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

[GuateGojira]

Update: capture numbers and table of Smith et al., 1983.

Sorry for the contant change, but I made some updates in the table of the description of the 26 tigers of Chitwan NP. This is based in that fact that I made a comparision with the number of captures that I found and those of the tiger of Smith et al., (1983). This is the original table:

*This image is copyright of its original author

Here we can see the number of the sample and I found that actually the number of the subadult females and subadult males do not represent recaptures but the real number of animals captured. Check this:

Cubs: Table says "7" but we only know one (F103 with 52 kg).
All those need to be taken as "recaptures". I will explain that latter in the table.

Subadult females: table says "4", specimens captured is also four (103, 111, 118 and 122).
* Based in the figures we can reconstruct the four weights of that sample: 98, 114, 143 and 145.
* From these we know that F103 weighed 114 kg at 18 months old. The other three weights belong to the other three females, but we don't know which belong to who, so I will leave it like that.
* The figures in the table are especific weights, not number of captures.

Subadult males: table says "12", specimens captures is also 12 (104, 110, 112, 114, 116, 117, 119, 120, 121, 123, 124 and 125). 
* We only know the especific weight of one of them: M104 with 159 kg. We don't know the weight of the others but I speculate that the highest weight (216 kg) is probably of the oldest of them M123.
* None of them was captured as adult before 1980, and if one of them was captured after 1980 as adult, is not included in the table.
* The figures in the table are especific weights, not number of captures.

Adult males: table says "7", but we know that only three were captured before 1980 (102, 105 and 126).
* We speculate that M105 (Sauraha male) was captured 4 times. M126 was captured also 2 times, but only once before 1980, so we can conclude that from 3 males we know 6 captures and we hypotesize, based on facts, that male M105 was captured one more time between 1976 and 1979.
* The figures in the table are number of captures, not especific weights.

Adult females: table says "19", but we know that there were only seven original females (101, 106, 107, 108, 109, 113 and 115) and the other four subadults females were surelly captured latter as adults (103, 111, 118 and 122). So is a total of 11 adult females. 
* However, on the last four females, we need to see that those animales were probably not entirely "adults". In fact if we see the description of Tamang (1982) in page 64, he says that F103 was clasified as "adult" when she had only 30 months old, which is about 2.5 years, which is less than the "over 3 years old" = "over 36 months old" normally used to clasify a tiger as an "adult". This means that the figure of "140 kg" as an average in Smith et al. (1983) is an underestimation because of the inclusion of specimens not yet "adults".
* Knowing the number of real captures of the adult females 101 (3) -106 (2) -107 (2) - 108 (1) -109 (1) and tigerss 103 as "adult", we have a number of captures of 10. Latter I can say that I am sure that the other three subadult females 111-118-122 were captured as adults (specially F118 which was weighed as adult after been euthanized). So we have 10 known captures plus the other 3 captures of the "new" tigresses as adults, we have a figure of 13 known captures. Let's add the females 113-115 which were captured at least once, we have a total of 15 known captures. So, where are the other 4 captures? We can only speculate but certainly it seems that the original females, especifically 109-113-115 and 103, were captured at least one more time, giving a total of 19 captures.
* The figures in the table are number of captures, not especific weights.

So, using only known animales, with the biggest weight known, the table should be like this:

*This image is copyright of its original author

* This use only the original weights, not adjusted.
* Also we use only use the known weights of the females (5 females of the original 7) which ignore the weights of the adult females 113-115 and includes the weights of the "new" adults females 103-118. 
* The section of the males use the figure of "261 kg" for the males M105 and M126. Using the real weights of" 272 kg+" for these large males the average for the males is of 237 kg.
* The sample of males says "4", but is because it includes the male "Banga Bhale", so that is why the total gives 27 instead of 26.
* Cubs should be taken as recaptures, as those 7 animales were 100% surelly weighed latter as subadults. However we only know F103 of that sample.


I think that, for the moment, this sumarize the information about body mass of the tigers in Chitwan NP, captured from 1973 to 1980, plus two males captures in or before 1984. This is the update of the table in post 430:

*This image is copyright of its original author

Erase the old one, keep this new one. I did not updated it in the post 430 because as I infer that the reader will know how the investigation had evolved until now and will need to read all my post to get the idea.


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