Amur Tigers

[Pckts]

@Sabre what zoo did you work for?

Also, were you able to find anything on captive Indian bengals to compare to Amurs with stud books provided?

And lastly, if we are saying the Manchuria Gene or lets call it the "giant amur gene" is gone and only used in captivity which does allegedly produce the largest Captive Cats than we must only compare the N. Indian Tiger gene as well. And I know for  fact that you will not find a known representative of this gene (stud books provided) anywhere other than India.
So you would never be able to compare apples to apples in that case.




Lets look at the wild Amurs body size compared to wild bengals and the "sauraha male" in particular

*This image is copyright of its original author

Longest HBL 208cm and 104cm Shoulder height

Compared to
M105 Sauraha Male

*This image is copyright of its original author

HBL 197cm which is shorter than Maurice but with a 140cm Chest girth.

So obviously we know where the size difference is, lets for the sake of argument say they were measured in different ways, yada yada and they are equal HBL, we still see that the sauraha male is obviously a much more robust animal, which is the argument we are presenting.

When comparing them side by side, not just specific individuals we see a different picture

*This image is copyright of its original author

But the sample size of the amur is only 10% of the Bengals, so obviously if we upped the sample size we'd have more exceptional individuals for the amurs.
But I think most of us agree on this,
The Amur is the largest cat in frame, meaning height and length but not in weight.

Option 1:
Since Amurs carry extra fat for insulation maybe that takes up some of the space for muscle and we know muscle weighs more than fat.


Option 2:
 Amurs have been decimated, the largest species are gone, their genetic bottle necking is most extreme and their habitat is gone and everything with in it. Thus any chance of obtaining their previous max weights are gone.

At the end of the day my feeling is this,
A tiger is a tiger:
Meaning, there is only so much space for mass, if we look at their muscle distribution I would assume that its very similar in all tiger sub species at parity. I may be wrong with that assumption but I'd assume the differences would be statistically minimal. With in 5% or so would be my guess.
So if an amur has more "sq. footage" to fill with mass, than he most likely as the capabilities of doing so. But its purely speculative and no matter how far we go back, Wild Amur weights have never been larger than Wild Bengals, hunting or scientific.
But to be fair, data on Amurs hunted in the past is extremely minimal. Reply