Amur Tiger
Panthera tigris altaica (sometimes called the Amur, Siberian, Manchurian, Ussurian, or Northeast China tiger).
Wild Amur tigers are found primarily in two areas in the Russian Far East, the primary population covers 156,000 sq km in Primosky and Khabarovski Krais, and another small population occurs on the Russia-China border and into northeast China.There may be less than 400 individuals left. Numbers of Amur tigers in China are unclear. According to a 1998 survey by WCS Russia in Northeast China, there were around 20 Amur tigers in Heilongjiang province and Jilin province.
Amur tigers are the second largest of the tiger subspecies, healthy male Amur tigers weigh, on average 176 kg. Their orange colouring can be paler than the colouring of other tigers. They have a white chest and belly, and a thick white ruff of fur around their neck. Total body length of Amur males and females averages 195 and 174 cm, respectively, with an additional tail length of 34.5 cm (males) and 32.6 cm (females) (Kerley et al. 2005). Indian and Amur tigers are considerably larger than other extant subspecies (Slaght et al. 2005). 
In the Russian Far East the territory size of Amur tigers ranges from 100-400 km2 for females to 800–1,000 km2 for males. Like all tigers their prey is primarily Cervids (wild deer) and Suidae (pigs) which in this climate are unevenly distributed and move seasonally leading to a relatively large tiger range. Amur tigers give birth year-round with a peak in late summer. They reproduce at about 4 years of age with a litter of 1-4 cubs after a gestation period of 103 days.
Over the last century tigers have faced many threats in the Russia Far East, surviving war and revolution, and now an onslaught on their forests. Between 1910 and 1947, tigers were hunted as game or pests in Russia. A tiger hunting ban was introduced in 1947 but poaching became a rampant problem during the economic and political chaos surrounding the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.
The Law of the Russian Federation on Environmental Protection and Management of 1992 re-established legal protection for Amur tigers but in 1993, Russia’s Primoski Krai Ecology Committee estimated that 60 tigers were still being poached each year from a population of 200-300 tigers.
Today these predators still face many threats from human-tiger conflict. They are being poached for their pelts and suffer from human encroachment, habitat destruction and prey depletion. Only about 20% of Russia's tiger population is found in protected areas, which here as elsewhere can never be sufficient for their survival in the long term. Outside these areas, commercial logging and hunting of ungulates are on the increase.
