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Long before you see a tiger in the Sundarbans, it has almost certainly seen you.
Explores the Sundarbans mangrove forest, where man-eating tigers, treacherous tides, and remote terrain make it deadlier for humans than Australia.
Key Takeaways
- The Sundarbans is arguably more lethal to humans than Australia because of tigers, environment, and lack of access to emergency services.
- Tiger behavior in the Sundarbans is shaped by the forest's water-dominated terrain and possible ecological or dietary factors.
- Human vulnerability is compounded by poverty, lack of permits, climate-driven salinization, and inadequate compensation for victims' families.
What the video covers
- The Sundarbans, a 10,000+ sq km mangrove forest across India and Bangladesh, is presented as more dangerous than Australia, which is famous for deadly wildlife.
- The forest holds the only tigers on Earth known to regularly hunt humans, with 1792 Sir Hector Munro's son as an early historical example.
- Tigers there were estimated to kill around 1,600 people yearly in the late 1800s; today roughly 220 tigers remain, still killing more people than any other tiger population.
- Tigers ambush victims from behind, often delivering a fatal bite to the neck, and have entered boats at night to take sleeping fishermen.
- Unlike Australia, the Sundarbans lacks roads, railways, and airstrips; help is hours away, and tides change the navigable landscape twice daily.
- Tidal flooding, soft mud, and pneumatophore tree roots define the environment, and millions of people depend on the forest for fishing, wood, and honey.
- Sundarbans tigers are exceptional swimmers that cross wide channels, and the video explores theories for their man-eating behavior, including brackish water, human remains, and easy prey.
- Cyclones like Aila have caused saltwater intrusion, leaving farmland unusable and forcing families to haul water long distances.
- Many victims entered the forest without permits, so deaths often go unreported; widows face poverty, inadequate compensation, and high rates of mental illness.
- The video frames Australia as the world's stereotype of danger while arguing the Sundarbans is where danger causes thousands of deaths yearly.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction: A Tiger That Has Already Seen You
- 00:50Historical Tiger Attacks and the Sundarbans Overview
- 03:09Australia vs. the Sundarbans: Comparing Dangers
- 05:25Tides, Mud, and the Lack of Rescue Access
- 09:00Tigers Hunting Humans: Attack Methods and Defenses
- 11:27Why These Tigers Became Man-Eaters
- 18:00Salinization, Cyclone Aila, and Human Suffering
- 23:00Conclusion: Australia's Reputation vs. Reality
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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Here, its stripes camouflage into the dark shadows of the mangrove roots.
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It can lie there completely still, watching the water while a boat drifts past only a few meters away.
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On the 22nd of December in 1792, a group of British passengers stepped off their ship onto an island at the edge of this forest.
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They'd come ashore to hunt deer, and around midday, they stopped and lit a fire to eat.
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A tiger came out of the undergrowth and took the son of a British general, Sir Hector Munro, by the head.
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It carried him into the trees as easily as a man could lift a newborn baby.
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His friends fired at the tiger, and it let him go.
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But the damage was already done.
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He died the next day.
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And he was just one of the first of thousands.
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By the late 1800s, tigers in this region were estimated to be killing around 1,600 people every single year.
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This forest is called the Sundarbans.
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It covers over 10,000 square kilometers across India and Bangladesh.
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You could fit it into Australia more than 700 times.
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Everyone knows Australia is dangerous.
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Most people could name three things there that could kill them without even thinking about it.
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Almost nobody can name one from here.
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This forest holds the only tigers on Earth known to regularly hunt humans, sharks in the rivers, some of the deadliest snakes in Asia.
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Even Australia's most famous killer, the saltwater crocodile, lives here.
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And to top it off, there are storms that have killed more people than every animal here combined.
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Australia is famous for animals that can kill you.
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But the Sundarbans is where the animals actually do.
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Australia is dangerous, but it's a danger you can not only manage, but reach as well.
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Well-built roads run across the whole continent from the coast to the deepest outback.
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And if something goes wrong out there, a quick call will get you a plane from the Royal Flying Doctor Service that can land on a dirt airstrip and fly you straight to hospital.
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That doesn't work here, however.
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The Sundarbans is a mangrove forest that sits right on the edge of the sea, split between India and Bangladesh.
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And twice a day, the sea comes in ruthlessly.
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The tide floods the forest floor, rising several meters before it drains back out again, hour after hour, every single day.
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Even the trees have had to adapt to it.
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Their roots now grow upwards out of the mud, poking into the air like thousands of spikes, so the tree can still breathe when the water floods the floors.
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Between them, the ground is soft, sucking mud, often up to the knee.
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There are no roads into the depths of this forest, no railways, and certainly no airstrips like Australia.
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On the Indian side alone, the land is broken into more than a hundred islands separated by hundreds of rivers and channels.
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The only way through it is by boat, and that's typically a small wooden boat.
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Millions of people live along its edges.
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Every day, fishermen, woodcutters, and honey gatherers paddle into the forest to make a living.
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Some of them stay inside it for days, sleeping in their boats.
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Once they're in the depths of the Sundarbans, help is a long way off.
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There's no road for an ambulance to drive into, and nowhere for a plane to land.
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A serious injury deep in the forest means hours on the deadly water before reaching anyone who can treat it.
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And every few hours, the tide changes the map, making it near enough unnavigable.
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Mud banks vanish, and footprints are wiped away.
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Australia's outback is the size of a continent, but you can easily navigate it.
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The Sundarbans is a fraction of the size, and the sea won't do that.
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And the people who do go in aren't alone, because the tigers in here have learned that humans are easy to find and kill.
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In 1666, a French traveler called François Bernier sailed through these waterways.
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He wrote that the tigers here would enter boats while the fishermen inside were asleep.
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More than three and a half centuries later, nothing about that has changed.
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Today, the Sundarbans is home to far fewer tigers than it was in the 1800s.
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A 2024 survey counted 125 on the Bangladesh side, and India has around 100 more.
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That's only around 220 tigers in the whole forest, and yet they kill more people than any other tiger population on planet Earth.
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The people they kill are rarely doing anything careless.
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They're working, bent over a net, wading through a creek, or cutting wood deep in the trees and focused on the job in front of them.
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With their backs turned to the unforgiving forest, that's exactly what the tiger here waits for.
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It stalks through the roots without a sound, sometimes for over an hour, until it's close enough to strike.
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Then it attacks from behind.
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The bite of a tiger goes straight to the back of the neck.
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The canines drive down towards the spine, and a single bite is often more than enough.
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Then the tiger drags its victim into the forest, usually before anyone nearby has realized what's happened.
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Being on the water doesn't make anyone safer, however.
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Sundarbans tigers are exceptional swimmers that have been known to swim across channels to not only kill fish, but jump onto small fishing boats, climb aboard at night, and take a man away from his sleeping crew.
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The threat is so specific that Sundarbans forest officials have worn stiff padded collars around their necks, like the neck guards in American football, to protect themselves from a bite.
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In the 1980s, workers tried something stranger.
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Masks of human faces worn on the back of the head, so a tiger watching from behind would think it had been seen.
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For a while, it worked.
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Then, the tigers learned to tell the difference.
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Nobody knows exactly how many people these tigers kill.
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Official figures have ranged from none in some years to around 50 in others, and some estimates put it at more than 100 a year.
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Because many of the victims had entered the forest without a permit, their deaths were never reported at all.
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Australia's largest land predator is the dingo.
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In modern history, it's been blamed for only a couple of human deaths.
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In the Sundarbans, the tigers can take that many in a single week.
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No other tigers on Earth hunt people like this.
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To understand why, you have to look at what this forest has turned them into.
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Most big cats tend to avoid water.
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Sundarbans tigers are the complete opposite.
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They relish it.
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With the tide flooding the forest twice a day, and islands separated by open channels, a tiger here that couldn't swim wouldn't survive.
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They cross rivers hundreds of meters wide, swimming from island to island to hunt.
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They're even known to cross the water border between India and Bangladesh.
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For most big cats, a river is a barrier.
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For these tigers, it's a road.
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There's very little fresh water in this forest.
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Most of what's available is brackish, a mix of river water and sea.
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So, the tigers drink it.
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In 1971, a German biologist called Hubert Hendrichs spent 3 months studying tigers on the Bangladeshi side.
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He noticed that the most attacks on people happened where the water was saltier.
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His theory was that drinking salty water was damaging the tigers' livers and kidneys, leaving them in constant discomfort and far more aggressive.
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His study was cut short by Bangladesh's war of independence, and the theory has never been proven.
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Another theory is that the bodies carried down the Ganges from cremation sites gave the tigers a taste for human flesh.
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Others suggest tigers first learned to raid fishermen's nets in the narrow creeks, then started taking the fishermen.
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And some researchers think it simply comes down to hunting.
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In thick mud and tangled roots, chasing down a deer is exhausting.
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A person bent over a net is not.
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This forest has shaped its tigers into something different from the rest of the tigers on Earth.
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Swimmers, ambush hunters, and animals that see people as prey.
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Australia has nothing like that.
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Its land predators are too small to treat a grown h
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On the Indian side alone, Aila destroyed around 778 km of them, nearly 500 mi. Seawater poured over the fields, and when it drained away, the salt stayed behind in the soil. For years afterwards, many farmers weren't able to grow rice on
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their land. So, to address this, a plan to rebuild the embankments was drawn up.
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10 years later, only around 15% of it had been finished. Another thing, here in the sea doesn't wait for storms. Since the 1960s, around 210 square kilometers of the Sundarbans, about 80 square miles, have been lost to rising seas.
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Islands are shrinking. Some families have watched their land disappear in a single season. Even finding water to drink is a major struggle. In parts of Southwest Bangladesh, the ground water is so salty that wells drilled hundreds of meters
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down can still come up undrinkable. One family described buying three 30-liter containers of water every week for most of the year. Women and girls carry them home on foot, sometimes 2 kilometers at a time. Living with salt water every day
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takes a toll. Doctors here link it to skin disease and infections, and researchers are investigating whether salty drinking water is raising blood And when the fields stop producing food, people turn to the river. More fishing, more crabbing. More people, every year,
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walking into the territory of everything in this video. Australia's dangers are things you can see coming, like a snake on the path. In the Sundarbans, some of the most dangerous things are truly invisible. Salt in the soil and the
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water, and the sea rising a little more each year. And when the people who go into the forest don't come home, many of them are never counted at all.
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To enter the Sundarbans legally, workers need a permit. Many can't afford one or can't get one in time.
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So, they go in illegally. The locals call these trips black trips. By some estimates, around 3/4 of the people working inside the forest are there without permission.
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When one of them is killed, the family often can't report it because the trip itself was illegal. So, the death never makes it into any official record.
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In one study on the Indian side, researchers went door-to-door through more than 3,000 households. They found 65 women whose husbands had been killed by tigers.
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2/3 of those husbands had entered the forest illegally. Even for those who went in legally, only a third of the families received any compensation at all. Some of it was worth less than a hundred US dollars.
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It's so heartbreaking. Those people are known as tiger widows. And in many villages, the loss is only the beginning.
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Around nine in 10 of the women in that study said their husband's family blamed them for his death.
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Some are called husband eaters. In some places, so many have been widowed that whole hamlets are known locally as the villages of widows.
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Nearly half of the widows examined had a diagnosable mental illness, most often depression or post-traumatic stress.
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In Australia, when someone is killed by an animal, it's investigated by a coroner and reported on the national news.
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In the Sundarbans, many of the dead are never recorded at all. And the people they leave behind are wrongfully blamed for it.
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And still, every morning, the boats go back in. In June 2014, at dawn, a 62-year-old man called Sushil Majhi rowed into a creek in the Indian Sundarbans to catch crabs.
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His son, Jotish, and his daughter were in the boat with him. They'd done this many times before. They knew the tides, and they knew exactly what lived in the forest on either side of them.
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None of them saw the tiger. It had been stalking them from the bank. It jumped onto the boat, took Sushil by the neck, and in one giant leap, it was back on the bank and gone into the forest.
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His son and daughter fought it with a stick and a blade. It didn't let go. His body was never recovered.
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Every danger in this video was in that creek. The tide, the silence, and an animal that had learned exactly how to hunt the people who come here.
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Sushil had spent his life preparing for it. It still made no difference. Australia is the most famous dangerous country on Earth.
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Its deadly animals have names everyone recognizes, and most of them have been studied, signposted, and treated.
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The Sundarbans is smaller, harder, and far more lethal than any of it. Its tigers kill more people. Its crocodiles kill more people. Its snakes kill more people.
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Its storms have killed more people than every animal in both places combined. And many of its dead have never been counted at all.
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Australia is the place the whole world frames as dangerous. The Sundarbans is the place where that danger takes thousands of lives yearly, and isn't stopping anytime soon.
Topics:Sundarbansman-eating tigersmangrove forestBangladeshIndiaAustralia comparisondangerous wildlifeclimate changecyclone Ailahuman-wildlife conflict
