Transcript White Bengal Tiger

White Bengal Tiger
By : Divina Boone
Inbreeding and
outcrossing
Because the extreme rarity of the
white tiger allele in wild the breeding
pool was limited to small numbers of
white tigers in captivity. According to
Kailash Sankhala, the last white tiger
ever seen in the wild was shot in 1958.
Today there is a large number of white
tigers in captivity. A white Amur tiger
may have been born at CenterHill
and has given rise to strain of white
Amur tigers. A man named Robert
Baudy realized that tigers had white
genes when a tiger he sold to Mar well
Zoo in England developed white
spots, and bred them accordingly.
Captivity
White tigers are found in many major
zoos across India. Zandankanan Zoological park, Odisha hosts 34 white
tigers with the first litter of white tigers
born in 1980. Parc de ben, is a zoo in a
city of Algiers, which houses of a rare
breed. Two females and a male, were
brought on a flight from Gabon, in July
2014. The Emperor Valley Zoo houses a
male and female white tiger. On the
9th January 2015 the female white
Bengal tiger name Rajasi gave birth to
two cubs.
Genetic Defects
Outside of India, inbred white tigers
have been prone to crossed eyes,
condition known as a strabismus, an
example of which is “Clarence the
cross-eyed lion”, due to incorrectly
routed visual pathways in brains of
white tigers. When stressed or
confused all white tigers cross their
eyes. Strabismus is associated with
white tigers of mixed Bengal x Siberian
ancestry. The only pure-Bengal white
tiger reported to be cross-eyed was
Mohini’s daughter Rewat. Strabismus is
directly linked to the white gene and
is not a separate consequence of
inbreeding.