No one knows exactly why tigers are striped, but scientists think that the stripes act as camouflage, and help tigers hide from their prey while they hunt. Tiger stripes are like human fingerprints; no two tigers have the same pattern of stripes. Most tigers have an orange coat with dark brown or black stripes accented with white. Tigers that live in cold climates (Siberian tigers) have thicker fur than tigers that live in warm climates. A tiger's tail is 3 to 4 feet long, about half as long as its body. Tigers use their tails for balance when they run through fast turns. They also use their tails to communicate with other tigers. A tiger's paw prints are called pug marks .

Siberian or Amur Tiger (Panthera tigris altaica) is the largest tiger with the lightest coloured coat. Its winter coat is shaggy, dense, paler than its summer coat. This is how it survives temperatures as low as -33 degrees C. Its stripes are brown rather than black. Its muzzle is broader and males have a very well developed ruff around their necks, almost like a mane.

The Siberian tiger can be found in uninhabited mountain forests of the Amur Basin to Siberia, and live primarily in coniferous, scrub oak, and birch woodlands of eastern Russia, with a few tigers found in northeastern China and northern North Korea. There are also tiger reserves in India.

Tigers can live in a variety of habitats. They do need adequate cover to be able to ambush or stalk their prey, and are therefore usually found in forested areas.

The habitat of the Amur tiger (and leopard) is a unique forested area in the Russian Far East states of Primorski and Khabarovski Krais. In the summer the forests are dense with varied vegetation which is both deciduous and coniferous but in the winter these forests are cold and snow bound. Much of the terrain is mountainous and rugged but is now crossed by roads, human settlements and more recently logging roads. Each adult tiger needs a huge area of land for its territory — up to 40km by 40km for an adult male whilst the female home range is usually smaller. Amur tigers need much larger areas of habitat to survive due to the relative lack of prey so that any particular area of habitat will have a less dense population than a similar size of habitat in one of the tiger ranges such as India or Thailand. For this reason a very large area of healthy habitat is needed to sustain a population of Amur tigers that is viable for the future.