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Female Tigers Returned More Often and Stayed Longer Than Males in Panna

Wild Bengal tiger walking in dry forest in Panna National Park, India
Research: Ecology, Behaviour

Female tigers (Panthera tigris) in Panna Tiger Reserve, India returned to the same parts of their home ranges more often and stayed there longer than males. The study analysed recursive space use — repeated return to and prolonged use of particular places — using continuous GPS data from 12 resident tigers across summer, monsoon and winter.

Females repeatedly used focal areas more intensively

The researchers measured revisitation rate and residence time separately because they describe different dimensions of space use: how often a tiger comes back and how long it remains after arriving. Recursive-use patches were quantified within a 250-metre analytical neighbourhood. That scale allowed repeated use to be compared consistently, but it does not mean that every 250-metre patch represented one specific behaviour such as hunting, resting or scent marking.

Females had higher descriptive revisitation and residence-time values in every season. In summer, females revisited focal areas an average of 11.14 times compared with 5.70 for males, and stayed for 14.36 hours on average compared with 9.80 hours for males. Revisitation was lowest during the monsoon, at 8.88 for females and 3.68 for males. The seasonal pattern therefore affected both sexes, but the difference between females and males remained.

No single habitat feature explained recurrent use

Revisited sites were non-random with respect to vegetation, water, topography and human-use interfaces. Tree-canopy height produced the strongest simple separation between revisited and available locations, while distance to villages and water showed intermediate differences. However, the detailed models were often non-linear and differed by sex, season and metric. A factor associated with frequent return was not necessarily associated with a long residence time, and canopy height was not a universal predictor of stronger use.

Individual tigers differed strongly

Much of the remaining variation was tied to individual tiger identity rather than the measured environmental variables alone. The authors therefore interpret recursive space use as a distinct dimension of tiger ecology: repeatedly used places can be disproportionately important within a home range, but their function must be investigated rather than assumed. The study does not distinguish whether particular recurrent-use sites served mainly as route junctions, marking areas, resting sites, hunting areas or combinations of these functions.

The biological sample comprised 12 resident tigers, but only three were males. Intensive repeated tracking strengthens the within-individual and seasonal analyses, yet the authors caution that sex-specific interpretations — especially for males — should remain tentative rather than being treated as precise population-wide differences.

Sources and image credit

  1. Dutta, S., & Krishnamurthy, R. (2026). Revisitation dynamics and fine-scale habitat use of tigers in a tropical dry deciduous forest of central India. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 14, 1929428.Primary open-access article published 8 September 2026; full text checked. Continuous GPS data from 12 resident tigers in Panna Tiger Reserve were analysed for recursive space use at a 250-m analytical scale. Females had higher revisitation and residence-time values than males, recursive use was highest in summer and lowest in monsoon, environmental associations were sex-, season- and metric-specific and often non-linear, and individual identity explained substantial additional variation.

Image: Bengal tiger (Panthera tigris tigris) in Panna National Park, Madhya Pradesh, India, 28 May 2025. Photo: Dr. Abhijit Bagui / Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0. Representative local image; not one of the GPS-tracked study animals. · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source

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