Modern weights and measurements on wild tigers

[GuateGojira]

(03-22-2022, 09:05 PM)Jerricson Wrote: Hello guate , I have quite read your posts regarding weights of lion and tigers and they r quite informative. I just wanted to enquire about madlas (m-125) weight. In one of the documents , its said he weighed around 220-230kg and in another mail from Dr. Raghu Chundawat , he was stated to weigh around 250kg. So whats the final conclusion on his weight??

On the weight of Madla male - M-125:

Good question and this is something that I wanted to wrote about since some time ago.

As we know, Dr Chundawat managed to observe several male tigers during his 10 years study in Panna, directly and indirectly, but he could capture only two: M-91 and M-125.

Acording with at least two independent sources, both males weighed 250 kg or more, but there are details that we need to check.

Here is the first source from M-91:

*This image is copyright of its original author

The next one is the confirmation via the person that witnesed the weighing (Mike Birkhead) of male M-125 and is supported by the documentary "Tigers in the Emerald Forest":

*This image is copyright of its original author

So, as we can see, both of them are very big male tigers, but Dr Chundawat mentions that they were baited so he adjusted the weights of all his tigers. The book from 2018 "The Rise and Fall of the Emerald Tigers" is the last word on the study of the Panna tigers during the 10 years that Dr Chundawat worked with the tigers. In his book he says that based in visual estimation the stomach content was estimated between 25 - 30 kg. However, there is an important point on this, check this:

*This image is copyright of its original author

So, as we can see the "visual estimation" seems to be exagerated as the actual stomach content was of 19 kg for the largest male, which interestingly match with the averages stablished by Dr Sunquist in Nepal (1981) with ranges between 14 - 19 kg in 24 hours.

And finally this stament is the one that pushed me to investigate all this case:

*This image is copyright of its original author

So, we can see that he says that the biggest tiger was M-91, not M-125, so what about this email?

*This image is copyright of its original author

As we can see, the entire explanation on the email is, in fact, what happen when they weighed the male M-91, not M-125, and that is the confusion. That is something that we can see here:

*This image is copyright of its original author

There it is showed that the real weight of male M-91 "empty" was more than 240 kg, and this because the male bottomed the scale of 250 kg, they knew that the scale could weight 10 kg more (total of 260 kg available by the scale) and taking in count that the tiger ate 19 kg, the final value was of 241 kg, but as there is no form to know how much more the tiger actually weighed, they stated that the empty weight was just over 240 kg.

Now about male M-125 (Madla tiger) its weight is stated between 220 - 230 kg because 20-30 kg is the stomach amount estimated by the workers, but probably the real amount will be the same as the other male, so its empty weight will be 230 kg. There is no other mention if this tiger also bottomed the scale or not, only that male M-91 was bigger. Sadly, we only have one picture of it and apparently the male "Hairyfoot" was even bigger than both of them, probably another cantidate for 260 kg "empty", but sadly it was not captured.

So, this is the conclution based in the facts, the real weight of male M-125 was of 250 kg and that of M-91 was over 260 kg, but when adjusted for stomach content they were calculated at 230 and 240+ kg respectivelly.

Hope this helps to clasify the issue and if no one noticed before, I have been used the 240 kg figure since many months ago.


Is interesting that now the sample of Panna is, for the moment, the largest (talking about numbers) among scientific sources in India, with average figures of 216 kg (n=8; range: 180 - 240+ kg) for males and 129 kg (n=9; range= 105 - 152 kg) for females. Reply