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

[GuateGojira]

Body mass of the Bengal tiger - UPDATE:

Ok people, I finally had the time to update the information about the size and weight of the Bengal tiger. I made the entire tables again, measurements and weights, and I corrected some values using new information, specially that from Nepal and re-ordered other specimens depending of they locality. The results do not change to much, specially in the average figures but is important to mention that all the averages are "weighed" this time, so the results are the weighed average of all the populations, including Sundarbans. This is the result:

IMAGE UPDATED

As you can see, the variation with or without Sundarbans is very few, so we can conclude that overall the historic and modern specimens together had an average of abouth 200 kg in males and 132 kg in females. This values are the one that I used in the new image of all the tiger subspecies/populations. Please check that I use the 5 males from central India that were confirmed to others posters but not by me. I decided to include them but I put a note about that (it says "Yet to confirm") and about the male of 285 kg reported by Dr Jhala, I estimate it at 250 kg "empty" for calculation purposes, but could be heavier definitelly. Also, in the sections were there are too many references you can go the the square below and with the color you can see which are the references for those values.

Now, here is the new updated comparative image of the tiger populations:

IMAGE UPDATED

Please save this one and delete the old one (check that this one has the WildFact Logo and the date is from 2022). Also the average of the Amur and the Indochinese tigers are weighed too (more details in the Amur tiger figures in a future post). Finally, you can see that in the Bengal tiger section, all the sources are for measurements, the ones of the weights are recorded under Valvert (2022) and is the image above. So the old PDF documents from Scrib that some people still quote is no longer correct or reliable, you can delete it and same only these images from 2022.

Now, as many people do not like the old records because they may include young or old-ill specimens, or simply because they do not believe in them, I made two tables only with modern records, the first is for Bengal only and the second one is a comparison with all the populations where tigers has been captured and weighed, no hunting records  in these ones and certainly only adults over 3 years old.

IMAGE UPDATED

IMAGE UPDATED

So, this is the information that I have for the moment. If I get more data I will updated again. I will like to address something that I think is important, normally we only focus in the average figures but as other poster mentioned, the average may change and are not fix. Other figure that we don't see is the Mode, which is the value that is more common in a sample and from the group that I have I found two modes, one at 190 kg and other at 225 kg. Now, when I made a distribution and frequency table, check what I found:

*This image is copyright of its original author

The biggest number of animals are recorded in the range between 220 - 230 kg, which suggest that most of the prime males are in this area. Also, according the Dr Jhala, adult males over 4 years weight between 200 - 260 kg, and in modern records there are no males less than 180 kg, which again suggest that the value of 200 kg may be an underestimation.

Finally, check that for reliability purposes, the maximum weights accepted are those from the males from Nepal (272+ overall and 261 adjusted), but here is the list of the other specimens that are heavier than them:

*This image is copyright of its original author

This is an screenshot of one of my old posts, there is more information about them. And just to let you know, If I include this exceptional males, the average overall increase only up to 203 kg, so no big deal. I don't take in count the Smithsonian tiger, I will make a post about it soon.

I will like to know more about the males captured in Ranthambore and Tadoba, as those were full grow adult males, but for the moment this is what I have.

Greetings and cheers. Reply