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🐅Anatomy & senses

Tiger · Asia largest cat whose subspecies map, 1973 Project Tiger and remaining 4,000-odd wild animals define a century of recovery arithmetic.

Every tiger is a stack of tissues that must agree under season, prey and human pressure.

Meters below repeat the six atlas scores as gauges; they are relative marks, not laboratory certificates.

Systems

Support and integument

A solitary pantherine with a long body, striped disruptive coat and forelimbs built to wrestle large ungulates. Canines and a killing bite to the neck or throat finish what the ambush starts.

Feeding apparatus

Sit-and-ambush on chital, sambar, wild pig and, in the Amur, deer and boar. A large kill funds days; livestock is the conflict calorie. The feeding kit sets the ecological-role score relative to the other 23 types.

Respiration and circulation

Gas exchange and blood flow are tuned to the tiger energy budget -- dive, hover, sprint or bulk browse -- not to a generic vertebrate template.

Senses and neural control

Night vision and hearing in closed forest. Stripes break outline more than they advertise.

Reproduction and ontogeny

Replacement rate is the hidden resilience number. A few thousand animals, shrinking SE Asian forest, and a prey base that snares erase. High cultural impact does not raise resilience.

Thermoregulation and salt/water

Climate and osmoregulation bound where a tiger can close its daily budget. Field sites in the English-speaking world still measure that envelope first.

Relative meters

69
Burst / travel speed
76
Behavioural flexibility
37
Geographic / migratory reach
14
Population security
94
Cultural charge
82
Ecosystem leverage
Burst / travel speed
Speed 69/100 relative to the 24-type atlas -- not a race ranking.
Behavioural flexibility
Intelligence 76/100 as social and problem-solving depth, not a best-species mark.
Geographic / migratory reach
Range 37/100 -- how widely the type occupies or crosses basins.
Population security
Resilience 14/100: high means more secure (Least Concern or recovered), low means threatened. Endangered. Wild numbers rose in India after Project Tiger (1973) and Tx2 pledges (2010); Southeast Asian and South China lineages did not share that graph.
Cultural charge
Cultural impact 94/100 across art, law and media -- relative, not a popularity contest.
Ecosystem leverage
Ecological role 82/100 -- engineer, keystone, pump or specialist.

Hotspots

Primary weapon or tool

The bill, teeth, trunk, pouch or talon that field guides name first -- and that trade or conflict usually targets.

Energy store

Fat, cache, crop or bamboo hours that decide whether a season closes.

Natal or breeding site

A redd, eyrie, den, anemone or ice lair -- often a single-point risk (Izumi, Natron, Gir).

Sensory organ

Night vision and hearing in closed forest. Stripes break outline more than they advertise.

Human interface

Hunt, tourism, film or quota -- the surface where tiger biology meets English-language law.

Tissues & materials

Keratin and integument

Feathers, fur, baleen or skin plates -- tissues, not metals. Moult and wear are the maintenance cycle.

Bone and cartilage

Load paths for stoop, lunge, knuckle-walk or hover. Marrow and pneumatic bone differ by family.

Muscle and tendon

The expensive tissue that speed and intelligence scores only hint at.

Fat, oil and glycogen

Stores that migration, fast and lactation spend. A market for those stores (oil, ivory, fin) is a historical threat.

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