Research overview: dispersal and recruitment in tiger populations

How young tigers leave their natal areas and establish their own territories determines the structure and persistence of populations. This overview synthesizes studies showing that subadult females often settle near their mothers, sometimes inheriting part of her range, while males disperse farther to find vacant territories, leading to sex-biased movement. It reviews how the availability of unoccupied space and prey limits recruitment, how floaters wait for vacancies, and how dispersal across human-dominated landscapes exposes young tigers to high mortality. The synthesis connects these individual journeys to gene flow, connectivity between reserves, and the demographic resilience of source populations. For conservation audiences it explains why corridors linking reserves matter, why isolated populations risk inbreeding, and why the fate of dispersing subadults is a key, often hidden, driver of whether a tiger population grows or fades.