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

[Pckts]

A couple of things..

The weights posted are from biologists, they are displayed in a "one stop shop" which allows you to view all of them in one image and compare. The references are also posted beneath it which you can easily confirm yourself.



The quotes listed aren't from random people, Sunquist and Dinnerstein are a couple of the foremost experts in N. Indian Tigers and Chitwan particularly.

@Master Chief 
"I remember I read one old paper in wildfact. It says that the majority huge records of the Bengal tigers were cattle killers. It was also said that the Bengal tiger average weight was lower than lion back in past. But they got heavier than Amur and African lion these days. "

This isn't true, there are many non cattle lifters and many cattle lifters and many that do both. This is the same for lions and tigers, if cattle is available they will be lifted. Tigers in Kahna aren't lifting cattle nearly as often as tigers in Ranthambhore. Amur tigers used to eat dogs, deer caught in traps, raid fish lockers (read brobears post in the Amur Tigers Thread) as well, opportunistic hunters take whats available. If you are talking about "baiting" than yes, some were baited and others were not. A couple of the largest modern weights came from males with relatively little in their stomachs, that was just an excuse some would use to downgrade tiger size. All big cats have food in their stomach and have usually ate fairly recently, they are hyper carnivores, they must eat regularly to survive.

*This image is copyright of its original author

". How do you even know about the pure Bengal or mixed Bengal in captive zoo around the world? I don't think you can prove like that by sending some emails to a few professor and reading some books and articles."

Because there isn't a single pure bred bengal in the US, try and find one if you like, but there are many pure bred Amurs and Sumatrans.
The stud books are what you would use and like I said, there are still Mixed Bengals/N. American Tigers that match the size of Amurs, Take a look at the Captive Big Cat Weight thread.


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"Amur tiger have almost no food intake in their home unlike the Bengal tiger or African lion. We don't know size of the Amur tiger if they are living in high prey density environment. "

This is probably true, but it doesn't change that their body measurements are similar with Bengals being the more robust animal throughout history, take away their prey and you probably have similar cats, but that's why most think Tigers should be broken down into 2 subspecies, Continental and Sunda, that's it.
https://phys.org/news/2015-06-tiger-subspecies.html Reply