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

[altaican]

Thank you @peter 

I am glad you have posted a tremendous amount of information there. I was looking for something like this. 
I haven't gone through it all yet, but will definitely go through it. I am looking for weight measurements of wild tigers (and lions).

That 461 pound average of Kaziranga tiger, did you get that number from the data of Maharajah of Cooch Behar?

I used to post on a forum similar to this about 10-12 years back (it was AvA forum in shark ezboards).
Back then the lion-tiger battles on that board were pretty brutal, but it was a lot of fun.

This seems to be a very different forum, more mature. An outcome of those AvA battles back then was that I had the pleasure of 
chatting with eminent Big Cat Scientists (like Dr.Craig Packer, Dr. Mel Sunquist etc.) regarding big cat behavior.

When it comes to big cat sizes, it looks like different people have different opinions. Difficult to say anything until we have raw data.

Dr.Sunquist had studied tigers in Chitwan (Nepal) & later on in Nagarhole (South India). I think he was one of 
the first Scientists to radio-collar the Sauraha male tiger. He was just astonished by it's size. He was clearly amazed by how the 
tiger just flattened out the 500 pound scale as if it was nothing.

When I showed him the photograph of Madla (the muscular male from Panna), he wasn't particularly impressed (when in comparison with the Sauraha male). 
He was insistent that the Sauraha male was bigger. 
Even when I pointed out that neck girth of Madla was 4 inches more than that of the Sauraha male (90cms vs 80cms), he still wouldn't budge.

I recall a 650 pound wild tiger from South India, the measurement was accurate, and the tiger was not particularly full, but the tiger was a cattle lifter.

During his study, Dr.Brian Bertram had measured the weights of several East African lions and came up with a correlation between the weight of a lion and it's chest girth.

I wonder if any such pattern has been observed in wild tigers.

Would you happen to know the actually measured weights (and other measurement data) of any of the recent, famous wild tigers of India (like Jai from UKWLS, 
or Konda from Kanha or Raja from Bandipur)? I am looking for actually measured weights.

I am also interested in dispersal of male tigers (this is absolutely essential for their survival in the wild, promotes a healthy gene pool). 
In one of the DNA studies (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3819329/), I read that there is genetic exchange between tigers of Central India and 
tigers in Srisailam forest in South India. That is pretty amazing, considering the distance. Reply