ON THE EDGE OF EXTINCTION - A - THE TIGER (Panthera tigris)

[GuateGojira]

(04-12-2022, 06:13 PM)Apex Titan Wrote: Here's a interview with wildlife biologist & field researcher 'Feng Limin', confirming the weight of a very large wild male Amur tiger weighing over 250 kg!

About 15-20 seconds into the video, Limin states: "The largest male Amur tiger I know of and have come into contact with weighs over 250 kg."






Here's another huge male tiger with a massive skull, from Hunchun Nature Reserve in Northeast China:






Recent camera trap photos and videos from Northeast China are frequently capturing some really large and very powerfully built male Amur tigers. The young adolescent wild male tiger aged 3 years old recently captured in Northeast China for attacking a villager and smashing in a car window, weighed (confirmed) 225 kg as a immature male, when fully-grown, its possible that this young male tiger could weigh 250+kg.

This indicates that Northeast China is producing some of the largest wild male Amur tigers in the world today, along with the huge male tigers from the Khabarovsk region in the Russian Far East. Amur tigers in these regions seem to definitely rival the biggest male Bengal tigers. 

Except that wild Amur tigers usually have a more massive skull, larger canines and larger paws than Bengal tigers.

Historically, Amur and Bengal tigers are the biggest tiger subspecies/populations and thankfully both are still alive. Although they are about the same body size, there are variations on the body mass and skull structure: the Amur tiger has a more massive skull, with bigger sagital crest and broader mouth. About the canines, they are equal, as both reach the 7.5 cm in the largest specimens. In the paws, Amur tigers had the broarder ones, but this is in funcion of its habitat, they need it to move on the snow, and by the way I remember an unconfirmed report that Caspian tigers had bigger paws and the largest claws of all populations, but sadly I lost the source of that claim and I did not found it in any of the books and documents that I have, so we can discard it.

About the body mass, definitelly Amur tigers did reached body masses of over 250 kg in the past and we have reliable records about it, however in modern days, and at 2012, the heaviest wild male reported was of 212 kg. However, there are unpublished reports of big males, like the ones that you are mentioning here. As far I know there is the young male of 225 kg, the male of 250 kg mentioned in this video and other report of a male of 270 kg. This looks great for the population, but the problem is that we don't have a real report about them, no document or anything that we can use to confirm them. In fact, we don't know if those are only estimations like in many cases with Bengal tigers and African lions in the news reports and we don't even have personal communications to corroborate.

In order to accept these figures, we need real confirmation of them, if not, I think that we can't use them yet, in order to avoid the inclution of incorrect information in the records.


By the way, I was checking the records of the weights of these two populations (Amur vs Bengal) and I noted that when we separate the old and new records, it shows that the Amur tiger was in fact the heaviest tiger and the biggest member of the Felidae family before to great massacre of 1950 and beyond. Next there is a very simple but information table that I made very fast, and shows that variation. So, in modern times (and overall) there is no doubth that Bengal are the heaviest, but in the past, Amur tigers were on the top, on average at least.

*This image is copyright of its original author

These are "weighted" values, and exclude Sundarbans tigers following Singh et al. (2015). Reply