White Tiger, Carlita
This is Carlita, a 19-year-old female White Tiger, who died in September 2013. [Carlita was born in captivity in July 1992 and came to the zoo two years later. She shared the exhibit with two other female Bengal tigers called Lyric and Roshe. She was the last surviving member of that group].White tigers are Bengal tigers. They’re not albino or their own separate species, as many people think. White tigers occur when two Bengal tigers that carry a recessive gene controlling coat color are bred together.
The tiger (Panthera tigris) is the largest cat species. At one time there were eight subspecies; now, there are only six. They once ranged widely across Asia, from Turkey in the west to the eastern coast of Russia (Nowell and Jackson, 1996). Over the past 100 years, tigers have disappeared from southwest and central Asia, from two Indonesian islands (Java and Bali) and from large areas of Southeast and Eastern Asia. Tigers have lost 93% of their historic range (Sanderson et al., 2006). Tigers are currently found in twelve Asian range states: Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Lao PDR, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, Russia, Thailand and Viet Nam. They may still persist in North Korea, although there has been no recent confirmed evidence. It is the largest living member of the cat family and no two animals are the same; each Bengal Tiger has its own pattern of stripes.
Status: Endangered --> Status information found at The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species