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

[GuateGojira]

(09-10-2016, 08:16 AM)Kingtheropod Wrote: Tiger body mass underestimated in historical records


After reading numerous records, I noticed that many hunters have weighed there tigers in different ways. Some hunters have even weighed there tigers in small pieces. This causes a problem, cutting up and weighing an animal in small pieces causes the animal to loss its blood weight, resulting in a reduction in its mass. Keep in mind, blood alone makes up approximately ~7% of the body weight of an organism. Peter or Guate, what do you think?

Baker (1890) gives the weight of one tiger that we shot as 437 lbs, but he later took into account that the animal he shot have lost a significant amount of blood, estimated at 10 lbs.

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Other hunters that have weighed tigers have not only shot there tigers causing them to bleed out before weighing, but have even cut there animal into small pieces...

Hornaday (1891) gives the weight of one tiger at 495 lbs, but there is a problem, check out how he weighed the tiger...

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And as far as I've seen, he isn't the only one that did this. Thoughts?

Well, here I go.

Contrary to popular belief, weights of wild animals are not as common as measurements, and its reliability depends of the scale used and the state of the animal (full or empty), also the health state and other natural factors.

These cases show that many times, hunters are unable to carry large scales and they used this type of method to "estimate", piece by piece, the weight of its specimens, and this was common in Africa and Asia. Interestingly, this is the "normal" case of all cetaceans, as just a few, very few, large specimens had been weighed completely, mostly are weighed in pieces and that is why a blue whale of 170 metric tons could weights up to 200 ton in real life.

With tigers, this are not rare cases. Burton weighed a huge tiger know as the "Ambari male" with a scale of just 500 lb, and he calculated that the animal probably weighed 50 lb more, a total of 550 lb (249.5 kg). Dr Sunquist had a scale of just 500 lb during his studies in Nepal so he never could get the real weight of the Sauraha male (M-105) and all the Sambar male deers that he captured. Later, Dr Dave Smith carried a scale of 600 lb (272 kg) and even then, the Sauraha male and the male M-126 bottom it to! Captain W. H. Hunter also used a scale of 513 lb and a little one of 50 lb, but even then, his largest tiger bottomed both (male of over 563 lb (255.4 kg+), in central India). Finally, the Maharaja of Cooch Behar once weighed a tiger with a incorrect scale, and latter he estimated a higher figure, based in a Sambar weighed with both scales (sorry, I don't remember the weight).

As we can see, there are several cases of tigers been underestimated in weight because of the scales used and the circumstances of the hunt. We most take in count that, if we actually take in count these situations, is possible that many weights of lions and tigers in old literature were taken in this form, but as there is no description, we can't take actions over them.

Even in modern days, we know cases of animals been weighed with bad scales. Remember the case of the lion Puyol of 235 kg (the same investigator accepted the fact that the scale was barely reliable), or the resent two tigers of 85 kg and 185 kg in Central India, which seems incorrectly weighed. Some people like Waveriders want to make us to believe that ALL scientists in the field make its measurements following established protocols at 100%, but that is not true, as circumstances and even the criteria of each investigator influence the results. There is always variations, and not all the people is guided "by the book".

So, I will quote Dr Sunquist, saying that if anyone is going to discard some "tiger weights" because they don't fall in its "golden protocols", then we should investigate all the weights of lions, jaguars, leopards, etc. etc., that don't follow it too, and discard them. That is why I am not agree in discarding skull measurements just because a pair of posters (both with "W") are not agree and just because they don't like the results, or don't fit into they stereotypes. We can't corroborate the accuracy at 100%, fair to say, but also we can't discard its accuracy, specially when is stated the method of measurement. If we are going to play fair, we most use the same criteria, with ALL the animals, tiger-lions-bears by equal.

There are no such thing as 100% or "crystal clear" measurements, that are nonsense. The best we can do is to believe in the descriptions of the procedures and use our own criteria to estimate its reliability. In this case, the scientists of the Siberian Tiger Project and other experts made a great work in the chapter 6 of the Amur tiger monograph, stating a clear and reliable protocol of four steeps to state which figures (weights and measurements) are reliable and which not.

Let's see what Peter can add here. Reply