Liger

From Freepedia

The liger is a cross (a hybrid) between a male lion and a female tiger. It is therefore a member of genus Panthera. It looks like a giant lion with diffused stripes. Like tigers (and unlike lions), ligers like swimming.

A cross between a male tiger and a female lion is called a tigon.

Known ligers exist due to human influence, either by deliberate human intervention, or by humans putting lions and tigers in enclosed spaces together. In natural conditions tigers and lions generally do not inhabit the same territory - the two species used to coexist in the wild in India, but inhabited different regions. Today in India, Lions exist only in the Gir forest. There have been no confirmed reports of natural interbreeding, though there are long-standing claims that this has happened.

In Nicholas Courtney's (editor) book "The Tiger, Symbol Of Freedom", it stated Rare reports have been made of tigresses mating with lions in the wild. A.A. Milne writing in chapter 3 "Tiggers Can't Climb Trees" said Under exceptional circumstances it has been known for a tiger to be forced into ranges inhabited by the Asian lion, Panthera leo persica, which is the same genus as the tiger. Rare reports have been made of tigresses mating with lions in the wild and producing offspring known as ligers. When a tiger and a lioness mate the cub is called a tigron.

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Historical Ligers

A colour plate of the offspring of lion and tiger was made by Geoffrey St Hilaire (1772 - 1844). A 19th Century painting also depicts an animal trainer with lion, tigress and three hybrid offspring. The offspring have lion-like colouration, a dorsal stripe and tiger-like ruffs. These are possibly the ligers bred in either 1824 or 1837.

In October 1824, exhibitor and animal deal Mr Atkins bred a litter of liger cubs from an African lion and an Asiatic tigress that were housed together. These may have been the first ligers bred. The cubs were exhibited to His Majesty the King at Windsor. The cubs were fostered by bitches and a goat. Cuvier reported the hybrids in his book Animal Kingdom (pages 444-449) and included an engraving of the 3 month old cubs.

Two liger cubs were born in 1837. These were exhibited to His Majesty William IV and to his successor Queen Victoria. On 14th December 1900, Carl Hagenbeck wrote to zoologist James Cossar Ewart with details and photographs of his cross breeding experiments using a lion and a tiger born at the Hagenpark in Hamburg in 1897. He wrote that he was also attempting to cross a female leopard with a Bengal tiger. On 31st May 1901, Hagenbeck wrote again to James Cossar Ewart sending him photographs of the results of his male lion and tigress hybridisation experiments.

According to A H Bryden in "Animal Life and the World of Nature" (1902), a liger was bred in May 1897 by Carl Hagenbeck. At 5 years old it measured from nose tip to tail 10 ft 2 inches in length, stood three inches short of 4 ft at the shoulder and weighed 467 lbs. These would be the same animals Hagenbeck described to Cossar Ewart.

Although ligers are now the more common of the two lion-tiger hybrids, a century ago, tigons were evidently more common than ligers. Gerald Iles, in "At Home In The Zoo" (1961) was able to obtain 3 tigons for Manchester's Belle Vue Zoo, but wrote For the record I must say that I have never seen a liger, a hybrid obtained by crossing a lion with a tigress. They seem to be even rarer than tigons.

Large Size

Ligers grow much larger than tigers or lions and it is believed this is because female lions transmit a growth-inhibiting gene to their descendants to balance the growth-promoting gene transmitted by male lions (this gene is due to competitive mating strategies in lions). A male lion needs to be large to successfully defend the pride from other roaming male lions and pass on his genes; also, in prides with multiple male adult lions, a male's cubs need to be bigger than the competing males for the best survival chance. Thus, his genes favor larger offspring. A lioness, however, will have up to 5 cubs, and a cub is typically one of many being cared for in a pride with many other lions. As such, it has a relatively high survival rate, and need not be huge as it will not need to look after itself very quickly. Smaller cubs are more easily cared for and fed, are less strain on the pride and hence the inhibiting gene developed.

Male tigers do not compete for status and mates in the way lions do; a tigress only mates with one tiger when in season, so a tiger does not have the same genetic predisposition to produce large competing offspring. Also, a tigress typically has fewer cubs, and those have a much lower survival rate due to the tiger's solitary nature, so being large and growing quickly are an advantage; there is no need for a growth inhibitor. Being the offspring of a male lion and female tiger, the liger inherits the growth-promoting gene unfettered by a growth-inhibiting gene and typically grows larger than either animal; this is called growth dysplasia. Some male ligers grow sparse manes.

Because of the impossibility of a gene being inherited from only females, there is a competing hypothesis. This hypothesis (allthough not tested) is that the Lion's sperm is damaged somehow during fertilization and that a growth inhibiting gene is typically destroyed. It is impossible for a gene carried on a chromosomes to be passed along only from the mother. The reason for this is there are no chromosomes that only a female can have. Female Tigons and Female Ligers both posess a tiger X chromosme and a lion X chromosome, yet only the female Ligers will grow large, this means something must happen to either alter the genes or that the cause of the growth dysplasia lies at least partially outside of the genes.

Another possible hypothesis is that the growth dysplasia results from the interaction between lion genes and tiger womb enviroment. The tiger produces a hormone that sets the fetal Liger on a pattern of growth that does not end throughout his life. The hormonal hypothesis is that the cause of the male Liger's growth is his sterility - essentially, the male liger remains in the pre-pubertal growth phase. This is not upheld by behavioural evidence - despite being sterile, many male ligers become sexually mature and mate with females . In addition, female ligers also attain great size but are fertile.

Fertility

Known male ligers have all been sterile. Many, however, reach sexual maturity and copulate with lionesses, tigresses or with female hybrids. A H Bryden reported in "Animal Life and the World of Nature" (1902), Already, I understand, Mr Hagenbeck has mated the big lion-tiger hybrid with other pure-bred felines, but with no result. This referred to the liger bred in 1897.

Female ligers are often fertile and can be mated to a tiger resulting in ti-liger offspring or to a lion resulting in li-liger offspring. A behavioural research programme in the USA has bred a female ti-liger called Lady Kali; at 2 years old she weighed 400 lbs.

Vocalisation and Behaviour

Ligers may exhibit emotional or behavioural conflicts due to their mixed ancestry.

They inherit different or mixed vocabularies (tigers "chuff", lions roar). G Peters included several hybrids (liger, tigon, leopon, leguar) in his "Comparative Investigation of Vocalisation in Several Felids" published in German in Spixiana-Supplement, 1978; (1): 1-206.

They may inherit conflicting behavioural traits from the parent species. Ligers may exhibit conflicts between the social habits of the lion and the solitary habits of the tiger. Their lion heritage wants them to form social groups, but their tiger heritage urges them to be intolerant of company. Opponents of deliberate hybridization say this causes confusion and depression for the animals, especially after sexual maturity. How much of their behaviour is due to conflicting instincts and how much is due to abnormal hormones or the stress of captive conditions is not fully known.

Colors

Ligers have a tiger-like striping pattern on a lion-like tawny background. In addition they may inherit rosettes from the lion parent (lion cubs are rosetted and some adults retain faint markings). These markings may be black, dark brown or sandy. The background color may be correspondingly tawny, sandy or golden. In common with tigers, their underparts are paler. The actual pattern and color depends on which subspecies the parents were and on the way in which the genes interact in the offspring.

White tigers have been crossed with lions to produce "white" (actually pale golden) ligers. In theory white tigers could be crossed with white lions to produce white, very pale or even stripeless ligers. A black liger would require both a melanistic tiger and a melanistic lion as parents. Very few melanistic tigers have ever been recorded, most being due to excessive markings (pseudo-melanism or abundism) rather than true melanism. No reports of black lions have ever been substantiated. The blue or maltese tiger is now unlikely to exist, making gray or blue ligers an impossibility.

Recent Ligers

The liger featured in the photograph is named Hobbs and lives at Sierra Safari Zoo, Reno, Nevada, USA. He is the offspring of an African lion and a Bengal tigress. According to the zoo, "He roars like a lion and swims like a tiger. He's definitely all cat. He likes to play, and for all his incredible bulk he moves just as silently as any other cat". He is estimated to weigh about 450 kilograms (approximately 1000 pounds), about twice the average for male Siberian tigers, the largest non-extinct, naturally-occurring member of family Felidae.

Shambala Preserve has a liger called Patrick who weighs an estimated 800 pounds. He has a golden coat with slightly darker golden stripes and a modest mane that resembles an overdeveloped tiger ruff. Patrick was born in 1990 and lived at Deer Path Animal Haven, a roadside zoo in Illinois. When this closed in 1998, Patrick went to Shambala.

There is a four-year-old liger on display at Barefoot Landing in North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, USA.

Wild Animal Safari in Pine Mountain, Georgia, USA, have been breeding ligers since 2000. As of October 2005 they had several adult ligers.

In September 1975, a tigress sharing a cage with a lion at a zoo in Osaka, Japan, gave birth to 3 cubs described as having tiger's heads and lion's bodies. Two died soon after birth and the third soon after the news reported.

A liger born in 2002 at Fuzhou, Fujian Province, lived for more than 100 days. In July 2004, a liger cub born in a wildlife park in Hainan, China died of respiratory failure 72 hours after birth. It had been born to the tigress "Huanhuan" and a lion called "Xiaoerhei". It was born underweight and its death was attributed to congenital respiratory failure. According to Hainan biologist Dr.Li Yuchun, only one out of 500,000 lion-tiger or tiger-lion cubs survive, due to differences in their chromosomes. Huanhuan had rejected the cub and it had been suckled by a domestic dog that had just whelped in the hope of getting colostrum. The zoo plan to breed further ligers. On 6th December 2004, a Bengal tigress produced healthy liger cubs sired by an African lion. The Russian Information Agency Novosti claimed it to be the first ever liger produced from this combination (possibly the first in Russia). The parents lived in neighbouring caves in the Novosibirsk zoo and got used to each other. The female liger cub was named Zita and resembles her tigress mother with clear tiger stripes, but has a lion's background colour and many leonine features. Her brother remains with his parents in another Siberian zoo. In 2005, two tigons and three ligers were bred at the Shenzhen safari park, in southern China (near Hong Kong).

In April 2005, a liger (erroneously called a tigron) called Samil was born at the Italian Circus in Vigo, northwestern Spain. Samil is a cross between a female tiger and a lion and therefore is a liger.

Ligers in popular culture

  • The title character of the movie Napoleon Dynamite declares ligers to be "pretty much" his favorite animal, and states that they are bred for their "skills in magic". [1] The liger he draws in the movie does not look like a real liger, suggesting that the movie's authors thought of ligers as fictional creatures.
  • A variety of mecha in the manga, anime and toy set Zoids are called the Liger.
  • In the new Transformers Galaxy Force series, where a figure scans a Liger as an alternate mode, and is now known as Liger Jack. He combines with Galaxy Convoy to become Liger Convoy.
  • Jushin Liger (anime) - a popular anime hero created by the legendary Go Nagai.
  • Jushin Liger - a professional wrestler

See also

Look up Liger on Wiktionary, the free dictionary

External links

Retrieved from "http://en.freepedia.org/Liger.html"


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