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

[GuateGojira]

(04-14-2022, 07:16 PM)Apex Titan Wrote: I agree with your post, you made good points which make sense. But, Feng Limin who's a tiger biologist is on video stating that he know's of a large male Amur tiger that weighs over 250 kg. So that weight is reliable, as it was confirmed by a biologist on video.

But I understand where your coming from, you operate with a scientific mind, you want actual measurements and verified recorded weights on paper.

Don't you think we need a better sample of modern Amur tiger weights though?  I think a good amount of weight samples from Northeast China tigers and Amur tigers from the Khabarovsk region would give us a much more conclusive average weight for modern Amur tigers. What do you think?

Did the STP biologists capture and weigh full-grown adult male tigers from the Khabarovsk region?  As far as I know, they didn't. They only weighed some male tigers from Primorye, in Sikhote-Alin.

I don't know Chinese, so I need to follow the translations that you have made. But if I am not mistaken, he says that he "know a large male that weighs over 250 kg". I also remember a similar claim made by a Russian expert (Nikolaev, I believe) that mentioned that he did not knew any male over 650 lb (295 kg) and some people interpreted that it means that he did knew a male of that weight and that was the limit, but when I checked the documents of the Siberian Tiger Project I found that they largest male was only 205 kg. So is very important to know if that male "over 250 kg" was actually weighed by Dr Feng Limin or if is just his personal estimation.

The Siberian Tiger Project only captured males in the area of Primorye in Sikhote-Alin, where they operated. The other males that were captured by the Amur Tiger Programme were recorded in the adjacent regions like the Ussuri area, and all of them are bigger than those from Sikhote-Alin. The question is if these are differences are caused by the habitat or ar just the growth recorded in time?

The sample of Amur tigers provided by the Siberian Tiger Project is one of the best, with weights and measurements, the only thing is that is from 1992 - 2005 (with a few others captured between 2006 - 2011, in the same region), so is possible (and this is my hypotesis) that with time the tigers are getting bigger, and that is why there is a tendency to increase the body mass. For example (using the sample of 23 males captured by scientists, all of them healthy males of over 3 years old, sick males were discarded), if we support the idea that areas influence size, the males from Sikhote-Alin had an average of c.187 kg while those from the Ussuri region had an average of c.203 kg. Now if we take by dates, the average for the males (independently of the area) between 1992 - 2007 had an average of c.185 kg, while those between 2010 - 2014 had an average of c.199 kg. So, at the end, it seems that both things are correct, that males in other areas are bigger than others and also that in time the tigers are increasing they size; please take in count that weights are already adjusted for any weighing device, that most of tigers did not included stomach content and that the weights from the S.T.P. are averages from several captures, like for example the male "Dale" which they use a figure of 193 kg for him, but in its last capture he actually weighed 205 kg. I will not be surprised if the tigers from the Manchuria region (north China) are bigger than those from Russia, after all, the biggest specimens of P. t. altaica came from this region. Reply