Amur Tigers

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Amur Tigers

GuateGojira Offline

Expert & Researcher

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#983

08-31-2023, 12:01 AM

(08-28-2023, 10:20 PM)Apex Titan Wrote: The real average weight of modern Amur tigers is a complex topic, we simply do not know the real average weight. Large male tigers, for some reason, are seen more often in the Khabarovsk region than in Primorye.

The biggest male tiger in Russia, in recent years, was from the Khabarovsk territory. I'm talking about the huge male tiger "The Beast" aka the "monster" tiger from the Anyuisky National Park. Even biologists were in awe of his massive size. His size (referring to body length, bipedal height) slightly surpassed even a huge male brown bear's. There have been no tigers in Primorye, in recent years that have matched the sheer size of "the Beast" tiger.

And the "Beast" heel width consistently measured 13.5 cm in both winter and summer. Which completely excludes the possibility of the snow giving inaccurate heel width size.

Add to this fact, most of the young tigers in the Anyuisky National Park are direct descendants of the "Beast", so he has passed on his giant genes to many tigers there. There are also other huge male tigers with similar heel width sizes to the "Beast" that have also been traced in the Anyuisky National Park. None of these enormous tigers have been captured or weighed.

Biologist Alexander Batalov has also traced some very large male tigers in the Durminskoye forest, which is in the Khabarovsk region.

Last year I read a Russian article on Amur tigers which stated that the largest Amur tigers in Russia are found in the Khabarovsk region. Unfortunately I forgot the title of the article, if I find it again, I'll post it.

Even if Primorye has the better prey density and higher population of tigers, for some reason, the largest male tigers (referring to camera trap photos, tree markings & paw sizes) are more often seen in the Khabarovsk region.

To get a more accurate estimate on the average size/weight of modern Amur tigers, mature adult male tigers from the Khabarovsk region must also be weighed. We cannot exclude a whole other region, especially where huge male tigers are seen.

The 'Siberian Tiger Project' biologists did a good job studying tigers from the Primorye region, but they didn't study nor capture and weigh ANY tigers from the Khabarovsk region.

From what I've seen and read, the largest Amur tigers today are from Northeast China and the Khabarovsk region in Russia.

When a debate start, sometimes the personal character and inner feelings may heat the situation, however, the seriousness of the debate is also showed by the quality of the information used. Saying this, I decided not to answer your previous post against me because is just full of crap, and this is because if you compare my post I used INFORMATION and EVIDENCE to show how wrong you are, but in your post you showed NOTHING against my information and you focused in attacks against me (megalodon, orca, etc., why is that even relevant here????). So, with all my experience in debates I decided just ignore your irrelevant post/attacks, simple.

However, this new post from you is, again, full of missinformation and pure especulation with no base, so I decided to answer it, and as usual I focus in the INFORMATION (which is important) and not in you (which is irrelevant).

1 - The size of the Amur tiger is not a complex topic, in fact, it has been explained several times by me since 2010 (as far I remember) and even to you in my last post. What you say "complex" is actually variations caused by the efects of human intervention in the Russian population of tigers. As I told you, Amur tigers had averages that fluctuated from c.220 kg to c.170 kg. Interestingly, while the body mass did changed during all these years since the past century, the body size do not (except for the girths), which shows that actually the body size of the population is the same and that the mass is afected by human preasure via direct hunting and depletion of prey. In fact, Sunquist et al. (1999) states that prey depletion is even more dangerous to tigers that direct hunting, and used the examples of the tigers in Nepal which were hunted and recovered relativelly quick, contrary to the Caspian tigers which were not hunted at the same level, but with a very small base population and the prey base depleted by the humans, could not recover. Of course, the hunting that we are talking is that of the old kings, which directly or not, regulated the hunts in they private game reserves, the modern poaching is even worst at some point, but that is another topic. In a nutshell, the size of the Amur tiger, modern and old, is not complex, but just a reflection of what may happen with a population of any animal if is affected directly by actions of the humans (against and in favor).

2 - I saw some pictures of tigers in the Khabarovsk territory and they are no different from the big males in China and even in Sikhote Alin. Relay in the size of an animal using only pictures with no point of reference is useless, but it seems that you insist on this. In fact, no one, and I say, no one that I have read say anything special about the tigers in this area. Actually, like I said before, the old documents like Heptner & Sludskii (1992) shows that this population was the first one in been afected by the hunting and depletion of prey, which suggest that they were never as abundant as the population of Primorsky and Manchuria, which did have records of giant tigers, in both size, weights and skulls.

3 - You mention that "biologist" says that this tiger known as "the beast" is estimated as big as a brown bear. I will like to see WHO says that, and what evidence they have for that. I have pictures of huge Amur tigers hunted in the past (Bengal tigers too), but unless they have real evidence (meaurements or pictures with references for the size), these estimations are no better than those made for the lions of the Ngorongoro Crater or the tigers of Kaziranga. I think this is the male, as the image says that came from Anyuisky NP, Khabarovsk Krai, width a metacarpal pad of 13.5 cm: