(04-21-2022, 01:40 AM)strongmanw7 Wrote: hello guate do u have the pics of that 281kg gwalior tiger , as we have seen images of that 320kg nepal tiger (290-300empty).

(04-21-2022, 07:57 AM)Roflcopters Wrote: @GuateGojira am i able to see the full sample size of your average weights? also was the 280kg male from ghunghuti range ever added to the list? i remember the statement came straight from the principal chief conservator of forest. did anyone ever look into this?

(04-21-2022, 09:54 PM)LonePredator Wrote: @GuateGojira Hello Gaute! How are you doing! I wanted to ask you your opinion on tbe subspecific classification of Tigers. Do you think there should be more than two subspecies of Tigers?

Is the Mainland and Island classification some political propoganda because there is a guy claiming to be a biologist who says this classification is just political propoganda and every biologist disagrees with it.

(04-21-2022, 10:15 PM)Pckts Wrote:

(04-21-2022, 09:54 PM)LonePredator Wrote: @GuateGojira Hello Gaute! How are you doing! I wanted to ask you your opinion on tbe subspecific classification of Tigers. Do you think there should be more than two subspecies of Tigers?

Is the Mainland and Island classification some political propoganda because there is a guy claiming to be a biologist who says this classification is just political propoganda and every biologist disagrees with it.

It's for conservation purposes, easier to offer protections on "Tigers" as a whole than specific subspecies. 
That being said, what does it really matter?
A Tiger is a Tiger, the environment it lives in will dictate differences in morphology. Take a Tigers from Kanha and repopulate the Sunderbans, eventually the Tigers that survive will end up looking as they do now.

(04-21-2022, 10:20 PM)LonePredator Wrote:

(04-21-2022, 10:15 PM)Pckts Wrote:

(04-21-2022, 09:54 PM)LonePredator Wrote: @GuateGojira Hello Gaute! How are you doing! I wanted to ask you your opinion on tbe subspecific classification of Tigers. Do you think there should be more than two subspecies of Tigers?

Is the Mainland and Island classification some political propoganda because there is a guy claiming to be a biologist who says this classification is just political propoganda and every biologist disagrees with it.

It's for conservation purposes, easier to offer protections on "Tigers" as a whole than specific subspecies. 
That being said, what does it really matter?
A Tiger is a Tiger, the environment it lives in will dictate differences in morphology. Take a Tigers from Kanha and repopulate the Sunderbans, eventually the Tigers that survive will end up looking as they do now.

I agree and I think subspeciation is also subjective but there are some idiots who argue about every insignificant things for no reason at all. Somewhere I pointed out that IUCN recognises two subspecies of Tigers but he starts saying that IUCN are idiots and all biologists disagree. What is your personal opinion on this?

(04-21-2022, 09:54 PM)LonePredator Wrote: @GuateGojira Hello Gaute! How are you doing! I wanted to ask you your opinion on tbe subspecific classification of Tigers. Do you think there should be more than two subspecies of Tigers?

Is the Mainland and Island classification some political propoganda because there is a guy claiming to be a biologist who says this classification is just political propoganda and every biologist disagrees with it.

(04-22-2022, 03:27 AM)GuateGojira Wrote:

(04-21-2022, 09:54 PM)LonePredator Wrote: @GuateGojira Hello Gaute! How are you doing! I wanted to ask you your opinion on tbe subspecific classification of Tigers. Do you think there should be more than two subspecies of Tigers?

Is the Mainland and Island classification some political propoganda because there is a guy claiming to be a biologist who says this classification is just political propoganda and every biologist disagrees with it.

On the tiger subspecies:

This is something that I would like to talk some time ago, but for time issue I did not manage to do it.

The subspecies concept is something that is not even quite clear among the experts, and opinions in Biology are divided between "lumpers" which are the ones that want to join innecesary separations between populations, and the "spliters" which are the ones that prefer to separate as much as possible based in morphology or genetic.

Currently, the Cat Specialist Group of the IUCN is following the idea of the lumpers and based in the study of Wilting et al. (2015), which analize morphological and genetic data, they resolve that the current information support the separation of only two subspecies of tigers but also accept the fact that in the mainland tigers there are two different MU (Management units). Kitchener et al. (2017) provide a summary of those conclutions but also accept the fact that there is no complete consensus about this clasification and latter Liu et al. (2018) provided evicence that support the separation of tiger populations in at least 6 subspecies. Now the question is, is genetic-only enough to separate subspecies, or this only reflect an artifitial differenciation between populations made by humans and not by nature?

Originally, the known 8 "subspecies" are based in morphology (size, weight and pelage), but honestly those differences are at some point arbitrary and based in a very small sample of specimens, some of them lost. Kitchener (1999) in the book "Riding the tiger" and copy-pasted with minimal adds in the book of 2010 "Tigers of the World" (this second time together with Yamaguchi) made a full chapter explaining why this clasiffication do not have a real support. Check this table from 2010:

*This image is copyright of its original author

As we can see only the Indochinsese tiger has a good sample, most of them are based in one single specien, which is completelly unreliable. This evidence, togheter with a broader analisys, Kitchener argue that there is no base for differences as even between Bengal tigers there is a difference betwen populations and those from Indochina are indistinguisable from those from India. The next conclution from the late Dr Rabinowitz is interesting in this subject:

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I am agree with this information, as the body size and weights reported of the Indochina and Malayan tigers are just slightly shorter than those from India and a little lighter, but they reach aproximatelly the same upper ranges. However the sample from Indochina is very poor in comparison with that of India.

Also in the skulls, I noted that while we can clearly see differences in the skulls of these populations in the images from Mazák (1981), check it:

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Upper one from Nepal (Bengal - tigris), lower one from Vietnam (Indochina - corbetti). However in Mazák (2013; reimpression from 1983) the author shows another skull from a Bengal tiger from the Assam and it looks like a transition form between the clasic "Bengal" skull and the classic "Vietnam" skull, check it:

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Now compare it with those in Mazák (1981) and you can compare the transitional form. Also the river Irrawaddy (which is normally used to separate the Bengal and Indochina subspecies) is not a significant barrier for tigers, which are know to swim 6-8 kg or even up to 26 km (Mazák, 1981). Here is the river Irrawaddy:

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Other problem is with the separation between tigers of Indochina and those of Malaysia. Genetic shows differences which were used by Luo et al. (2004) to suggest them as a different population (followed latter by Liu et al. (2018). However Mazák (2010), Wilting et al. (2015), and Kitchener et al. (2018) do not support this separation and conclude: 

"The taxonomic status of tigers in Indochina and the Malay Peninsula is still unclear; “jacksoni” is diphyletic, based on mtDNA, and must have originated very recently from corbetti. Subspecies corbetti shows further genetic structure which does not appear to have geographical significance (Luo et al. 2004). However, we shouldbe wary of conclusions based only on living tiger populations. Mondolet al. (2013) showed that modern Indian tiger populations show increased population structure compared with historical samples, indicating  a loss of mtDNA and microsatellite diversity, owing to local extirpation and genetic drift."  

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And the last nail in the coffin, from Kitchener et al. (2018):

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The description of the subspecies was not done correctly and the name can't be accepted and is no a nomen nudum. Evidence suggest that the "differentiation" in body size and genetic was a man-made efect, not a natural separation.

Kitchener & Dugmore (2000) shows that there is no clear geographic separation between Indochina and South China tigers (by a significant gap!), check it:

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Also Luo et al. (2004) found that some putative South China tigers has Indochina DNA. Finally Driscoll et al. (2009) found that Amur and Caspian tigers are one and the same and they populations were separated by only about 200 years ago. Contrastingly Singh et al. (2015) found that the Sundarbans tigers are separated of the mainland population by 2,000 years! So, genetically speaking, Caspian are more "Amur" than the Sundarbans been "Bengal".

There is a lot of more information, this is just a very very very breef summary, but here we can see that with this few data those "separations" between populations are/were not as clear as we may think. In fact, that idea of clearle separated "subspecies" provided by Guggisberg and Mazák are not realistic at all, and taking in count that the maximum distance traveled by a tiger, reliabily recorded, is of 1,000 km, this suggest that all mainland tigers could travel between they regions with few to none natural barriers and that morphological differences recorded may be just clinal as suggested by Kitchener. However, I have an hypotesis, that this differences are the efect of a very small sampling, after all check how many Bengal tiger skulls we know and how many South China ones, there is a big difference; check also how many Indochina tiger skulls we had and until resently it was found a new Malayan skull as large as one from Bengal, so in theory maybe the sizes that we normally use and quote could be bigger than we think and similar to those of Bengal. That is the same that happen with Javanese tigers, normally quoted as smaller than Sumatran, when in fact, skull records shows that they were of the same size than South China tigers (Mazák, 2013). By the way, Xue at al. (2015) provided an interesting analysis about the singularity of the Sunda tigers and the idea that while they are a single subspecies, they stoped the gene flow between them years ago.

Knowing all this, I fell that the theory that tigers are separated in only two real subspecies is the correct one, as mainland tigers could travel freele, fromt he map analysis of Ktichener & Yamaguchi (2010) the model HTP (habitat, topography, precipitation) is the best one as it predicted all the tiger populations, in contrast to the model DDP (distribution data prediction) which fail to predict the pupulation of Caspian tigers. Su using the map of 20,000 years ago (late Pleistocene) and the metod HTP, check this:

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Here we can see that all the tiger population was interconected with no natural barriers and the separation was probably until the end of the Pleistocene when sea levels rised at 12,000 years ago, but even after that, mainland tigers still were interconected. Mainland tigers were separated only until the humans started to act in they environment, supporting a man-made separation. Now check the modern tiger map:

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This map from 2016 shows that the modern tiger populations are very fragmented, we can see a huge gap between the last viable population of tiger in Myanmar/Burma and those from Thailand. There is also no habitat that can be used by tiger to move from Thailand to Malaysia, and Russian together with Sumatran tigers are beyond the reach of any other tiger population. India is like a group of "islands" of tigers and young specimens can barely move between them, and Sundarbans is so separated that Singh et al. (2015) with Barlow et al. (2009) concluded that based in genetic and morphology the Sundarbans tigers "are the most divergent group of Bengal tigers, and ecologically nonexchangeable with other tiger populations, and thus should be managed as a separate “evolutionarily significant unit” (ESU)". Check please that none of the genetic studies from Luo, Liu and Wilting, used ANY Sundarbans tigers in they study.

So, in conclution, we as humans have created 5 artificial populations in mainland: 1- India/Nepal/Buthan/Myanmar; 2 - Sundarbans; 3 - Thailand/Laos; 4 - Malaysia; 5 - Russia. Sumatra is definitelly different and South China tigers exist only in captivity. What we don't know is if the genetic data from Luo at al. (2004 and 2010) and Liu et al. (2018) used old and modern data, or just modern, because that could explain the genetic differences, as these populations are isolated and now relfect speciefic adaptations to they areas, which using the old taxonomical ideas from 19th century could be interpreted as "natural subspecies".

Following Wilting et al. (2015), confirmed by Kitchener et al. (2017) of the CSG of IUCN and adding the study of Singh et al. (2015), there is only two tiger subspecies, divided in conservation units that should not be mixed as they had they own adaptations:

 1 - Continental tiger - Panthera tigris tigris
      1.1 - Mainland tiger - India, Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, China (captive amoyensis).
      1.2 - The Sundarbans - India, Bangladesh.
      1.3 - Russian Far East - Russia, China.

2 - Sunda tiger - Panthera tigris sondaica

These will be the modern populations of tigers based in the information. Now, if we follow Luo et al. (2004) and Liu et al. (2018) we should have 6 "subspecies". Interestingly, the artifitial groups created by the human presure match those from the subspecies of Luo and Liu:

1 - Bengal tiger - Panthera tigris tigris - Indian subcontinent.
2 - Indochina tiger - Panthera tigris corbetti - Thailand and Laos.
3 - Malayan tiger - Panthera tigris jacksoni - Malaysia.
4 - South China tiger - Panthera tigris amoyensis - China.
5 - Amur/Caspian tiger - Panthera tigris virgata - Russia and China (altaica is synonimus under this scenario).
6 - Sumatran tiger - Panthera tigris sumatrae - Sumatra (and possible Java and Bali too).

Remember that none of these teams used a single Sundarbans tigers in they analysis.


Which are the implications? Certainly the idea of this person, whoever he or she is, that the tiger subspecies had political implications may be correct, but not in the form that we may think. Subspecies names are tied with countries and some governments will not be happy if they regional or national animal change of scientific name, or if they tigers are no longer "unique". So nationalism may be a problem on the creation o deletion of subspecies. One famous case in the USA is Smilodon, as we know that the real species from North America is Smilodon fatalis, but in California is "officialy" known as Smilodon californicus and they declare it the state fossil! 

What means to have only two subspecies? It means that we can use Indian tigers to repopulate Indochina, Malaysia and South China. Also provides "value" to the mix captive tigers that populate USA and other countries. While the idea will be good, actually it will create a mess if is not correctly used. For example, most of the captive tigers are a mix between Amur and Bengal tigers, and if we remember, these two populations are the most diverged since the Pleistocene and even under the new clasification they belong to two different conservation units, so the large captive tigers of USA are STILL useless for conservation, but I highly doubth that those places that breed tigers for business are going to check and accept these details from the study. Other thing is that there is still a good and viable population of Indochina tigers in Thailand, so there is no point in trying to use Bengal tigers to populated Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia, while the efforts should be focused in increase and care the tigers from Thailand and, with time, used them to repopulate the other Indochina countries. As we can see, the idea of two tiger subspecies could be the correct one, but sadly is the most problematic based in politicar and economic purposes.

What means to have 6 subspecies? It measns to continue with the effrorts to save the tigers like they are in this moment, each country manage thy own populations and keep the "purity" of they specimens. Captive tigers in managed zoos still have they value and the mix tigers from private owners can't be used for breeding which is good! So, the "6 subspecies" scenario could not be realistic in a natural point of view, but is the most realistic in the modern days, based in the current distribution of tigers and will keep the traffic of generic tigers at minimum.

Using all this information, my opinion is that 2 tiger subspecies is the real one, but form management of the modern tiger populations and to avoid traffic and bussines of "paper" tigers, I think that the best is the usage of the 6 subspecies scenario.

Hope this helps, greetings.

(04-21-2022, 09:19 PM)GuateGojira Wrote:

(04-21-2022, 07:57 AM)Roflcopters Wrote: @GuateGojira am i able to see the full sample size of your average weights? also was the 280kg male from ghunghuti range ever added to the list? i remember the statement came straight from the principal chief conservator of forest. did anyone ever look into this?

Yes, of course, here is the full list. If you want an specificdetail about a weight or a group (for example the "Modern records") just ask.

*This image is copyright of its original author

About that tiger of 280 kg I don't remember it. The only two large modern males that I included is the 285 kg for Dr Jhala and other male of 280 kg provided by @"Khan85" but from an unknown location (probably Ranhambore), and both of them were adjusted for stomach content (255 and 260 kg respectivelly). Do you have more details about this 280 kg tiger of Ghunghuti?

Also I found another Nepalese tiger in hunting records, it is first hand source and include measurements (definitelly средненадежные, or maybe even высоконадежные as is 1st hand source, based in Slagh et al. (2005)), you will see it already included.

(04-22-2022, 11:58 PM)Jerricson Wrote: Brilliant stuff guate . I think the tiger 'Roflcopters' talking about is this one - https://www.indiatoday.in/pti-feed/story...2016-11-22.

(04-22-2022, 04:26 AM)GuateGojira Wrote: Here is the paper from Kitchener et al. (2017), specifically the part of the tiger:

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Interetingly, when the number of lion subspecies was reduced also to only two, there was not a huge revolution like with tigers. There is no doubth that the tiger is a "political" animals and its significance is beyond the boundaries of nature and include politics and nationalisms. Quite interesting, don't you think?

(03-24-2022, 01:42 AM)Pantherinae Wrote:

(03-24-2022, 12:00 AM)GuateGojira Wrote:

(03-22-2022, 09:05 PM)Jerricson Wrote: Hello guate , I have quite read your posts regarding weights of lion and tigers and they r quite informative. I just wanted to enquire about madlas (m-125) weight. In one of the documents , its said he weighed around 220-230kg and in another mail from Dr. Raghu Chundawat , he was stated to weigh around 250kg. So whats the final conclusion on his weight??

On the weight of Madla male - M-125:

Good question and this is something that I wanted to wrote about since some time ago.

As we know, Dr Chundawat managed to observe several male tigers during his 10 years study in Panna, directly and indirectly, but he could capture only two: M-91 and M-125. hello guate open this link   https://www.nfwf.org/sites/default/files/finalreports1/5179_initiatives_grants_2002-0301-004.pdf   And read page no 47 of raghu journal , the 220-230 weight of madla is estimated weight for drug dose . its predarting weight , in a similar way they estimated one kanha sub-adult as 120kg and it turned out to be 180kg , panna tigers too had estimated predarting weight which is different from real weight , weight of madla is around 250kg as stated by chundawat in his book and he had clearly written in his journal that 220-230 weight is estimated for durg preparation.

Acording with at least two independent sources, both males weighed 250 kg or more, but there are details that we need to check.

Here is the first source from M-91:

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The next one is the confirmation via the person that witnesed the weighing (Mike Birkhead) of male M-125 and is supported by the documentary "Tigers in the Emerald Forest":

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So, as we can see, both of them are very big male tigers, but Dr Chundawat mentions that they were baited so he adjusted the weights of all his tigers. The book from 2018 "The Rise and Fall of the Emerald Tigers" is the last word on the study of the Panna tigers during the 10 years that Dr Chundawat worked with the tigers. In his book he says that based in visual estimation the stomach content was estimated between 25 - 30 kg. However, there is an important point on this, check this:

*This image is copyright of its original author

So, as we can see the "visual estimation" seems to be exagerated as the actual stomach content was of 19 kg for the largest male, which interestingly match with the averages stablished by Dr Sunquist in Nepal (1981) with ranges between 14 - 19 kg in 24 hours.

And finally this stament is the one that pushed me to investigate all this case:

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So, we can see that he says that the biggest tiger was M-91, not M-125, so what about this email?

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As we can see, the entire explanation on the email is, in fact, what happen when they weighed the male M-91, not M-125, and that is the confusion. That is something that we can see here:

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There it is showed that the real weight of male M-91 "empty" was more than 240 kg, and this because the male bottomed the scale of 250 kg, they knew that the scale could weight 10 kg more (total of 260 kg available by the scale) and taking in count that the tiger ate 19 kg, the final value was of 241 kg, but as there is no form to know how much more the tiger actually weighed, they stated that the empty weight was just over 240 kg.

Now about male M-125 (Madla tiger) its weight is stated between 220 - 230 kg because 20-30 kg is the stomach  amount estimated by the workers, but probably the real amount will be the same as the other male, so its empty weight will be 230 kg. There is no other mention if this tiger also bottomed the scale or not, only that male M-91 was bigger. Sadly, we only have one picture of it and apparently the male "Hairyfoot" was even bigger than both of them, probably another cantidate for 260 kg "empty", but sadly it was not captured.

So, this is the conclution based in the facts, the real weight of male M-125 was of 250 kg and that of M-91 was over 260 kg, but when adjusted for stomach content they were calculated at 230 and 240+ kg respectivelly.

Hope this helps to clasify the issue and if no one noticed before, I have been used the 240 kg figure since many months ago.


Is interesting that now the sample of Panna is, for the moment, the largest (talking about numbers) among scientific sources in India, with average figures of 216 kg (n=8; range: 180 - 240+ kg) for males and 129 kg (n=9; range= 105 - 152 kg) for females.

Fantastic post, thank you.

(04-23-2022, 04:00 PM)Roflcopters Wrote: Thanks @GuateGojira 


unfortunately, I wasn't able to find anything about that ghunghuti male. the best way to find out would be to get a hold of Shree Jitendra Agarwal of PCCF and i searched everywhere. i couldn't find any contact info for him. 

however, i am very curious. i went back and read a few pages. i could not find anything regarding these new Panna Tiger weights that i came across. has anyone seen this before? @Pckts @Rage2277 @Ashutosh @"Khan85" 
a youtuber that goes by the name "Abhishek Singh" posted this on his community feed two months back and someone recently brought this to my attention. I figured we could try to get to the bottom of this.  

anyone able to get a hold of him and find out the source if possible?  yes bro its me , this is the source https://www.pannatigerreserve.in/BOOKLET%20ON%20TIGER%20BODY%20GROWTH%20.pdf

https://www.youtube.com/post/UgkxrTdzX1bUEgGPI647zQRFA8r72wwp8Jjv

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here is P243 - one of the males listed as 6 years old, weighing 228 kilograms. 

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I did more digging and I peeked through something. he was apparently radio-collared in May 2021 or 20/05/2021 to be exact. if the weight is correct, that would be his summer weight. 

source : 

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