tigers are born to tigers that carry the unusual gene needed for white coloring. Wild white tigers are rare species.

They are usually located on the Mainland of Southeastern Asia and in central and southern India. Those living on islands have almost disappeared, most now live in zoos or special wildlife parks.

White tigers are born to Bengal tigers that carry an unusual gene needed for white coloring. The White Tiger is a good swimmer, but a very poor climber.

They may be slow runners, but they are stealthy enough to catch any prey in their sights. Because they are solitary animals, they mostly hunt at night.

Contrary to popular belief, white tigers are not albinos; true albino tigers would have no stripes. Even the "stripeless" white tigers known today actually have very pale stripes.

Part of the confusion is due to the misidentification of the so-called chinchilla gene (for white) as an allele of the albino series (publications prior to the 1980s refer to it as an albino gene). The mutation is recessive to normal color, which means that two orange tigers carrying the mutant gene may produce white offspring, and white tigers bred together will produce only white cubs. The stripe color varies due to the influence and interaction of other genes.

While the inhibitor ("chinchilla") gene affects the color of the hair shaft, there is a separate "wide-band" gene affecting the distance between the dark bands of colour on agouti hairs.[20] An orange tiger who inherits two copies of this wide-band gene becomes a golden tabby; a white who inherits two copies becomes almost or completely stripeless. Inbreeding allows the effect of recessive genes to show up, hence the ground and stripe colour variations among white tigers.

Because of the extreme rarity of the white tiger allele in the wild,[9] the breeding pool was limited to the small number of white tigers in captivity. According to Kailash Sankhala, the last white tiger ever seen in the wild was shot in 1958Today, there is such a large number of white tigers in captivity that inbreeding is no longer necessary. A white Amur tiger may have been born at Center Hill and has given rise to a strain of white Amur tigers...