Bears of the Pleistocene

[GrizzlyClaws]

(01-23-2018, 11:45 AM)Spalea Wrote: @brotherbear @GrizzlyClaws :

Your accounts are fascinating for a quite layman like me: such a profusion of big predators !

I don't want to be out of sequence but, if I may so, I would like just to believe a little bit more about the prospects of the American lion's way of living: in groups or in small prides. Being faced to a very violent environment, probably very closes ties governed the members of the pride, and just imagine 5 or 6 American lions defending a kill. 5 or 6 predators weighing each 250 - 300 kilos amount to a 1500-1800 kilos meat eater, do they ? In this case, perhaps it should have been enough to keep victoriously the kill perhaps not against a big short faced bear, but otherwise, against any other opponent ?

With this hypothesis, I make an analogy with the current model in Africa: the spotted hyenas standing against a lioness around a kill. We indeed admit that from 4 the numbers of hyenas prevails.

American lions were the biggest brained felids of all time, perhaps they were able to sustain the intense competition between these North American large predators (not enough for finally surviving to the end of the Ice Age though, being entirely predator like the short faced bear they disappeared, as you told only the grizzly survived).

Imagine in the twilight of the Pleistocene era or the dawn of the Holocene era, the old ecosystems of the North America had just collapsed as most herbivorous megafaunas of the Pleistocene era were just gone. The SF bears and American lions were just few residual survivors that kept struggling for survival.

But even worse, they now have to face the competition from the two newly arrived species, human and grizzly bear. As the food source was becoming scarce in the early Holocene era, the conflict over the food would become pervasive in the daily life. I would say that the human could play an even bigger role for the extinction of the residual megafaunas than the grizzly bear.

Since there weren't enough room for everyone, so some species needed to be wiped out in order to vacate more living space for other more competitive species. Reply