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

Options

peter

Co-owner of Wildfact

2,719 Replies

34 Topics

Joined: Mar 2014

Reputation: 53

#2,775

01-11-2025, 06:54 AM

DOCUMENTARY ABOUT THE CASPIAN TIGER (Panthera tigris virgata)

A - About the documentary and the producer of the video

This shortish (09:35) documentary called 'Caspian tiger II - Tales of forgotten' was uploaded about 3 years ago by 'Extinction - Tales of forgotten'. I visited the site and saw a lot of interesting documentaries about animals that went extinct in the last two centuries. My advice is to have a look yourself.

The documentary about the Caspian tiger has a lot of photographs posted in the thread about this tiger subspecies I created some years ago. It also has photographs I never saw.

B - Distribution

The Caspian tiger is, and will remain, a mystery. Not so long ago, tigers roamed over a very extended region in the southwestern part of central Asia. I'm referring to the region between the northeastern coast of the Black Sea to the elevated ridge in northwestern part of China and, in the north, the Altai Mountain Range. When you try to find out a bit more about that region, you'll quickly discover it was very diverse in many ways. In some districts, this subspecies was found in a very rugged landscape. In others, tigers thrived in near arid conditions.

C - Subtypes and size

As a result of the diversity, it's likely different local subtypes developed over time. There is some information about the size of this subspecies, but it isn't much. The best book, by a margin, I read is 'Die Säugetiere der Sowjetunion', Band III (Gustav Fischer Verlag, Jena, 1980). In the paragraph about the two local types in what used to be the Sowjet Union ('Geografische Variabilität'), you can find detailed information about the length and weight of tigers shot in both regions (Russian Far East and the region in the southwestern part of the former USSR).

Most unfortunately, this part of the book is questionable. The reason is Heptner (VG) and Sludskij (AA), the authors of 'Säugetiere der Sowjetunion', used unreliable sources. I'm referring to articles and books written by hunters like Barclay and Baikov.

The information about skull measurements, however, is reliable. The reason is they only used tables in the first edition of V. Mazak's book 'Der Tiger'. Mazak's tables are based on measurements he took himself. His information about the length and weight of wild Turan and Amur tigers, however, is questionable as well. The reason is Mazak too was misled by both Barclay and Baikov. The information in the third edition of his great book (1983), however, is reliable in most respects.

Apart from the books mentioned above, you can find a bit more in books written by hunters from (what used to be) British India. Every now and then, one of them went north to hunt. Only very few of them saw, or hunted, Caspian tigers. I wrote different posts about them (in this thread and the Caspian tiger thread).

I don't quite know what to make of the information they provided, but I do know most hunters thought there wasn't much to choose between a male tiger in northern India and a male tiger in, say, Mazanderan (Iran).

D - Skull

Apart from that, there's the articles written by biologists and zoologists. I'm referring to articles published in the last two decades in particular. If you combine Mazak's information and the information I found in recent articles, it isn't that difficult to get to a few conclusions, provided you use averages only. They say there isn't much to choose between Amur and Indian tigers in the skull department. It largely depends on the size and the quality of the sample. There are plenty of skulls of Indian tigers in natural history museums in the UK, but skulls of adult wild Amur tigers are hard to find.

Compared to skulls of Indian and Amur tigers, Caspian tigers have shorter skulls. I also noticed a marked difference between males an females. Skulllengthwise, Caspian females compare to females in southeastern Asia. Skulls of males, however, are quite large. In greatest total length, they average 330-340 mm. As far as I can see, there are quite outspoken differences between tigers shot in different districts in Central Asia. Males from the northwestern and northern part might have compared to an average male Indian tiger, but tigers in the central, northeastern and southeastern part seemed to have been a bit smaller. Males in the western part of the Altai Mountains, on the other hand, might have been as large as those in the northwestern part of western central Asia. The are, in fact, quite a few photographs of large males shot in that part of Central Asia.

Sexual dimorphism seems to have been outspoken in Caspian tigers. The most likely reason is competition between males, but it's also well known males often hunted wild boars. Wild boars in the western part of Central Asia are larger than their relatives in eastern Europe and, in particular, India. Not every adult male tiger, for good reasons, is prepared to hunt a solitary large male wild boar, but tigers in the Russian Far East, and those living in Central Asia, apparently (referring to countless reliable reports of those who know more) often are.

E - Repopulation

Anyhow. Caspian tigers, like their relatives in Bali, Java, most of southeastern Asia and, last but not least, southern and central parts of China, are (all but) gone. Kazakhstan is prepared to reintroduce tigers, but one would have preferred a try-out with young adult wild Amur tigers, not aging captive tigers from a facility in western Europe.

The assumption, of course, is not one Caspian tiger survived the unslaught between 1900-1970. But remember biologists also assumed the Javan tiger was really gone not so long ago.

F - Photographs

f1 - Tigress (Ognev, 1935):