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

[WaveRiders]

Pckts
 
I agree that a scale to weigh animals must be a scale suited for that aim for those particular animals. An it has to be accurate and the measurement has to be repeatable. And the operator must adopt the correct procedure.
 
I agree that if a scale has bottomed out anything else can only be an approximation, may be a close approximation like in the two examples I gave in a previous post.  
 
If one would like to precisely account for the stomach contents he should kill the animal if alive (!), open the animal, take out the stomach contents and weigh the animal again all done with loosing no material and no fluids from him. If the scale does not bottom again, that is the actual weight at empty stomach of the dead animal.
 
Smuts weighed the stomach contents of dead lions and estimated the stomach contents weight of the live lions he also weighed and measured. His estimations came from belly size. This was subject to his interpretation and experience. I can guarantee you that Smuts had a vast field experience in zoology.
 
He may of course have underestimated stomach contents of some live lions and overestimated that of others.
 
His heaviest lion was a 5 years old animal scaling 225 kg. The animal was weighed dead. He open his stomach and found nothing inside. He was surprised by the amount of subcutaneous and intestinal fat as reported because significantly higher then normal. I can also tell you that Smuts heaviest female lion was a 5 years old animal with no stomach contents.
 
Smuts was also conservative in the weight statistics he provided from samples pulled or taken accounting individuals weighed by zoologists / game wardens in other region of Africa for comparison. For instance in East Africa he pulled lions from different sources apparently including those from Meinertzhagen (1938). Meinertzhagen (1938) was not a zoologist in the true sense of term, but his paper is a peer reviewed scientific publication.
 
In that sample a massive 185,5 kg female lion is reported. Smuts did not include that individual. Why? I believe because he included no freak individuals from any sample or individual weights of lions weighed in other parts of Africa by very respected sources he completely trusted perhaps as he was unable to weigh any freak lion over the many years working in Kruger NP and therefore a much unlikely occurrence in general if he realized he was unable to even just spot by sight at least one of them. Or much more likely because freak individuals can screw up statistics a lot particularly in small samples.
 
I am aware of over half a dozen wild female lions weighing in excess of 175 kg, one weight coming from a pregnant female. These figures appears reliable, two of them even appear in peer-reviewed scientific papers, others in quite respected scientific sources although one data reported is clearly very much unrealistic (a wild female lion well in excess of 200 kg) , others in hunting / game books. However I do not feel particularly comfortable with those weights and that one of 185,5 kg from Meinertzhagen (1938) is one of them.
 
I have always suspected that the individual was tagged in the sample as a female for a mistake: in the paper her data are shown as first female in the row just below the last male. Maybe there has been a typing mistake and she actually was a male. Bear in mind that the heaviest male in Meinertzhagen (1938) sample weighing only 191 kg is definitely very far from being as impressive as the heaviest female. The two things are not related, but it is definitely interesting to note that computing the standard range over an hypothetical sample of 1000 individuals and its min and max 1% probability, this range would result in ca. 79 kg for males and ca, 177 kg for females with upper 1% probability equal to ca. 146 kg for males and ca. 588 kg for females, While these values for the male sample makes sense for the female sample are totally unrealistic and the standard range should instead lie for the females below the 1% probability lower limit (ca. 89 kg for females and ca. 50 kg for males).
 
 
                             WaveRiders
 

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