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

[GuateGojira]

Final reflexion on the topic:

It seems strange and at some point disapointing that at 2023 there is still people that believe in the old ideas that the Amur tigers was not just the biggest of the cats, but that it was by a very significative margin. I will not be surprised if there is people out there that believe that Amur tigers "average" 300 kg or more, or that in fact they measure 4 meters in total length! It is since 1981 that Vratislav Mazák, the famous Zoologist accepted that those figures were not accurate and in his book "Der Tiger" of 1983 he accepted that the heaviest Amur tiger was of 306 kg (captive) and the second one of 270 kg (wild?). However his "love" for the Ussuri tiger population made him denied the fact that at that point there were several ogther figures of Bengal tigers that matched the body size of the biggest Amur tigers in the field.

At the beggining of this topic I made a comparison based in three points: 1 - Skull; 2 - Body size; 3 - Weight. The conclution was that in the skull department the Amur and Bengal tigers had skulls of the same size, in both hunting and scientific records. On the body size, the few body measurements of Amur tigers "in the flesh" showed that they were no larger than modern specimens, only difference was in the chest girth, which was massive in the old specimens. Finally, in the body mass, historic Amur tigers and historic/modern Bengals were the same, while modern Amur ones were lighter, based in the specimens captured by scientists.

However, there are some points that I will like to clarify:

1 -  Skull size:
Mazák biggest skull measured by him was of 383 mm for a male Amur tiger, while the biggest Bengal was of "just" 378 mm. However been honest the difference of 5 mm is nothing, if you see the massiveness of these animals. However, there are other 2 Bengal tiger skulls, measured by Zoologists, that reached 381 mm that were not measured by Mazák, the most important one is the record reported by no other than Dr Charles McDougal, which said that the biggest tiger skull from Nepal that he saw was of 15 inches (381 mm) in total length and 11 inches (279 mm) wide, which is wider than the biggest Amur tiger skull of Mazák with 268 mm. So, it seems that the biggest skulls for both populations are evenly matched. Sadly, Dr McDougal do not provided more measurements for comparison. The skulls of the Amur tigers, however, are more massive and I hypotetizised that is because of the prey that they hunted which is the very impresive wild boar of Russia, this is very appreciable in the skulls of the Caspian tigers and they big sagital crests. However, there is a new paper from this year that said that probably the massiveness is because of the climate and that a more powerfull bite is necesary to eat and cut the freezed meat of the prey killed in the area and not for any other particular reason. I will search the document for all of you. On the average figures, Mazák presented a bigger average for Amur tigers in the skull department, but this could be explained also by the sample size, which is less than that of the Bengal tiger and if you check the other samples that I presented, the average is the same with other specimens are included. So, overall, they have the same skull size, in both males and females.

2 & 3 - Body size and weight:
As I presented my new tables of 2023, you can compare the body sizes and check that they are practically the same. However, the only thing that change is the chest girth of the Amur tigers in modern time. For the Bengal tigers, they have the same size in old and modern records, with only difference that in old ones it was measured "between pegs" but they still reach the 190 cm in head-body for males, while in modern records is of 195-198 cm, a difference so small that suggest that modern scientist in India/Nepal, even when they measure "along the curves" they are not pressing the tape as the old hunters, but trying to follow a straight line, as Dr Sunquist explained. So, here is the table with the body measurements taken by scientists, for males and females. The figures used are just those published in scientific papers for a fair comparison and when the Bengals were measured more than once, I used the average of the figures, just like Kerley et al. (2005) do with the Amur ones. The average weights you already have it here in my two previous posts, so no need to explain further. Here we go:

*This image is copyright of its original author

As we can see, the body size is the same, the height is the same, just the girths the Bengal surpass the Amur ones, which of course affect the body mass. Is possible that modern Amur tigers weight more than 212 kg? Or course, if the habitat is good with good prey base. But until those measurements are published or confirmed, we can only guess. And even then, do not expect giants as the Amur tiger will be the same as the Bengal one, just that with the same body mass.

You may ask, why I did not make a comparative image? Well, I know that you like my images, but honestly it will be to put two tiger of exactly the same size, so there is nothing impresive to show.

Since the beggining, the intention of this topic is to clarify the issue about the Amur-Bengal tiger size and to show that both are, overall, of the same body size and weight. The claim that the Amur tiger was exceptional in size is incorrect, as the measurements shows otherwise. Currently the Bengal tigers are the heaviest tiger subspecies and the largest wild cat alive, but in the past the Amur tiger match it, but as the skin measurements from Russain reports and the claimed weights of 300 - 385 kg were accepted by many, this fact was ignored. Modern investigations shows the truth, and based in the few reliable old hunting records it seems that the conclution is the same. However, if after ALL this information, there is STILL someone that thinks that my data and my conclusions are not accurate, I think that the scientists have already answered the question, many years ago:
 
1. “Contrary to earlier perceptions, measurements obtained from tigers captured for radiotelemetry studies in the Indian subcontinent (Sunquist 1981; Karanth, unpubl. data) show that they are not smaller than tigers captured in the Russian Far East (Dale Miquelle and John Goodrich, unpubl. data).” K. Ullas Karanth, 2003.

*This image is copyright of its original author

 
2. “Surprisingly, while Siberian or Amur tigers have long been thought to be the largest of the subspecies, measurements of tigers from the Russian Far East show they are currently  no larger than the Bengal tigers of the Indian subcontinent [2] (D. Miquelle and J. Goodrich, unpublished data).” Melvin Sunquist, 2010.

*This image is copyright of its original author

 
3. “Despite repeated claims in popular literature that members of the Amur population are the largest of all tigers, our measurements on more than fifty captured individuals suggest that their body size is similar to that of Bengal tigers”. Dale Miquelle, 2004 (in Thapar, 2004).

*This image is copyright of its original author

 
4. “Siberian tigers are often considered the largest of the tiger sub-species, although they are in fact about the same size as the Bengal tiger.” WCS-Russia, 2012.
http://www.wcsrussia.org/Wildlife/AmurTi...fault.aspx

*This image is copyright of its original author

5. “However, recent data on tigers captured for telemetry studies in Nagarahole (India), Chitwan (Nepal) and in Sikhote-Alin (Russia) show that tigers from these three sites are all about the same size.” K. Ullas Karanth, 2003.

*This image is copyright of its original author

Now, if after all this information there is still people that resist to believe, I think that there is no worst blind that the one that do not want to see. 

Greetings to all. Reply