Why are there tigers in the Sundarbans? reproduced w/ permission from a FB post by Dibyajyoti Lahiri.

The tiger population in the Sundarbans is among the planet’s enduring mysteries and a story of survival against impossible odds. 1/n

By ‘odds’, I don’t mean poaching and habitat destruction, but rather paradoxically, the habitat itself: i.e. the biological oddity of a large predatory mammal thriving in a coastal/mangrove ecosystem. For all practical purposes, tigers *should not* viably continue to exist 2/n

and reproduce in a mangrove forest. There is practically no natural source of fresh water (an absolute must for land mammals) and the wet, marshy soil is supposed to make ambush hunting (the tiger’s modus operandi) extremely difficult. 3/n

There is also very little in the form of significantly-sized prey for a tiger — at 36 kgs, the chital is a small species of deer. It’s no wonder then that the tigers prey on humans in this region, given that we’re larger, less fast, and less evolved to be wary of predators. 4/n

The species we refer to as the Royal Bengal tiger actually has 4 to 5 times more individuals in the wild outside of Bengal/Bangladesh than inside. The nomenclature has more to do with Calcutta/Bengal being a major centre of colonial India than actual geographical range. 5/n

Once inhabiting a continuous range throughout the Indian subcontinent, the existing populations of the Royal Bengal tiger have been reduced to patches of protected forests here and there. 6/n

But there are major differences between the tigers in the Sundarbans and those elsewhere. The avg weight of the Bengal tiger is ~220 kgs but healthy individuals from the Sundarbans population usually max out at 100-100 kgs, less than half the normal size. 7/n

This is an expected adaptation owing to the scarcity of food resources. Also no one quite knows how they survive by drinking highly saline water. This is why the Sundarbans population is thought to be ‘ecologically non-exchangeable’ with other populations of the same species. 8/n

Meaning, if you take a population of Bengal tigers from the Sundarbans and introduce it in other known Bengal tiger habitats elsewhere, they won’t survive, and vice versa. 9/n

From a biological point of view, this is usually a sign that an isolated population is on its way to being classified into a separate subspecies in the distant future. 10/n

How many tigers remain in the Sundarbans is an extremely crucial question from a conservation perspective. The answer currently is about 400-600. But *why* there are tigers at all in the Sundarbans we might never know. 11/11