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

[Apollo]

Disturbed Feeding

Every kill site will be disturbed to get the measurements on the amount of food taken from the carcass as long as the tiger can sense your presence before, during or after the procedure. The term unterrupted feeding means if the measurements are taken after one day then it can be termed "undisturbed feeding for a day or disturbed feeding after a day". Same goes for day 2, 3, 4 etc. Both the terms can be used, I hope you get it.



Top Predators

Tiger is a predator which is in the top of the food chain in its ecosystem. It will feed on any time possible if the food is available at that particular given time. The term tigers feed on night directly correlates to their hunting behaviour. Since majority of the tiger hunts happen during night, they start feeding during night. But when there is a successful day hunt, tigers will feed during day time. Similarly when it comes to baits, tigers would have fed when they reached them.

A good example will be tigers like Machali (from Ranthambore), Charger (from Bandhavgarh) etc. Because these tigers ate during day time when provided by the forest officials (without waiting for night fall)

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Table

*This image is copyright of its original author

In the table we can see that the average first day feeding is less when compared to other days. The reason could be it is higly impossible for a tiger to have the full quota of 24 hrs on the first day of the bait but it will have the whole 24 hrs in the corresponding days.

So what you said 
" However remember that the period of 24 hours of feeding refers basically entirely to the night only as tigers during the day leave the kill to come back in the following evening if they know there is more to eat from it."

could be wrong, because the tigers fed more on 2nd, 3rd day because they had more time (the whole 24 hrs). Hence your assumption of tigers basically feed entirely on night cannot be true.

So the longer the tiger is exposed to bait the higher the consumption will be in a day. Since the capture is within 10 to 12 hrs from baiting the 14kg (average food intake per day) food intake subtraction is possibly an overestimate.

Since we dont have any average hourly feeding data or the time when the tigers actually started feeding from the baits. It is more sensible to take both the highest and lowest feeding averages per day 14Kg and 19Kg and make it to 10 hrs 5.8Kg to 7.9 Kg as suggested by @tigerluver 

 

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