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

[Apollo]

 

(02-09-2015, 05:17 AM)'WaveRiders' Wrote: From Sunquist (1981) pag. 76
 
“RESULTS.—Estimates of the amount of food that can be eaten by a single tiger are shown in Table 27. The average quantity consumed in one day may be too low since most of this information was from animals that were disturbed at bait sites. On two occasions the tiger was known to be eating when we arrived. If the tiger is left undisturbed the average amount eaten in two days is more than double that of the first day, suggesting that the one-day value is low. A hungry tiger probably eats more on the first day of feeding than on successive days.”
 
The darting operation implicated a “disturbed kill” similar to the one caused by the weighing of the carcass on the day following the kill. For sure at least the first day of table 27 fully reflects the average of a disturbed kill (also the other days when occurring, but the average after 2 or more days does not necessarily implicate the kill was also disturbed in any day before in principle, although in my opinion it was more often then not the case because of the purpose of the study on feeding habits).
 
The only likely difference was that the darting and weighing operation occurred during the early/mid morning while the weighing of the carcass to study the food habits may likely have generally occurred later, perhaps late morning or even in the early afternoon. For you that makes a lot of difference. For me no because the tiger had already had the kill at disposition for 10-12 hours or so and because for a night kill tigers ate during the night and normally leaves the kill during the day to come back in the following evening if they know there is more to eat from the carcass. When a predator kill he start to eat immediately regardless how much hungry he is. He always eats, and if he is hungry he eats more. Sometimes baits were not killed, because tigers were not interested to kill it, perhaps because they were not hungry, or because baits were not located by the them. Or because they may have not feel comfortable to do it. It is obvious that if a tiger kills during the day it eats during the day as he starts to eat at least something immediately. This is not the case if the tiger has killed in the late afternoon/early evening/night of the day before.
 
In my opinion day 1 of table 27 reasonable reflects on a statistical basis what you could expect the “unsexed” tiger (actually females contributed much more then males to that figure) had eaten on average before the weighing operation if the tigers were located at a kill like when baited. Then that amount of 14,0 kg is not too far from the stomach contents on average (considering metabolic consumption over 10-12 hours, urination, defecation, blood and water drinking). We could discount something perhaps even 2-4 kg. But then we have the issue of males and females differentiation. Bear in mind that according to Sunquist females contributed much more then males to that figure. He states he substantially studied female tigers feeding habits.
 
So those statistically 10-12 kg or so of likely stomach contents at weighing operations can basically be attributed to the adult female class. Corresponding amount for adult males would be 15-18 kg or so on average on a statistical basis and applying Kleiber’s Law like I suggested to get an estimate.
 
 
                    WaveRiders
 



 

Other than your weight estimates this post of yours clearly explains what Ive been saying in my previous post.
That is "The longer the tiger is exposed to bait the higher the consumption will be in a day".
So it clearly boils down to the time available for a tiger to feed on the bait.
In this post you clearly mentioned that the disturbed bait sites will have lower consumption than the undisturbed bait sites.
But you used the 3 days undisturbed feeding figures in your calculations to find  the average 1 day disturbed feeding, thus your claims unfortunately contradicts each other.

Quote:In any case I prefer to stick to my consideration as far as Chitawan tiger weights from Sunquist (1981) and Smith et al. (1983) is concerned rather then doing nothing at all. That was a clear case of baited animals and 12/18 hours of uninterrupted feeding

This is a quote from one of your previous posts, I use this as an example to show that before @GuateGojira  showed that the time available for feeding is not more than 10 hrs before capture, you never mentioned about night feeding but instead you highlighted about 18 hrs of uninterrupted feeding. But once Guate showed the time was much less then you started using the term tigers entirely feed on nights.
If you assume that tigers entirely feed on night than why use the term 18hrs uninteruppted feeding in the first place. 

Quote: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.

Unfortunately your assumption of tigers entirely feed on night fails because the data in the table 27 shows diifferent results.
The tigers fed more on 2nd, 3rd day because they had more time.

Regarding tiger behaviour, 
Tigers generally hunt and patrol their territory during night hours. But tigers feed throughout the whole day whenever they wanted to no matter the kill was made in night or day, they generally avoid travelling long distances during day time. Being the top predator there is no danger of losing the kill to another animal other than to another tiger, hence there is no specific feeding pattern.


When it comes to food intake myself, @GuateGojira  and @tigerluver , kept are methods and calculations very simple.

Guate --> used an average of 14Kg as said by Mr.Sunquist

Tigerluver --> the average intake reported of 14 kg/24 hr (disregarding portions of bait no actually eaten by the tiger), for 10hrs eaten 5.8 kg.
Tigerluver also made an execellent point on the Standard deviation values from table 27 "I just noticed something on the standard deviation. That number is relatively quite low for all days. Either all the tigers were about the same size in the sample (unlikely, I'm sure even if the sample size was female biased there would be some males in there), or size does not matter as much as we thought for food intake and cats avoid gorging. To have a standard deviation that low, either almost every tiger gorges or almost every tiger does not gorge. 14 kg is not a gorged figure, so I'd conclude the latter."

Myself --> I took both the highest and lowest feeding averages per day 14Kg and 19Kg and make it to 10 hrs 5.8Kg to 7.9 Kg


But unfortunately you dont seem to be satisfied with these values because it involves both genders. Hence I thought of using your values and perform a calculation.
IMO this food intake estimate should be mathematically closer to the actual figure.



Average food intake for males during the time of capture


Im using your values of 2 males eat 56 kg and 57 kg of meat respectively in 3 days.
So the average undisturbed feeding per day is 18.7 kg/day and 19.0 kg /day
But since we dont have a value for average disturbed feeding per day.
I thought of using the table 27

*This image is copyright of its original author

In this table if you add the average consumption for the first 3 days we are getting 14+17.6+15.3 = 46.9
And for this total day 1 accounts for 29.8% , day 2 accounts for 37.5% and day 3 accounts for 32.6%

lets roundup day 1 to 30%
So
for 56Kg, the average disturbed feeding for day 1 is  16.8Kg 
for 57Kg, the average disturbed feeding for day 1 is  17.1Kg

We have to remember we dont have any average hourly feeding data or the time when the tigers actually started feeding from the baits

So the average food intake for males before capture (10hrs from baiting) is  7Kg to 7.1Kg.
For the average stomach content available in males during capture we need to subtract the values of digestion, excretion and metabolism

I would appreciate more new data and evidence instead of repeating stuffs and going in circles

 

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