Who is the "king" of tigers? - Bengal or Amur

[GuateGojira]

(04-02-2020, 10:06 AM)strana Wrote: Guate,
First, thanks for another very interesting material.
However, I think that the size of modern Amur tigers are underestimated. There are some pics of very impressive wild tigers in Russia here in Wildfact; I would not be surprised if some of them reach 250 kg+. I believe only the young/not very healthy are weighted. Wild Bengals and Amur might have similar size, but ok, it is just speculation.

Hello, thank you for your words.

About the size of the Amur tiger, in fact the data on the image takes in count both historic and modern weights. Surely there are photos of very impressive male in the Russian Far East, but sadly none of them has been weighed, so for the moment the biggest male recorded between 1992 to 2012 (the last year when weights were published) was of 212 kg.

Now  about the sample, it is not true that only young or not-healty males were weighed, let me explain to you first. In 2005 Dr Slaght and other scientists published a chapter in the monograph of the Amur tiger published by the Siberian Tiger Project (in Russian only), especifically the chapter No. 6. Now, in that document they calculated an average weight of 176.4 kg (n=18; range: 125 - 205 kg) for males and 117.9 kg (n=13; range: 113 - 129 kg) for females. However those figures includes specimens that were not in good shape, in fact the weight of 125 kg was for male in such a bad shape that was eutanized! Also, the sample includes specimens over 3 years old, as for scientists an animal is "adult" when they are sexually mature. Now, in order to get a more reliable average figure I investigated all the reports about the Siberian Tiger Project, plus the new males/females captured by the Amur Tiger Programme and I excluded the specimens in bad shape, although it was not posible to exclude the specimens between 3-4 years old for obvious reasons. At the end, my result was of an average weight of 190 kg (n=23; range: 155 - 212 kg) for males and 121 kg (n=15; range: 110 - 136 kg) for females, taking in count only the specimens captured between 1992 and 2012. For the moment those are the most reliable figures about the body mass of the Amur tigers, but take in count that after the year 2000 more males of 200 kg or over had been captured, so I think that there is a big posibility that males over 215 kg are now there in the Russian Far East.

If we use the weights of the Amur tigers in the past, we can see that they were of about the same size of the Bengal tigers, with confirmed weights of about 250 kg and the skulls shows that they could be slightly longer too. Reply