B2 and Other Great Tiger Pics from India

[GuateGojira]

(08-12-2015, 09:31 PM)Pckts Wrote: Eye witness accounts must be taken with a grain of salt, obviously if you are looking at a tiger through trees from a boat a good distance away, that isn't going to be as true as looking at a tiger 5 feet away from you. Also, what other places has that photographer been to? What other Tigers? etc.


The sumatrans I saw in the zoo where obviously smaller than indian bengals, so if Sunderban tigers are nearly the same size, they will obviously be a smaller cat.
But sumatra was/is an amazing place, like java, there are all types of herbivores there, I would imagine in older days before we destroyed their habitat, prime males could definitely of been much larger tigers.

The stories of the photographers are excellent and should be summarized in books, like Valmik Thapar has done with all his observations. A condensate of knowledge of the several observations can transform quantitative data in qualitative and even statistical information. I would like that some one, could achieve that goal.

About the size, yes, I guess that Sundarbans tigers, in good health state, could weight the same than the Sumatran-Java-Bali tigers. In fact, a male captured in 2008 weighed 150 kg, less than 2 kg more than "Slamet" in Sumatra (the radiocollared male of 148.2 kg). Sadly, new captures in Sundarbans revealed males of only up to 115 kg, but they were in bad shape.

In older times, we have speculated, based in the information from @peter, that Sumatran tigers were larger and the large skulls (up to 350 mm in G.L.) together with the pictures support this. However, something tells me that as Sumatra never had a great prey base, like for example Java, I guess that Javanese tigers were even larger, probably reaching the 160 kg, which is the hypothetical maximum for the Malayan tigers, calculated by Locke (1986). I think that the estimations of Mazák (1981-1983) for the island tigers, especially for Java and Bali, are too small. Reply