Every tiger has its own stripe pattern, like a fingerprint

No two tigers have quite the same stripes, and conservation scientists put that to work.

Researchers set up hidden camera traps in the forest and identify individual tigers from their stripe patterns in the photos. Those IDs feed into population counts. In India, WCS researchers have identified almost 800 individual tigers from two decades of camera-trap images.

Matching stripes by eye is slow, so scientists built software for it. A 3D stripe model from 2009 was reported to match about 95% of photos belonging to the same tiger, and it can even link a poached skin back to a tiger photographed alive.

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A Bengal tiger pads along a misty jungle river at sunset, painted in a warm vintage nature-tee style.

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