Tigers of North-Eastern India

[peter]

PARVEZ

Good posts, especially those on landscapes and genes. The post on genes has very interesting info about tigers in northeastern India. I asked the mods to move a copy of that post to the tiger extinction thread.

As to the post on genes. In many ways, northeastern India is a crossroads. It's close to the Himalayas, Bengal, southwestern China and Burma (Myanmar). My guess is all of these regions produced different tigers. When they met in northeastern India, a new type could have been the result. One would, however, expect to find (traces of) the original types as well.    

Based on what I have, I would distinguish between 3 local types (the Himalayas, the alluvial floodplains and tigers from the hilly southeast). Almost a century ago, males in the extreme southeast of Assam (Naga Hills) averaged 8.7 'between pegs' in total length. Only one of them exceeded 9 feet. The 2 males weighed, if correct, ranged between 340-355 pounds roughly. Hill tigers, they were. Male tigers from the floodplains, about half a feet longer, were among the heaviest weighed in that period (461 pounds). The mountain tigers in the extreme northwest could be different from both. My guess is they were larger. 

I've always been interested in the tigers ranging between the extreme southwest of China and the extreme northeast of Assam. Most biologists decided western China tigers belonged to Panthera tigris amoyensis, but there are reasons for doubt. Same story for Indochinese tigers.

Both regions (southern and central China and all of Indochina) are too large and too different for one tiger subspecies. If you decide for subspecies, you got to do it right and collect as much information as possible in order to refine the proposal of Pocock on 8 tiger subspecies. If you don't, chances are the proposal will disintegrate sooner or later. If you decide for one tiger subspecies for all of mainland Asia, like Kitchener proposed, you will lose a lot of details. Managers wouldn't mind, but those interested in details would.

Maybe we need a few good maps of Assam in order to understand the summary of the article in post 25. See what you can do. Reply