The powerpoint thing didn't work out, but here's the body of the report! This is sorta short but nonetheless full of information. It's actually all the information I could find from various websites combined. NO STEALING MY REPORT!!!
A Brief History of Liger’s
Ligers (tigris x panthera leo) are hybrid breeds. They are the offspring of a female tiger and a male lion. In the wild, there are no ligers due to the fact that lions live in Africa and tigers live in Asia. Ligers are entirely zoo-bred. The first ligers were born in the October of 1823 to Curvier, a French zoologist, in England. An African lion and an Asiatic tiger were kept in the same room. They mated frequently throughout the July of 1823. They produced three liger cubs. These are only the first recorded liger cubs, as it is unknown to this day if any ligers were born before 1823. Ligers are sometimes called tigons, which is incorrect. A tigon is the offspring of a female lion and a male tiger. The appearance of a tigon is, also, distinctively different from a liger. Ligers like to be in the water. The trait comes from their tiger side. Lions hate to get wet.
Appearance
Ligers have stripes on their back, their legs, the stomachs, and their tails. The stripes are a slightly darker color but can clearly be distinguished from their tawny-colored background. Ligers may also have rosettes, which they inherit from their lion parent. The rosettes are usually black, dark brown, or sandy brown. When ligers have rosettes, their coats are tawny, sandy brown, or golden. Ligers can also have pale golden, white, or stripe-less coats. This drastic difference in color can only occur when a white female tiger mates with lion. Male ligers, in most cases, do not have a mane. If they do have a mane though, it is very short.
There have been no cases in which there has been a black liger bred, but there are theories. This has been tried before by mating a jaguar with a tiger but it resulted in a stillbirth. If a jaguar and a tiger mated, the liger would not be purebred as a result of the jaguars’ genes and it wouldn’t be a liger, as the father would not be a lion.
Age and Size
Liger’s are the worlds biggest cats (excluding Siberian tigers, which are purebred). The biggest liger in the world is over 1,200 lbs (554 kgs) and his name is Hercules. Hercules, when standing up on his back legs, is 10 ft. tall. He has the strength of a lion and the speed of a tiger, reaching up to 50 miles per hour. When he was three years old, in 2005, he weighed 900 lbs (408 kg) and was featured in Maxim magazine.
The oldest liger in the world was 24 years old. Her name was Shasta and she was born on May 14th, 1948 at the Hogle Zoo in Salt Lake City, Utah. The oldest tiger that is living is named Nook. He lives in the Valley of Kings animal sanctuary and is 21 years old. He weighs 1, 210 lbs (550 kg). It was confirmed that Nook was still alive in January of 2007.
A Sterile Breeder
Hybrids are usually sterile. This is not the case for the liger. Female ligers were always known to be fertile, although the males are sterile. It is because of genomic imprinting that the male ligers were thought to be sterile.
Generic imprinting is a biological occurrence that occurs in some genes when two inherited copies of the genes have opposite expression patterns. Each of the two inherited copies of the genes is either expressed or silenced, meaning that it is there but not shown, depending on the parental origin of the copy of the gene. Imprinted genes may be responsible for the liger’s unusual size. Another hypnosis is that the interaction of the lion genes in the tiger’s womb causes a difference. The tiger produces a hormone that sets the liger on a pattern of growth that does not end until the liger dies. The different hormones react and the male tiger stays in a sterile state. The male lions, despite being sterile, somehow mature sexually and mate with other female felines.
Ligers and their Offspring
When ligers mate, they usually mate with another lion or another tiger.
When a liger mates with a tiger, their offspring is called ti-liger. When ligers mate with lions, their offspring is called li-liger. Li-liger’s look more like lions while ti-liger’s look more like tigers. The more genes of one cat that a liger’s children have, the more likely it is that they will look more closely related with that type of cat.
Ti-liger’s resemble golden tigers but with darker stripes. They also sound more like a tiger than their liger mothers and they rarely grow manes. This is all due to the amount of genes the tiger has in the ti-liger. One ti-liger was born in the Shambala preserve. His name was Nathaniel. He lived for 8-9 years and then died of a cancer. It is thought that his mixed genes might have contributed to the illness. His mother, Noelle, a liger, also died soon after her son.