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Journalism of Courage
Wildlife enthusiasts often go wow over videos and photographs of big cats shared online. Indian Forest Service officer Susanta Nanda Tuesday shared a similar clip featuring a black tiger cub roaming with its mother in the wild.
The video shows a little black tiger cub accompanied by its mother moving in the forest seemingly at night. Both of them take a turn and move forward.
Nanda also explained the reason behind the rare colour of the tiger cub. “I am sure you must not have seen the clip of a black tiger cub with its mother in wild. Abundism is a variant of pigmentation, identifiable by enlarged stripes covering a large part of the body of the tiger making it appear melanistic. Some refer to it as pseudomelanism also,” Nanda tweeted.
Watch the video here:
Before this, on the occasion of International Tiger Day on July 29, Nanda had shared a clip of an adult black tiger marking its territory in the forest. IFS officer Parveen Kaswan had tweeted that the rare tigers were first officially found at the Simlipal Tiger Reserve in Odisha in 2007.
As per a study conducted by a team of scientists from the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bengaluru, the black stripes are broadened or spread into tawny background due to a single genetic mutation. Pseudo-melanism is known as the rare pattern variant, distinguished by broadened and fused stripes. The genetic variations may occur spontaneously, not frequently and it is different from melanism, a condition characterised by unusually high deposition of melanin, a dark pigment.
The pseudo-melanistic tigers have been caught on camera repeatedly in Simlipal since 2007. A confirmed record of a pseudo-melanistic tigress was reported in 1993 after a tribal youth killed the big cat in self-defence.
