Science
The amazing science behind how tigers stay camouflaged in the forest, despite being orange
The trees are green and the tigers are orange - how does that work?

The tiger, the largest big cat species - no, it’s not the lion - can successfully hide just a few metres away from its prey animal without being spotted.
Then, in the perfect moment, it pounces, dragging the animal down with its claws before crunching down with a neck-breaking bite to the nape or a suffocating, clamping bite to the throat.
It all sounds well and good, from the tiger’s point of view at least, but a very reasonable question is: how does the tiger stay hidden at all?
A fully-grown tiger can measure up to 1.4–2.8 m (4 ft 7 in – 9 ft 2 in) and weigh up to 700lbs (310 kg). I’m not that big, but I reckon a deer would spot me quicker.
Scientists discover that tigers aren’t actually orange
The trick, scientists have discovered, is in the tiger’s coat. In their natural habitat, which often consists of dense forests and tall grasslands, the stripes provide a broken-up pattern for the animal to blend in with the ragged edges of trees, leaves and other foliage that are constantly being hit by dappled sunlight and shadows.
OK, but they’re still orange!
Touché. Here we go: recent science has discovered that tigers appear orange to humans because the vast majority of us are trichromatic, which means we are sensitive to all three primary colours: blue, green, and most importantly here, red.
However, boars, deer, and other ungulate (hoofed) tiger prey are dichromatic, and pick up only green and blue light: they are effectively colour-blind when it comes to red tones.
Therefore, their distinction between red-orange tones and green tones is virtually none for the prey, rendering our orange tiger green in their eyes.
The tiger, it seems, didn’t ‘need’ to evolve to become green, it simply became the colour it needed to in the eyes of its prey, allowing it to get so close to its dinner and become one of the most successful predators on the planet.
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