A Tiger That Drinks Salt Water
Every other tiger population on Earth drinks fresh water. The Sundarbans tigers, living across roughly 10,000 square kilometres of tidal mangrove forest straddling the India-Bangladesh border, regularly drink water with salinity levels that would cause severe dehydration in most large mammals. A 2011 study by the Wildlife Institute of India found that Sundarbans tigers have adapted to tolerate brackish water intake to a degree not documented in any other tiger population. The exact physiological mechanism is still being studied, but the leading hypothesis is that the tigers supplement their water intake through the blood and tissue fluids of their prey, spotted deer, wild boar, and water monitor lizards, which themselves live in the brackish zone. The mangrove forest provides almost no standing fresh water. The tigers stayed anyway, and their kidneys appear to have paid the price in terms of chronic physiological stress, which may partly explain why Sundarbans tigers tend to be smaller in body mass than their counterparts in Ranthambore or Jim Corbett.
