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

[GuateGojira]

In fact, in the book "Tiger Moon", in page 19, Fiona Sunquist said that before any capture (specially in Summer days), the elephants and the team were practically ready at the 3:00 am. This was because they must be close to the tiger and capture it in the very morning, long before the middle day, as the temperatures will be to high for a sedated tigers. Even in winter days, all captures were in the morning, which means that the tigers had relative little time to eat undisturbed.

Other thing that I would like to point again, the bait time according with Dr Dave Smith and colleges (1983): the baits were fixed in the late afternoon, which means it was between 5:00 to 6:00 pm, or even latter. Also, the baits, at the other day, were inspected 30 minutes BEFORE sunrise (surely before 5:00 or 6:00 am), which support the report of Fiona.

In this case, we can guess that the period that a tiger had to eat was about 12 hours, and as we can be very sure that the tigers didn't killed the baits just after the people left them, the period is even shorter. Like I said before, and based in Sunquist (1981) and personal communications, the baited tigers eat between 14 to 19 kg in 24 hours, when undisturbed, so in a disturbed bait-kill, with almost half that time, plus the testimony of Dr Sunquist that ANY baited tiger was gorged or even with its belly full, well, we can know that the stomach content of the "baited tigers", at the end of the day, was probably even less than the 14 kg suggest by Dr Sunquist.

To this, we most add that some of the stomach content will be absorbed by the body, increasing its body weight with protein and fat. This is logic, as a tiger that eat 14 kg don't defecate also 14 kg! [img]images/smilies/dodgy.gif[/img]
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