The Tiger

- Signature in the skin: Every tiger carries a stripe pattern unique to it, as individual as a fingerprint; field researchers identify wild animals from camera-trap images by the markings on their flanks alone. The pattern is set in the skin itself, not merely the coat.

- Patience over speed:Fewer than one hunt in ten ends in a kill. The tiger closes to within a few paces on padded feet before it commits, and a single large kill may sustain it for the better part of a week.

- Six of nine remain: Of the nine subspecies known to science, the Bali, Javan and Caspian tigers were lost within the last century. Fewer than 6,000 survive in the wild today, across less than a tenth of the range the species once held, from eastern Turkey to the islands of Indonesia.