Amur Tigers

[Apex Titan]

(11-01-2023, 04:02 AM)GuateGojira Wrote:

(10-30-2023, 07:46 PM)Apex Titan Wrote: Why wasn't the Himalayan black bear included in this chart? The Himalayan (Ussuri black) bear is classified as a 'large predator' too. It is the 3rd largest predator after the tiger and brown bear.

Brown bears don't pose any "serious competition" to tigers for resources because the vast majority of their diet is plant-based, they rarely or occasionally hunt. Brown bears only serve as commensal animals (mostly scavenging on left-over tiger kills) and a prey item of tigers. 

And the specific subspecies of wolf that's native to the Ussuri region is the Mongolian grey wolf, not the Himalayan/Tibetan wolf. The latter subspecies is not found in the Amur-Ussuri regions of Russia, but is from the Himalayan range, Tibetan Plateau and the mountains of Central Asia. Although the Mongolian grey wolf and Himalayan wolf are genetically the same wolf, they are recognized as a different subspecies.

Map showing the range of the Mongolian wolf (blue) and the Himalayan wolf (pink) in China and surrounding countries:

*This image is copyright of its original author

*This image is copyright of its original author

* Why wasn't the Himalayan black bear included in this chart?
Too few measurements. So I decided to focus in all the felids in the area and left the two largest non-felids predators.

* Brown bears don't pose any "serious competition" to tigers?
Bears steal some tiger's prey, so they are a serious competition, specialy if they can kill it too.

* About the subspecies of wolf:
Depending of the source, people clasify the wolf popultions in different subspecies and they location vary. 

Gibson (1999) clasified all the wolves of the area as Eurasian wolves and separet them from the Eurasian tundra wolf, although she did not use any specific name for the population in her book. 

*This image is copyright of its original author

In Wikipedia (which is popularly used) they shared several  maps, conflictive information on them:

*This image is copyright of its original author

*This image is copyright of its original author

But in the article of subspecies of wolves, for the Ussuri region they are clasified as C. l. chanco:

*This image is copyright of its original author

Check that the scientific name used by Heptner et al. (1998), which is C. l. tschiliensis, is sinonimized with C. l. chanco too:

*This image is copyright of its original author

Finally, Castelló (2018) include the wolves of this area with C. l. chanco:

*This image is copyright of its original author

There you go.....

You don't know what "serious competition" means. Brown bears only to a certain extent can pose some competition to tigers, but this is mostly done by scavenging the tigers left-overs. Research and studies show that even large adult male brown bears rarely contest a tigress for her kill. In the vast majority of cases, even a big male brown bear will wait for the tigress to finish eating, leave the vicinity, then he'll move in and scavenges or "steals" the kill. This is not serious competition, even small predators scavenge kills from much larger predators.

Add to this fact, that there's not a single case in the last 30 years of a brown bear killing even a little tiger cub. Like I said before, brown bears serve as commensal animals and are a prey item of the tiger. So they very clearly pose no serious competition.

The only predator that could have posed some serious competition to the Amur tiger for prey is wolves, especially large packs. But wolves highly fear tigers and flee to other regions to avoid decimation by tigers.

Amur tigers have no serious competitors at all and they hunt, kill and eat all other predators of the taiga.

And as we see here, even adult brown bears will run away from a tigress:

Reply