Persian Leopard (Panthera pardus saxicolor)

[LonePredator]

(04-30-2022, 02:21 AM)GuateGojira Wrote:

(04-30-2022, 01:53 AM)LonePredator Wrote: Surely, I agree. Indian Leopards are also the longest aren’t they? Are they also the tallest?

I wonder why Indian Leopards still lag behind in terms of weight.

Been honest, because I am not very interested in leopards, I never made a comparison between leopards of different countries, the only ones that I focused are those from India (because I love India!) and those from the Amur (which are no giants as many people believe). My comparative image from Iran leopards just used the information from Dr Farhadinia's paper from 2014 but I did not digged to much.

Based in the data that I have, Indian leopards seems to be the largest in body dimetions, but this is probably because I have not compiled the data from Africa. I say this because when we compare the few animals reported from Iran (over curves), the Indian leopard is bigger even "between pegs", and I suspect that is the same case with those from Africa.

Now, about the low body mass, I think that we can "blame" the tiger as they monopolize the big prey and leave the leopard just the small animals, although in India there is no to much big prey to choose. However, if you check the body mass that I found, the average weight is for 57.6 kg for males and 39.1 kg for females, which is not too small compared with other populations. While I am aware that is not exaustive, let's use the table from Sunquist & Sunquist (2002) for a quick comparison, some in "straight line", other "over curves":

*This image is copyright of its original author

Now the specimens from Iran, all "over curves":

*This image is copyright of its original author

Now check my comparative image that include the Indian leopard (forget the Bengal tiger, those values in the image are outdated at this moment), all measured "between pegs":

*This image is copyright of its original author

As you can see, Indian leopards are among the biggest of all the populations, they are only smaller in the body mass, and by a small margin. By the way and just to clarify, the weight of 83 kg includes stomach content according with Dr Athreya, but did not specify to what degree.

Thank you! I believe that with the example of Amur Leopards, Amur Tigers and Canadian Lynx, we can say that the Bergmann’s ‘rule’ does not apply to felids.

People still use that to say that Siberian Tigers are bigger than Bengals even though the body dimensions are almost the same. Reply