The Java Tiger (Panthera tigris sondaica)

[GuateGojira]

(12-08-2014, 06:02 PM)'phatio' Wrote: Thank you very much Guate. Honestly this is beyond my expectations, you know it's so hard to find photos of an animal that officialy declared extinct.
about the size of the Bali tiger issue, well i have no idea that they can grow almost as big as their sumatran cousins.
But we don't know if that the normal size of the Bali tiger or  just one of the freak.
and due to the limited data (weight or skull measurements) and photos, we may never know the answer.
to me, based from all the available photos, i still believe that on average they are the smallest tigers ever lived.
Their smaller body size may have been caused by island dwarfing, you know... a condition when natural forces cause species to shrink in size over time in isolated locations, presumably because resources are severely limited. Remember that Bali is a small island with no large game available.

 

The problem with the Bali tiger is a little more deep. I have not read (yet) a study about the possible prey animals available for tigers in they days. We only know about Sumatra and Java, and in this comparison Java wins and by a lot. That is why contrary to popular perception, Javanese tigers were (or are) larger than those from Sumatra. Hopefully, new scientists like Kitchener and Yamaguchi are trying to change the "old" views perpetuated by V. Mazák.

On the size issue, its is true that we probably will never know the truth of its size, only 9 skulls are available and only 7 are adults, and the size of skins is not reliable. However, from the 4 pictures available, we know at least two large specimens and one small but very robust male.  This suggest that Balinese tigers were not so small as leopards, and probably more close to the size and weight of the Brazilian-Venezuelan jaguars, which are know to weight up to 130 kg empty belly and measure 170 cm in head-body (maximum skulls of about 310 mm).

Finally, I think that the smallest tiger population is probably between the Balinese tiger and the Sundarbans tiger, both of them reached the same weights (75 - 130 kg, smallest female and largest male), although early specimens in the last of these places were larger in the old days. However, while the Bali tiger probably evolved in this form do island dwarfism, the Sundarbans tiger suffer a lack of prey and poor habitat, although we don't know if the same happened with the Balinese tigers.

What most impress me is the fact that the small Javanese tiger could kill the huge banteng, reaching almost six times its weight. [img]images/smilies/biggrin.gif[/img]

Ps. For those that can say that jaguars in Brazil weigh up to 159 kg (350 lb). I manage to found the book "Tigrero" of Sasha Siemel, and is from here that this particular record came. However, I see no evidence to suggest that those jaguars were actually weighed. Even worst, the picture of that jaguar named "El Asesino" (the Assasin), show a short body jaguar and fully gorged. At this day, the heaviest male jaguar captured by scientists is a male of 148 kg, with no apparent stomach content, but this male was probably exceptional. De Almeida (1991) statates that a maximum weight of 130 kg (empty) is the most probable for modern Pantanal jaguars, the largest of all.
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