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

Guatemala GuateGojira Offline
Expert & Researcher
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(01-07-2020, 01:36 PM)Greatearth Wrote: Where did you obtained body size of tigers (Bengal and other tiger subspecies for modern days)? Can you even trust many those information? If you got it from news in internet or newspaper, then you can't trust 100%. I talked to Dharmendra, and he said many tigers were actually never measured unlike in media. Whenever they capture tigers, they don't bring measuring measurement machine unless if they need to collared and other things. It depends on the situation. They just answered to news reporter or journalists just write whatever they want. Especially, if you got it from fb, then you probably need to be confirm about it to people who measured that animal.
Many Asia is not willing to provide body size of their big cats because of poaching problems. My advisor worked in famous tiger national park (I am not going to mention the place to not identify myself). He said many forest department in Nepal/Bhutan are not releasing tiger information due to poaching problems. I am working on jaguars, and this is true. Big cat biologists are also a little stubborn/selfish and want to keep secret as themselves due to money/time to study big cats. And I've seen many biologists just changing answers time to time for my research until I got helped from the director of the program in the WCS. These people are also receiving 100 emails per days, especially if they are professors. Whenver you send them email about their body size, do you think they will answer back by spending hour to digging up their old info to answer nice, detailed email? I highly doubt they would. PEople like Sunquist is a very nice guy (since I saw many post that has Dr. Sunquist's email), and he really answered email nicely. I know one student who was from Florida. I heard about Sunquist. He is really nice guy, but his mind is everywhere when he teaches the class. I heard he just spoke about bird entire class when he saw one migrated bird was sitting on branch (he saw it from window) and only covered 10 mins for the lecture that day. Some people are really douchebag, and they will ignore emails. They will never answer anything. The professor that I told you I had research with him, he had around 500 unread emails in his inbox.

Brother of famous Final 16 (male Siberian tiger who always beat up lions and made lion fanboys to created many different videos in youtube in the 2000s) in Everland, Korea. He was around 220-230 cm long from head to body, but his weight wasn't really heavy (I remember he was around 220-230kg?). Final 16 was 260-270kg, but I don't know about other measurement. I guess he was huge in shoulder and length as well since he was dwarfing other tigers/lions in Everland. It is all depending on each individuals regardless if it is heavy, long, and tall. Just look for human... Some humans are really tall, but slender (Kevin Garnett and Peter Crouch). Other human is really tall, but very big (Shaquille O'Neal and Great Khali). OTher human is tall, and builk (Lebron James), Other human is tall, but average in built (Son Heungmin, Michael Jordan {Jordan was not really builk, but neither slender}). Espceially, many NFL and WWE players are builk regardless their height.



It is the same as felidae as well since I've been interact with many street cats. 4 cats that I know (I will named them A, B, C, D here). "A" cat is average size. "B" cat looks biggest. "C" cat looks larger than "A" and "D" cats, but smaller than "B" cat. "D" is bigger than A, but smaller than C and D. This is when you just see them with your eyes from distance. However, if you actually see them closely (which I did since I used to give them food all the time).... "C" cat is actually the tallest and longest. "B" cat has huge body, bigger head, bigger paw, and the heaviest. However, B is shorter in shoulder and length compared to C cat. He is even shorter than D cat as well. B cat looks biggest just like the same concept as people think Wagdoh and Assam tigers looks biggest since they have big body. D cat is smaller than C (bu it looks different from angle) and B cats, but he is actually heavier than C cat. My belief is he eats a lot. "A" cat is just average.
So from largest to smallest....      Weight: B, D, C, A. Length: C, D, B, A. Height: C, B=D, A. Paw/body size: B, C=D, A. Skull: B, D, C, A. Observation mistake by many people since all of them ran away besides B cat (B is friendly one): B, C,or =D, A. Since they are not running away from me, I will say: B=C=D (different in each body sizes, but in overall size), A. Top 3 largest (B, C, and D) only have millimeters or few cm difference in size. It is the same for big cat including tigers.

I do know body sizes of tigers in Bandhavgarh and Kanha. I am not writing their body size since friend told me to not release info of these tigers. Every large male tigers in central India such as Banda, Bokha, B2 were similar sizes as the Sauraha male tiger. Banda, Bokha, and Sauraha all bigger than other measured Chitwan tigers in the 1970s. And I am not really sure if M105 was actually more than 272 kg when he measured. I believe Bachelor or Powalgarh was huge tiger since Corbett mentioned him about stories back in the time. He may not be really long, but he probably has very big body. And there are always going to be myth and exaggeration on large size tigers, especially if it goes to 1800s to early 1900s. The same for animals like whales, crocodiles, sharks, bears, snakes, and any other large animals. The book Peter asked about me, this book mentioned about two male Korean tigers above 310 kg. However, what about today's Siberian tigers in Russia? I changed my mind as we should conclude from the measurement from scientific study, not old records if we have to decide 100%. That is why percent error is exist in every science field. Thus, just because some tiger is either heavier in empty body or longer in length. There is no way to tell which is actually bigger, the same for populations. Bigger or smaller individuals are everywhere in each populations. However, I believe there are more numbers of larger individuals located in northern India/Nepal compare to other parts of India.
Sorry for my disorganize email, but I don't really have time to write post in wildfact now.

It is the great post by the way, I can still earn some knowledge from it. You should mention where did you get the source for other subspecies of tigers.

Wow, there is a lot to cover in your post, I will try to focus in the important points:

1. Source of the data:
About Indian tigers, only 21 of the 166 came from modern scientific sources, the others are from hunting records from sources that we classified as "reliable". From the 21 males, only 4 came from news reports:
   a - Tiger "Gabbar" with 185 kg at Tadoba - Jadhav reported it in an article in 2015, but @Pckts confirmed the figure in an email. 
   b - Old male of 197 kg at Kahna - It came from an article of 2014 from the 21st Century Tiger webpage.
   c - Tiger S-T1 "Darra" male of 220 kg in Ranthambore/Sariska - Confirmed by personal communication with Neha Sinha (the same with the females that she reported in her articles).
   d - Tiger T-24 "Ustad" male of 240 kg in Ranthamore - Reported by Khandal in a report in 2015, and confirmed trough email to other poster (don't remember who, maybe @Pckts or @tigerluver, I don't remember).

The other 17 males came from scientific documents only. From the large list of tigers shared in the topic of "Modern Measurements of tigers" I did not use any of them, as we need verification of all those figures, although I think that the communication of the two adult male tigers in Kanha of "over 227 kg" is reliable, but I will like to double check. About the hunting sources, many people don't believe on them (Karanth & Yamaguchi) but others do (Sunquist & Schaller) so it will be always open to question, however sources like Brander, Hewett and the Maharaja of Cooch Behar has been allways at the top of the reliability even after several questionings.

About Russian Far East tigers, you have my old tables from 2015 check the figures and the sources. The sources are reports from the Siberian Tiger Project itself, or webpages from reliable scientific asociations or confirmations by emails of several scientists that worked with those tigers in the field. Also you can see the sources for the tigers in the old records, all of them follow the 4 steps protocol that Slagth et al. (2005) used to clasified if a record is relaible or not.


For the Caspian tigers, the weights came from Heptner & Sludskii (1992) and Mazák (2013). Indochina tigers came from Dr Simcharoen et al. in a document in 2012; the 3 hunting records came from Pocock (1939), Mazák (2013) and Bazé (1957). From those from South China tigers it was more dificult and and used as reference to Allen (1938), Brown, (1893), Downess (2000), Inverarity (1911), Kun et al. (1998) and Wan & Hu, 1999; more sources were also used for the sample of the skulls of this subspecies/population. 

For Sumatran tigers I used many sources, only one came from news papers (female of 75 kg). I leave this old image as it summarize all my sources:

*This image is copyright of its original author

Please take in count that the small "male" of 73 kg is no longer taked in count in my new calculation for the reasons that already explained in my previous post to you.

For the Java tiger, the sources are Hoogerwerf (1970), Sody (1949), Slagth et al. (2005) and Mazák (2013). For Bali tigers, the sources are Buzas & Farkas (1996), Mazák (2013), Mazák et al., (1977) and Sody (1949).

2 - Share of data:
The excuse that people do not share the information because of poaching issues make no sense at all. I mean, poachers are not looking the biggest tiger, they just search any tiger that they can catch, they don't care about its size, age or if is dominant or not. Actually most of the tigers poached are young specimens with no territory. I can believe in that "professional zeal" do exist and I am 100% that is the main reason why they keep the data, but poaching is just not logic. Even worst, why they will keep the date secret? They should published, like the Siberian Tiger Project or the Smithsonian/Nepalese tiger project done before. However it seems that modern scientists are more focused in ecological issues than in morphological issues, and they may be right. At least scientists from Africa did published the data of they lions and leopards and that is why the information of those species is more abundant in this point.

3 - Morphology and modern tigers:
About the tiger M-105 "Sauraha", we confirmations from Sunquist, Smith and Dinerstein that the male was actually weighed and that did weighed over 272 kg as it was the largest scale available, the figure of 261 kg came from a chest girth-weight equation and the figure of 260 kg that I normally use is my estimation of the weight empty belly. There is no reason to doubth of the data of the Smithsonian/Nepalese tiger project. Morphology is a tricky issue, as I described before to you, body can change and I think that you more or less take the idea: similar size do not means similar weight. A long tiger may be less heavier than a short but stockier one, this is even discussed in the old hunting litterature and that is why people like the Maharaha of Cooch Behar and the scientists of the Siberian Tiger Project collected a full set of measurements for they specimens. So, can we say if a population is larger than other? It depends of how you interprete the data. For example a person can say that 4 males from Nepal is to few to say that they are the largest, but other people can say that from 4 males 2 are already over 600 lb, and they were captured with no bias. So it depends of the data, and for the moment, the biggest tigers have been captures in the norther region of India/Nepal, although new date from Dr Jhala may show new figures from Ranthambore and Kanha.

Hope this helps to clarify some of your questions.
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Messages In This Thread
RE: ON THE EDGE OF EXTINCTION - A - THE TIGER (Panthera tigris) - GuateGojira - 01-07-2020, 10:51 PM
Demythologizing T16 - tigerluver - 04-12-2020, 11:44 AM
Tiger Data Bank - Apollo - 07-28-2014, 09:54 PM
RE: Tiger Data Bank - Apollo - 07-28-2014, 10:02 PM
RE: Tiger Data Bank - Apollo - 07-29-2014, 12:56 AM
RE: Tiger Data Bank - peter - 07-29-2014, 07:05 AM
Tiger recycling bin - Roflcopters - 09-04-2014, 01:36 AM
RE: Tiger recycling bin - Pckts - 09-04-2014, 02:22 AM
RE: Tiger recycling bin - Roflcopters - 09-05-2014, 01:01 AM
RE: Tiger Data Bank - Apollo - 11-15-2014, 10:07 PM
RE: Tiger Data Bank - Apollo - 11-15-2014, 10:57 PM
RE: Tiger Data Bank - Apollo - 11-15-2014, 11:33 PM
RE: Tiger Data Bank - Apollo - 02-19-2015, 11:25 PM
RE: Tiger Data Bank - GuateGojira - 02-23-2015, 11:36 AM
Status of tigers in India - Shardul - 12-20-2015, 03:23 PM
RE: Tiger Directory - Diamir2 - 10-03-2016, 04:27 AM
RE: Tiger Directory - peter - 10-03-2016, 06:22 AM
Genetics of all tiger subspecies - parvez - 07-15-2017, 01:08 PM
RE: Tiger Predation - peter - 11-11-2017, 08:08 AM
RE: Man-eaters - Wolverine - 12-03-2017, 11:30 AM
RE: Man-eaters - peter - 12-04-2017, 09:44 AM
RE: Tigers of Central India - Wolverine - 04-13-2018, 01:17 AM
RE: Tigers of Central India - qstxyz - 04-13-2018, 08:34 PM
RE: Size comparisons - peter - 07-16-2019, 05:28 AM
RE: Amur Tigers - peter - 05-20-2021, 07:13 AM
RE: Amur Tigers - Nyers - 05-21-2021, 08:02 PM
RE: Amur Tigers - peter - 05-22-2021, 08:09 AM
RE: Amur Tigers - GuateGojira - 04-06-2022, 12:59 AM
RE: Amur Tigers - tigerluver - 04-06-2022, 01:08 AM
RE: Amur Tigers - tigerluver - 04-06-2022, 09:08 AM
RE: Amur Tigers - tigerluver - 04-06-2022, 11:30 PM
RE: Amur Tigers - peter - 04-08-2022, 07:27 AM



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