ON THE EDGE OF EXTINCTION - A - THE TIGER (Panthera tigris)

[Pckts]

Quote: I never read anything about the difference between the actual 'heel width' of a male measured by a biologist and the 'heel width' of the print left by that same tiger in, say, frozen snow.  

I have posted a few accounts stating the influence or exaggeration of paw size due to soft dirt/mud/snow. How exactly that correlates for one tiger specifically isn't known.

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Quote:The information I have suggests every mm in width, depending on gender, health, age and conditions, compares to 5-10 pounds at the level of averages (referring to adult males). Wild males leaving a print with a 'heel width' of, say, 11,5 cm range between 160-207 kg, but in tigers affected by disease, injury and hunger it could be very different. My guess is Batalov, as experienced as they come, summed it up best: http://programmes.putin.kremlin.ru/tiger/news/25452.

That's a very wide range and I haven't seen anything to confirm that.
That being said, you have a 3 year old Bheema with an 11cm breadth forepaw weighing in at 209kg full stomach but threw up during capture.

Part Batalov's quote

"A track diameter of 16 cm and above belongs to a very large male, 14 cm to a medium-sized male, and 10–12 cm to a female. There are no claw marks on the tiger's tracks because they are retractable. The bare heel and four toes stand out very well on the paw print. The width of the heel of the front paw, which is always larger than the heel of the hind paw, determines the sex and age of the animal. A heel more than 10.5 cm wide belongs to an adult male, less than 10 cm - to an adult female or young male. Five-month-old tiger cubs have heels measuring 5.5–6.5 cm. At this age they leave the den and follow their mother. In one-year-old males, the size of the heel of the front paw is approximately the same as that of the mother (sometimes larger); in females, the heels reach the size of the mother’s by the age of one and a half years. At this age, the young gradually move to independent life and increasingly hunt alone.

 

By the age of two, tigers are already established predators. From this time on, each of them has its own fate and heel size, which increases slightly until four to five years of age, and then depends on the body weight of the predator, especially in males. The larger the male becomes, the larger his heel. The largest male, with a heel size of 13 cm, recorded by us, lived until 2013 in the area named after. Lazo, in the basins of the Obor, Durmin and Kiya rivers, and on the right bank of the Khor River, in its middle part. Many foresters and hunters saw the size of his tracks and admired them.

 

Currently, the territory of two model sites in this area, covering an area of 400 thousand hectares, is inhabited by two large males, whose heels of the front paws reach 12 cm."

This holds true for either Tiger subspecies although we have accounts up to 20cm large in Kanha and Terai Arc, the Kanha male "Saddam Hussein" wasn't the largest at the time but his pugmarks were notoriously huge while the Terai Arc male is stated to be the 280kg Male we have seen in the medical report although any details of where that report came from are missing. 

Quote:Russian biologists never saw a wild tiger exceeding 212 kg in the period 1992-2023, but Feng Limin, also as experienced as they come, said male tigers exceeding 250 kg have been weighed in northeastern China a few years ago. The young adult male that attacked a car in that region, at 225 kg (confirmed), wasn't small either. 

Unfortunately there hasn't been real confirmation with regards to 250kg claim and the 225kg Male was full bellied.

I'm not sure how the topic turned to skulls but that being said, If I recall correctly the longest skull is a Bengals while the widest is an Amurs but both differences are negligible. The largest canines have belonged to Bengals.


The point was, the paw size mentioned isn't an abnormality, it's a normal size consistent with what's been measured prior. Reply