Welcome to our tiger enclosure! My name is Barry, and we've been joined today by one of our resident carnivore experts Justina, and also we have our recent resident behind us as well! 

Tell us about the tigers that we have here?

Well this lovely man here is Lucu, he's our new male. He only came in a few months ago, he's nearly five years old and he came to us from Paignton Zoo which is where he was born. He is hopefully going to partner with our female Dharma, who is in the other enclosure at the moment.

We are in the process of introducing them. Dharma's about four years old, so she's a little bit younger than him, but ideal for first-time breeders as they're just coming to their full maturity. Hopefully, fingers crossed, soon we shall have little tiger feet!

If you're used to tigers, when you first look at a Sumatran tiger the first thing you really notice is they're quite small in comparison to other tigers. 

What are some of the main differences between Sumatrans and other tigers?

The size is the obvious one, and these are the smallest subspecies of tiger. If you compare them to the biggest, the size difference is huge - they're about a third of the size of the bigger Amur tigers! Lucu is actually quite a big male, he is quite considerably bigger than Dharma but he is still on the small side for a tiger. 

There are other differences as well, you might notice he has quite a lot of very dark close-together stripes and that helps blending into the jungle habitat that they they are found in. Amur tigers live in more open spaces so they are much paler and have much more spaced out stripe patterns.

Now we're also quite lucky today that he's active, because tigers and most big cats (as anybody's got cats will know) are quite - as we like to say - "energy efficient". We're standing here just now so we're kind of 'enrichment' for him!

Tell us a little bit about tiger behaviour? 

He has come to see what we're doing in a hopeful sort of sense, today wasn't a feed day! We feed them every other day normally and they will eat quite a lot in one go. It's all raw meat as well which takes a lot to digest, so they will mostly then sleep it off. So he is just about to the point where he's thinking "I could have another meal soon" so he is looking a little bit! But most of the time they spend a lot of time sleeping just to digest that meal, and then they go and use that energy to get the next meal, so they mostly don't waste energy if they don't have to.

All tigers sadly are in decline in the wild through a number of reasons, and Sumatran tigers currently are the the most endangered of all of the kinds of tigers sub-species. 

What are the key threats they face in the wild?

They face similar threats to other tigers and many other species - poaching and particularly habitat loss. The reason that issue in particular is so bad for these guys is because they're island species, they're the only island subspecies of tigers left so they have a very limited space to spread out in and to breed in, and any habitat loss lessens the chances for breeding and for them to expand their population, so it is very difficult at the moment with the deforestation of Sumatra.

Why should we save tigers? Because apart from the fact that one of the most beautiful big cats in the world, they do play a very important role in their habitat don't they?

Why should we save tigers?

The phrase you hear is 'top of the food chain' with these guys. Top predators play a really important role in their habitats because they they'll keep the the populations of prey species under control. If those prey species numbers go out control, they eat so much vegetation that the landscape can be just be decimated and you end up with soil erosion if you've got all the vegetation gone, so keeping those populations in check is tigers main job in the ecosystem. If you start losing those, then we have to manage them ourselves like we do with deer in Scotland to the population under control, so if we can get these guys to do it for free out in Sumatra then we have less interference and that's the goal really.