An excerpt from an email to my sister, Jessica.
"all's well here. work is going great. we did some very adorable art projects last week - all themed with animals in polar regions. a narwhal coloring page, penguin suits, a tiger mask. no, not a mis-type. there exists a polar tiger. the amur (or siberian) tiger is the largest of all tigers, and inhabits the far east of asia (russia, mongolia, china). it is in appearance very similar to it's warm-weather cousins, excepting that it can be much larger (up to 10 feet, i think). the amur tiger is an endangered species. from what i read, it is concentrated into two regional populations. in one, the tigers number about 450. in the other, less than 50. reasons for the tiger's tenuous hold onto survival all trace back to man. however, in captivity the tigers numbers are high (it being bred as early as the 1950s). in addition, the captive population shows a greater genetic diversity than the wild population. this seeming incongruence likely results from a population decline in ...