There is a world somewhere between reality and fiction. Although ignored by many, it is very real and so are those living in it. This forum is about the natural world. Here, wild animals will be heard and respected. The forum offers a glimpse into an unknown world as well as a room with a view on the present and the future. Anyone able to speak on behalf of those living in the emerald forest and the deep blue sea is invited to join.
(03-30-2022, 03:44 AM)LandSeaLion Wrote: The note that LoveAnimals included indicates that it was an intentional choice by whoever wrote those down, not really an error. It looks like they wanted to see how recent weights reported in various parks compare with the large Smuts dataset (Smuts being the standard accepted as reliable in many scientific publications).
Of course, gathering examples together from multiple small samples has many caveats compared to a big sample directly weighed by one team of scientists, because unlike in the latter case there’s no consistent standardisation - you don’t know if the people reporting the data followed the same procedures, whether they had the same quality of scales, and so on…
(That said, that overall range isn’t really anything out of the ordinary - males do tend to range between 170-250kg, with some exceptions on either side. The biggest difference is that it is skewed to the right - published samples tend to be skewed more to the left, averaging at about 190kg.)
Normally I am agree with you, but not this time, not entirely. There are errors, but I suspect that are intencional, there are incorrect values included, estimations and young specimens included just because they are big.
Like I say, I will provide an analisys about this information and will also provide more information about who made these calculations.