Zoologists at the Land of the Leopard national park have received rare footage of Amur tigers. Three tigers were caught on a video camera. They were walking one after another, the largest of them in the middle, the other two, of a smaller size, alongside them, as though they were a family.     

Dina Matyukhina, a Land of the Leopard researcher, thinks that the animals in the video are either a tigress and two cubs or three young males born in the same litter because tigers are solitary animals. “The animals in the video seem to be 1.5-2 years old. When cubs are two years of age, they are ready to abandon their mother, but can still accompany her. This isn’t surprising. Young males usually outgrow their mothers by the age of two,” she said.

So far, the researchers aren’t absolutely sure whether the tiger in the centre is the mother tiger. To say more exactly, they need to thoroughly analyse all of the photos and videos of tigers from the same area.

The above video was recorded in the park’s northern section where tiger population research had been largely sporadic, with photo traps set in typical leopard habitats. Now that Amur tigers were spotted there, new photo and video cameras will be installed, making it possible to monitor the tiger population in that area of the park and add more data to the Amur tiger population statistics.

The video suggests that tigers in the park’s northern section reproduce normally.

As a rule, tigers have one to five cubs in a litter, but only one or two of the cubs survive, while almost half of the litter perishes before reaching the age of one for various reasons. If all of the three tigers in the video prove to be siblings, then this is a larger-than-normal family for the average tiger.