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

[GuateGojira]

(11-01-2014, 11:29 PM)'Pckts' Wrote:

(11-01-2014, 09:21 AM)'GuateGojira' Wrote: Like I said, I appreciate very much your efforts. You are right in the point that if we adjust one group, then we should adjust the other group and we can't do it correctly as different populations of tigers have different food intakes. For example, Nepalese tigers eat between 14-19 kg in a single night (Sunquist, 1981), while those of Kanha were recorded to eat 18-27 kg in the same time (Schaller, 1967); no other reliable measurements are available in literature, just estimation of up to 40 kg for Amur tigers (Baikov, 1926), but like much of his data, this figures is unreliable. Dr Schaller (1967) estimated that the maximum food intake for a tiger, in 24 hours, is about 1/5 of they weight, which for a large male would be about 45 kg, however, in the reality, the largest food intake ever recorded was for a large male that gorge itself with 35 kg in a single night (McDougal, 1979).

I am still reading the book of Dr McDougal, so I have not found which male was the one that eat that figure. [img]images/smilies/huh.gif[/img]
 


 

I don't think food intake has anything to do with location, I think it has to do with size of the tiger.
Corbetts book that I am reading, the chapter about the Bachelor, he is reported to have the largest pug marks that any of these poachers and indian guides had ever seen, he was measured three times by corbett with a length of 10'7'' and he was reported to be able to devour most of a domestic buffalo in one sitting. I wonder if its possible to determine food intake by body weight %?

 

 

I just put the only available data, I am not saying that in fact, food intake has to be with location.

What interesting is the fact that although Kanha tigers are, on average, lighter than Chitwan tigers (203 kg against 221 kg, respectively), they have a higher food intake. I think that it is more related with food availability than with size itself.

For example, Nagarahole tigers are lighter than those of Nepal, but still, they were adjusted by 30 kg when captured (although Tigerluver said that they don't look gorged to him). Other thing, in the time of Schaller's study, Kanha was in a process of recovering, and its prey density was growing, but compared with Chitwan, it had a lower prey density (in that time, in latter studies Kanha was much diferent (Panwar, 1987)). I guess that Chitwan tigers eat "less" because they had a higher prey density and needed to kill less often than, for example, Kanha tigers. Schaller recorded many instances of empty belly tigers after several nights of unsuccessful hunts, probably this provoque them to eat more than for example, those of Chitwan. Prey items are similar (Kanha had gaur in higher density, by the way), but still, the figures show different results.

I guess than the Bachelor, by virtue of its size, probably was able to eat 50 kg in one night, I don't remember if the domestic buffalo was an adult one or a calf. In the last case, those specimens (c.90 kg) had just about 50  - 60 kg of edible parts, excluding guts, bones, skin and stomach content.
  Reply