(CNN) —When tour guide and wildlife photographer Gaurav Ramnarayanan set out on safari on the evening of January 24, 2024, he wasn’t looking for tigers.
The 25-year-old was leading a private tour in the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Kaziranga National Park, a 430 square-kilometer wildlife reserve in India’s northeastern Assam state. While it’s home to the largest tiger population in the region, sightings are rare and the park is better known for its other wildlife, including the world’s largest population of one-horned rhinoceroses and hundreds of colorful bird species.
That’s what Ramnarayanan and his tour guests were looking for that night. Sitting in the safari jeep in the late afternoon, the group suddenly heard an alarm call from a deer — the sound an animal makes when it sees a predator, says Ramnarayanan. He began driving, turning a corner before stopping the car in its tracks: around 700 meters away, there was a tiger on the road.
“Initially when I saw him, he looked really white and didn’t look like a normal (Bengal) tiger,” says Ramnarayanan, who has been guiding wildlife tours and photographing big cats since 2016, when he founded his travel company The Wildside. “I’ve seen enough tigers to realize at the first glance that this one was not regular.”
His suspicions proved right when he looked at the predator through his camera lens: with strawberry-blonde stripes, the big cat was unmistakably a rare “golden” tiger.
“The tiger decided to come towards us, not with any intention for attack or any intention to harm us, but purely to pass through his path and proceed with marking his territory,” says Ramnarayanan. He was able to snap incredible shots of the tiger as it walked along the road, coming within 100 meters of the jeep.
Ramnarayanan posted an image online, and internet users were quick to express their admiration for the stunning photo and the tiger’s unusual coloring.
But golden tigers — also known as golden tabby tigers or strawberry tigers — are not a subspecies: they’re the result of a genetic mutation that changes the color of their fur.
And while beautiful, their presence has a dark side.
Genetic “spelling mistakes”
Golden tigers, like white and snow-white tigers, are the result of a recessive trait that appears as a mutation in color-creating genes, says Uma Ramakrishnan, a professor of ecology at India’s National Center for Biological Sciences.
She likens the mutation to “spelling mistakes in the DNA” that result in different color combinations. In white tigers, the mutation inhibits color, while in golden tigers, a mutation in the so-called “wideband” gene extends the production period of pheomelanin, a reddish-yellow pigment, during hair growth. Snow-white tigers inherit both recessive traits, giving them a white coat with barely visible blonde stripes, giving them the nickname “stripeless tigers.”
In the wild, less than one in 10,000 tiger cubs are born with the white fur trait, and the golden trait is even rarer.
That’s why conservationists are concerned that the appearance of these tigers could be a symptom of inbreeding in isolated tiger populations.
