Personal Opinion & Speculations

[GuateGojira]

(10-05-2021, 02:20 AM)LandSeaLion Wrote: To thrive in Africa and stand a chance against prides of lions or large clans of hyenas, tigers would have to transition to being a social animal. Their fondness for water would also be a great weakness, so they would have to become largely water-avoidant. In short…they would essentially have to adapt to become like lions. 

This statment shows how marvelous is nature and I am fully agree with it. Basically, if you have a "X" big cat, and you put it in close habitat with large but low density prey, abundant water and few competitors, you will get the solitary tiger. But if you put the same "X" big cat in an open habitat with large high density prey, few water and plenty of social competitors, you will get the social lion. Nature is about adaptations, and like LandSeaLion says, the tiger in Africa will need to became a "lion" to survive, because that is what nature have done with the original "X" big cat. And we saw that in the Indian lion, they are not as social as African lions, they live in small prides with relatively low density prey (that is why they are habitual domestic cattle killers) and they avoid the close areas of the Indian subcontinent. How knows what would happen to lions in India in a couple of millions years (without humans of course), after all we saw it with the cave "lion-like" felids of the Pleistocene, they trive from Europe to North America thanks to the open sabana-like habitat and giant prey, but when climate changed and forest arise, they could not adapt and got exting in all the planet! Reply