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

[GuateGojira]

Talking about the article of Dr Dale Miquelle, I will focus on this point now:

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We need to understand that when he is making his opinion, he is using the data from Slagth et al. (2005; chapter 6), which is the following table (original in Russian), now translated to English:

*This image is copyright of its original author

The data itself is not perfect, of course, I we can discuss about its errors or omissions, but the point that interest us are the wild Amur tigers and the Bengal tigers. Based in the document, the Amur tigers include all the adult specimens, independently of its health, captured between 1992 and 2005, so in this figures they DO include the three sick males. The results are these:

Males: 176.4 kg - n=18 - range: 125 - 205 kg
Females: 117.9 kg - n=13 - range: 112 - 129 kg

These results are the ones normally quoted in other scientific papers, but has been critizised because of the inclusion of the unhealthy males, although the females are all healthy. None problematic specimen was included (EYE on this), as the problematic specimens were separated in the section of "Problem adults". So this myth created by "fans" can be discarded completelly.

Now, about the Bengals, the document says that they got the information from Sunquist (1981), Karanth (1993), Smith et al. (1983) and Smith (personal communication). As I have all the sources and I got the figure provided by Dr Smith by mathematical means, I got that the figures used for males were these: 200, 227, 217, 235 & 227. For the females where all the weights from Sunquist (1981), the one from Karanth (1993) and the two Sundarbans females of 80 and 75 kg each. The data is this:

Males: 221.2 kg - n=5 - range: 200 - 235 kg (other will say 261 kg, as is already included in the average of 235 kg, used here as a single value).
Females: 139.7 kg - n=11 - range: 75 - 164 kg

If you see, the sample used of Bengal tigers, specially the males, is very small and repeat specimens, that is why Dr Miquelle says: "Data on weights of tigers in the wild are in actualy quite rare - especially for Bengal tigers". They only use the males available in that moment, those from Panna were not published yet (until 2010, as the other document that we used before that it was not officialy published and clearly says not for public). Even then, they do not use them in the correct form, as with the use of those from Nepal (7 captures of 3 males with 235 kg) and Nagarahole (3 captures of 3 males with 217 kg), the sample was already of 10, or 6 males if we use only one weight per animal. In this case, the correct average for males wouldbe:

1 - Captures: 235 (7) + 217 (3) = 229.4 kg (10) -- 200, 200, 230, 230, 261, 261, 261, 206, 215, 227.

2 - Animals: 241 (3) + 217 (3) = 228.8 kg (6) -- 200, 261, 261, 209, 215, 227.

Of course now we have more specimens (males and females) and I already calculated a higher average for the Amur tigers (Valvert (2023), both documents), but even then, the evidence based in the animals captured by scientists in the field suggest that Bengal tigers are heavier than Amur ones, in modern records. Now, if we mix the old hunting records with the modern ones, both Bengal and Amur tigers had an average of around 200 kg for males and 125 - 130 kg for females.


Hope this helps to clarify this part.

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