The Specifics Of Tigers Mating Behaviors

The tigers that we know and love today are going extinct because of us, which means that we should learn more about how they have offspring and how they choose a mate. We should also start studying their genetics and just find out as much as possible. Tigers have quite weird mating behaviors, like mating multiple times a day.

Tigers like most other organisms have a certain number of pairs of chromosomes in their DNA, for tigers, they have nineteen chromosomes and they have thirty-eight chromosomes in total. The way that competition for mates with tigers go is the biggest and strong tigers will fight with other tigers for the right to mate with the female tiger. Although “tigers prefer to part ways and pursue a more peaceful lifestyle elsewhere than to fight” meaning that a tiger most of the time would rather not fight each other (Meyer, A. (2013, January 1). Tigers do not want to fight each other, this means that generally there is not a competition for mates. Tigers are not social creatures, they mainly travel alone and one of the few times that they will purposefully seek out another tiger is when it is their mating season. Their mating season or “copulation usually happens between November and April, which are the cool months” which means that for most of the year the tigers remain loners (Meyer, Amelia. “Tigers.org.za.” Tiger Reproduction, 2013). They do not travel in packs and for the most part, if they see a tiger that they have seen before then they will be somewhat friendly and may share food.

The way that a female tiger shows she is ready to mate is she will urinate around her area, and this urine has a specific smell that tells other tigers that she is ready to mate and will attract them over to come mate with her(Meyer, Amelia. “Tigers.org.za.” Tiger Reproduction, 2013). When the male or possible males come over to the female’s territory, they will do certain things that will make a sort of trust bond between the two tigers. They will walk around each other, growl or make sounds at each other, rub their heads together (this is prevalent in modern day house cats, that is why a cat will rub their head against their owner, it’s a sign of trust) and just create trust between the two before they mate. Also, like it was said earlier if multiple male tigers show up to mate with the same female then if they decide to compete for the mate then the strongest and biggest tiger will be able to mate with the female. Once the male and female tigers trust each other then the female will lick and groom the male. While the tigers are mating over a few days they will “ovulate” which means that they will have sex. They will have sex multiple times to give a higher chance of the female conceiving. When a male tiger is in the few days that it is mating with a female tiger it will defend its mate very aggressively, attacking or killing anything that comes near. Sometimes a male will kill a female’s cubs so the female will reproduce with the male tiger. This is not very strange since a tiger’s priority is its fitness, of its survival, not other tigers seeing as though they are loners. So, them killing baby tigers is not all too strange, they are worried about their fitness, not other tiger’s fitness.

After a few days of mating, the male tiger will leave the female tiger and go and try and find another tiger to mate with. The female is left with the cubs and she will take care of them on her own. The male does not help with the cubs at all. It takes about 16 weeks for the baby cubs to be born, and after they are born the mother will keep them in a den for a month because they are born blind (Meyer, Amelia. Tigers.org.za. 2013,).