The Amur tiger cubs at the Pittsburgh Zoo and PPG Aquarium are celebrating their first birthday today.

Mara now weighs 160 pounds while her brother, Petya, is 180 pounds.

Their birthday cakes were made from boxes filled with their favorite treats.

Amur tigers are an endangered species.

Mara and Petya were just about 14 pounds during their big media debut on October 3, 2006.

According to the Pittsburgh Zoo’s website, female tigers can weigh as much as 350-pounds – while males can tip the scales at 675-pounds!

Watch the tiger cubs live

Like all other rare and endangered non-domesticated animals, baby White Tigers require extremely species-specific nutrition and care. They, require feeding every 2 hours, 24 hours a day for the first 3 weeks of their life.

The mother of these tiger cubs in El-Mahdia, Tunisia refuses to feed them or doesn’t have enough milk. Local veterinary authorities came up with the idea of entrusting a dog with the delicate mission. Leaving only one cub to its mother, two cubs were introduced to a local dog. The dog responded and soon took the cubs as her own.

The Bengal Tiger or Royal Bengal Tiger (Panthera tigris tigris) is a subspecies of tiger primarily found in Bangladesh and India and also in Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar and in the south of Tibet. It is the most common tiger subspecies, and lives in a variety of habitats, including grasslands, subtropical and tropical rainforests, scrub forests, wet and dry deciduous forests and mangroves. Its fur is orange-brown with black stripes, although there is a mutation that sometimes produces white tigers. It is the national animal of both Bangladesh and India.

There are only 4000 white tigers in their natural habitat and 200 in captivity.

It’s a reality show with a difference. On a visit to Chhatbir zoo the last thing you expect to see is a man atop a tree whistling away to glory, a wildlife guard making loud, strange noises and another one busy beating a drum.

No, it’s not even an effort to recreate a tiger hunting scene from yesteryears. In fact, what greets visitors at the zoo is wildlife authorities pulling off every trick in the animal management book to lure a 11-month-old white tiger to go back to its enclosure.

The tiger is one of the two such cats brought from Delhi zoo some days back and released from captivity on Saturday morning, and has since then been playing hide and seek with zoo keepers.

Probably, it’s trying to convey something — the weather, the living place, or maybe just a day or two of solitude.

Whatever be, zoo officials, after losing a few from the tribe recently, are now too fond of the cat to leave it alone.

On Monday, they tried to push the female tigress near the wire mesh and grills of the locked enclosure, hoping that it may at least respond to feminine sweet-talking.

Field director Dharmender Kumar and zoo warden Neeraj Gupta seemed the most worried of all, finding it difficult to chose from options being suggested by all except those inside cages.

Recent criticism for showing negligent in handling the felines in captivity too proved a hindrance as officials dared not touch any tranquilliser or any other medical aid, fearing the worst.

The official reason, however, remained: “It is only a child enjoying all those mood swings.”

Poachers seeking to bag a Royal Bengal tiger in the Sunderbans reserve are encountering a unique new security measure to keep them away: hundreds of crocodiles that have been released in the mangrove forest.

Originally brought into the reserve in the late 1990s for breeding, the crocodiles are having the unintended beneficial effect of scaring away poachers from the forest - home to the largest wild population of Royal Bengal tigers.

“With tigers on land and the crocodile in water, the fear factor does work,” divisional Forest Officer Rathin Banerjee said Tuesday.

During winter months, the crocs often come out of the cold water and lie in the jungle path of the poachers.

Nearly 400 crocodiles, bred in captivity over the years, have been released in the reserve, Banerjee said. A 2004 census said more than 270 tigers were roaming the reserve in West Bengal state, bordering Bangladesh.

“The use of crocodiles is one of the measures to save the wildlife there from poachers,” said V.K. Yadav, a forest conservator.

Conservationist Ranjit Mitra said it was difficult to say how many tigers have been killed by poachers in the past five years, “but it will run into dozens.”

Another conversationist called the idea of using crocs “novel.”

“It is surely a novel idea, but this can be one of the measures to check poaching,” said Animesh Basu of the Himalayan Nature and Adventure Foundation, a local non-governmental organization.

The state Forest Department was assessing the effectiveness of the new measure.

“It is not like you count how many hens you had and how many have been taken away by the jackals at night,” Yadav said. “Here the idea is to ensure that there is no unusual change in the demography,” Yadav said referring to major species of animals in the Sunderbans.

India’s border guards also have set up camps in the area to guard against the poachers.

“We are trying our best,” Yadav said.

Preliminary results of a recent exhaustive study of tiger habitats found that the population in some Indian states may be nearly 65 percent smaller than experts had thought.

Conservationists said the early results indicated the most recent tiger census - which found about 3,500 tigers - was far too optimistic. The study was conducted in the past two years by the government-run Wildlife Institute of India.

A rare Siberian tiger that was moved from Quebec to Edmonton’s Valley Zoo last year has apparently been missing one of the biggest comforts of home - the French language.

Zoo staff in Edmonton say the magnificent 300-pound tiger called Boris responds better to French than to the English most commonly heard in Alberta. The zoo is now urging French-speakers to visit Boris so he can hear the language he so appreciates.

“He was being aloof most of the time, but as soon as he heard the French language, he came over to the bars,” said Dean Triechel, the zoo’s operations supervisor.

Boris first arrived at the Valley Zoo last May after spending the first seven years of his life at the Granby Zoo in Quebec. He was unresponsive upon his arrival, but when Ginette Heppelle, a native French speaker who works at the zoo, visited his enclosure area a few days later, she called out to him in French and the response was immediate.

“He just got up from the back of his enclosure and walked over to the fence, so that’s when one of the keepers said that he responded to me because I spoke to him in French. That’s where it all started,” said Heppelle.

She points out that Boris’s new surroundings probably made the giant cat as uncomfortable as anything else, but still thinks it could be comforting for Boris to hear his “native tongue.”

“If anything, it will just remind him of home and it will probably make him feel pretty good,” she said.

Joseph Stookey, a professor in the department of large animal clinical sciences at the Western College of Veterinary Medicine in Saskatchewan, doubts the tiger would appreciate hearing French words from the public. He also notes that changes in the tiger’s physical environment would probably have the biggest impact on his comfort level.

“You can imagine all of the conversations that people have around that enclosure, and I don’t think the tiger would put that together in any kind of meaningful way,” he said. “The animal knows it’s in a strange place and it’s going to feel that way for a long time … (Language) is going to be a small part of this great, big unfamiliar picture for the animal.”

Triechel, the zoo’s operations manager, admits he’s just as keen to have people learn more about the Siberian tiger as he is about having them speak French to Boris. Siberian tigers are an endangered species, and it is estimated there are less than 500 left in the world today.

Boris is part of the Species Survival Plan program, which organizes managed breeding programs for some animals facing extinction.

Big Cat Falls at Philadelphia Zoo has some new residents.

Three rare Amur tiger cubs were born last night, the zoo announced today. They appear to be healthy, according to the zoo.

Female tigers keep their cubs hidden after they’re born, the zoo says, and the tiger family will remain off-exhibit for about three months so that Kira can care for her cubs in privacy. Amur tigers are the largest of all big cats.