Who is the "king" of tigers? - Bengal or Amur

[tigerluver]

(05-20-2015, 06:23 AM)stoja9 Wrote: So what causes the size switch from Amur and Bengals? Population, resulting in a smaller breeding pool? 

In my opinion, the Amur was most likely drastically affected by the population bottleneck that occurred due to their attempted extermination. It is said that 20-30 individuals are ancestors of today's population. Therefore, the gene pool likely has much less variety due to the small starting population (which would also result in worsening conditions due to inbreeding). Prey is also like another problem. Global warming also seems to be shrinking cold climate species such as the polar bear, thus the Amur tiger may be facing the same fate. Finally, the big tiger records are often rejected as unreliable today, and has also caused the confusion on the Amur's status as the largest of the tigers. The hunting record that is accepted has an average of 215 kg, I believe, essentially the same size as the Bengal tiger.

On Bengals, I did a statistical test (posted somewhere in the forums, likely the "edge" thread), and the resuts showed that there is a difference between the size of the Bengal tiger of today and yesterday. At the same time, the math was close, and adding a few more tigers or changing a few factors might indicate that the size difference is only due to random chance. It's possible that Bengals that were hunted were often not fully grown due to the high rate of hunting, also deflating the apparent average compared to today (I believe Guate also pointed this out). Finally, the modern database might be skewed toward logging only dominant males, which would artifically inflate the average size of the Bengal tiger.  Reply