Bengal Tiger

Bengal Tiger: Species Facts

Range & Habitat

The Sundarbans is the world's largest mangrove forest, in the delta of the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna rivers, and is shared by Bangladesh and India. According to the Bangladesh Forest Department's 2024 tiger report, it covers 10,263 km², about 60 % of it (6,017 km²) in Bangladesh and the rest in India. It is made of low-lying islands, between 0.9 and 2.1 m above mean sea level, cut by a network of tidal waterways, with dense human settlements and farmland to the north and east and the Bay of Bengal to the south.^[2]

India's Sundarban Tiger Reserve describes the Sundarbans as the only mangrove ecosystem in the world that harbours tigers, and its tigers as adapted to saline water and excellent swimmers, with a varied diet that runs from fish and crabs to wild boar and chital. In the Bangladesh Sundarbans, the 2024 report says that spotted deer (chital) and wild boar make up 89 % of the prey biomass in the tigers' diet.^[11][2]

Bangladesh: the Bangladesh Forest Department's third camera-trap assessment, with fieldwork between January 2023 and March 2024 and published in September 2024, estimated 125 tigers in the Bangladesh Sundarbans (95 % confidence interval 100–156), at a density of 2.64 tigers per 100 km². Tiger signs were found in 64 of the 65 sample units surveyed along the creeks, and camera traps confirmed tigers in the remaining one, which the report says suggests that tigers occupy the whole of the forest.^[2]

India: the All India Tiger Estimation of 2022, India's most recent national estimate, put the tigers of the Indian Sundarbans at 101. According to the Sundarban Tiger Reserve, that cycle estimated a density of 4.27 tigers per 100 km², tigers occupied 1,895 km² of the Indian Sundarbans, and camera traps identified 100 individual tigers: 81 in the Sundarban Tiger Reserve and 20 in the adjoining South 24 Parganas division, with one tiger common to both. For India as a whole, the same 2022 estimation gave 3,682 tigers (range 3,167–3,925), the figure the Government of India was still citing in July 2026.^[4][8][3][5]

Earlier figures, for the record: in the Bangladesh Sundarbans, the first systematic national survey, in 2015, estimated 106 tigers (95 % confidence interval 84–130), and the 2024 report describes its estimate as 9.65 % higher than in 2018 and 17.92 % higher than in 2015. In the Indian Sundarbans, the All India Tiger Estimation gave 70 tigers in 2010, 76 in 2014 and 88 in 2018; India's national estimate was 2,226 in 2014 and 2,967 in 2018.^[2][4]

The name used on this page, Panthera tigris tigris, follows the 2017 revision of cat taxonomy by the Cat Classification Task Force of the IUCN SSC Cat Specialist Group, which places all mainland Asian tigers, including those of India and Bangladesh, in that subspecies.^[6]

Threats

Poaching of tigers and of their prey. The Bangladesh Forest Department's 2024 report lists poaching, retaliatory killings and the taking of the tigers' prey animals for human consumption among the serious threats in the Sundarbans. It attributes an earlier decline to poaching before or during the first survey in 2015, and says that poaching of tigers and spotted deer may have contributed to the fall in tiger density in Satkhira, in the west of the Bangladesh Sundarbans.^[2]

Cyclones and flooding. The 2024 report says the Sundarbans has been facing severe climatic events, including increasingly intense cyclones and tropical storms that flood the forest floor. Hundreds of spotted deer, one of the tigers' main prey, died in Cyclone Remal in 2024, and tigers themselves may have faced life-threatening risks from the high water.^[2]

Sea-level rise and climate change. A 2019 modelling study in the journal Science of the Total Environment projected a steep decline in suitable tiger habitat in the Bangladesh Sundarbans, with sea-level rise expected to have a substantial negative impact on this low-lying area. Under the combined effect of climate change and sea-level rise, its model predicts that no suitable tiger habitat would remain in the Bangladesh Sundarbans by 2070.^[7]

Conflict with people. The Sundarban Tiger Reserve describes tigers straying into the fringe villages outside the mangrove forest as a very common phenomenon and the main reason for conflict with local villagers, and notes that, in extremely stressed conditions, tigers there have attacked people.^[10][11]

Uneven trends within the forest. Although the overall trend in the Bangladesh Sundarbans is positive, the 2024 report found declines in the Chandpai-Sarankhola and Satkhira blocks, and only one male to 12 females in the Khulna block, which it says calls for more intensive camera-trapping and genetic monitoring to look into possible missing males or inbreeding.^[2]

Conservation Status & Work

Panthera tigris: Endangered on the IUCN Red List (global assessment of the species, published in 2022). That category describes the tiger as a species across its whole world range. It is not the status of the Sundarbans population, nor of the Bengal tiger as a subspecies.^[1]

In India, the Sundarban Tiger Reserve in West Bengal is one of the country's tiger reserves listed by the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA), the body constituted under section 38 L of the Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972. The reserve states that all the rules and regulations under the Indian Forest Act, 1927, the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972 and the NTCA apply inside it, and the Act requires every State Government to prepare a Tiger Conservation Plan for each tiger reserve. The Government of India declared the Royal Bengal Tiger its National Animal in 1972.^[13][12][5]

India counts its tigers every four years in the All India Tiger Estimation, led by the NTCA with the Wildlife Institute of India. In the Sundarbans the method is adapted to the mangroves: camera traps are the only way to count tigers there, prey is counted from boats along transects at low tide, and surveys along the khals (water channels) record where tigers and other species occur.^[5][8]

On the Indian side, the Sundarban Tiger Reserve says nylon-net fences along the forest edge play an important role in keeping tigers from straying into villages; it lists about 21, 35 and 40 km of fencing in three of its ranges, checked daily by forest guards together with members of local joint forest management committees. Patrols use a mobile app, E-Patrol, introduced in 2021-22, and drones, which the reserve says have also helped to locate tigers that have strayed into villages.^[9]

In Bangladesh, the 2024 assessment was carried out under the Sundarbans Tiger Conservation Project of the Bangladesh Forest Department, funded by the Government of Bangladesh. The report credits the Village Tiger Response Team (VTRT) model with significantly reducing the impact of human-tiger conflict on both people and tigers, and recommends supporting it, maintaining the existing nylon fencing with the local community, strengthening SMART patrols and building a community-based intelligence network against deer and tiger poachers.^[2]