Personal Opinion & Speculations

[Matias]

Circunstances within overlaps can amount to multiple outcomes. If tigers were placed in savanna, bushveld, lowveld, or even the Okavango Delta environments, the implications for lions would be different, but certainly none would drive tigers to be social because they are competing with a predator of similar size. Such a scale of behavioral change would take at least hundreds of years as each generation builds some small, subtle, or barely perceptible new interactions. If proximity to the lion will make any changes to its evolutionary nature.


There is no way to predict tiger behavior, especially in the early years when its stress level will peak. From my point of view, it would be entirely rational to imagine that tigers would likely not take off in a landscape with a high density of lions. As well, I'm more concerned about the practical issues that will drive the tiger to stay in lion pride, such as adapting to the new range of prey, habitat, pathogens - and the entire ecological web. Predicting "social tigers" is a fantasy, but I think it is possible that, in a enormous and balanced habitat, the two species can coexist, and some ligers or tigon may also occasionally be seen in the landscape (there will always be lionesses that for "N" reasons live apart from proud flocks, and male lions encountering ovulating tigress).


Everyone can exercise their imagination. 


If it's worth imagining, having the jaguar in the Congolese forest or even in the forested savannas of Africa would be a very interesting point. More than tigers, jaguars would have more chances of a less traumatic adaptation - but it's all speculation! Reply