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behind the big cat's and bear's, who is the top predator?
behind the big cat's and bear's, who is the top predator?
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behind the big cat's and bear's, who is the top predator?
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 (03-16-2021, 05:24 AM)Styx38 Wrote: "So…why don’t mountain lions defend their kills from bears? On occasion, they do. In one case in California, a large female mountain lion was displaced by an average-sized female black bear from a deer kill. The lion abandoned the site for 24 hours, but then looped back to confront the bear. What we found when we visited the kill a week later were the remains of the deer and bear, side by side." Quote:Seems to be the same Bear, but confirmed as a sub-adult in an actual peer reviewed source. "Seems", so you don't know and are assuming, ok got it. Quote:1. Camels should at least be comparable to Guanacos. Bizarre comparison to say the least, I don't know where to begin with. Humans are fragile and can be killed by almost any committed livestock, showing cases of camels hurting humans to prove that leopards must be so extraordinary to kill them doesn't make those camels any more impressive. Killing livestock and killing a free raging animal are two very different things. In the first paper on camel predation in Kenya, it is stated very clearly that the camels were in dire condition and dehydrated;  *This image is copyright of its original author  *This image is copyright of its original author Not only were these camels suffering from accessing proper nutrients through quality food and water, but being domestic animals entails that they would have almost completely lost the anti-depredatory measures they would have learned in the wild to fend off potential predators, something their free-ranging counterparts (i.e. guanacos), now how to do very well. A smaller but more skilled guanaco that knows how to fight off a predator will forever be more impressive than an emaciated, domesticated camel. Quote:A smaller Big Cat won't fall down so easily like a man, but the kicking/stomping and biting from a belligerent 300-600 kg Ungulate is still going to be devastating. Which is something you don't know, they were physically weak and lacked the experience gathered in the wild to know to properly fend off predators. So far it looks like the leopards were smart and took advantage of an easy meal. Quote:2. So male Cougars, which are around 72 kg in Alberta with an 81 kg specimen kill 400+ kg animals like Feral Horse and a the Moose. They did make up <2% of the kills. So you read my last post on cougar predation in Alberta, good. You didn't mention that the 2% figure was only given for animals past 400 kg in weight (i.e. stallions and bull moose), there was another 12% that involved adult wild horses and moose smaller than that figure, but most certainly above 300 kg in weight. Quote:That is comparable to the two female Eland. The first chart you posted very clearly stated that the average weight for the eland killed by leopards was 267 kg, not 400 kg. Using random literature figures for eland body mass is completely irrelevant to the conversation when the leopards aren't tackling eland of that size class. By contrast, the study of predation by Albertan cougars does detail the weights of 400+ kg for prey items for cougars. Not the same. From the A Zooniverse Project Blog "Although life seems good in these juvenile gangs and generally eland are long lived, mortality can be high in youngsters. Whilst studying leopard in South Africa we found eland was a common prey item, in fact we discovered three kills within a month of eland less than six months old and those were just the ones we found. Lion and hyena are also known to take their toll. There is no real synchronised birthing in eland herds with young born at anytime. I guess this means there is always a slightly younger, less savvy, youngster in the crèche that is easy prey for predators." Leopard predation on eland overwhelmingly focuses on youngsters which is to be expected, with the occasional cow being killed sporadically. Quote:Speaking of killing large animals, a Leopard killed a Bull Eland around 500+ kg. This claim comes from the book Large Carnivores of the African Savannas  *This image is copyright of its original author While a curious tale, there is no physical evidence to corroborate that such kill actually took place. Just because something is included in a peer-reviewed document doesn't mean the entirety of its contents are reliable. For example, the vast majority of peer-reviewed papers quote the maximum size for jaguars as 158 kg and they base that off of a jaguar killed by Sasha Siemel who supposedly weighed that much, the problem is that we don't know if he actually weighed the jaguar or estimated the weighed, nonetheless its been quoted multiple times by the likes of Seymour on important papers. It's no different with this case. Bull eland are extremely large and dangerous game that can give trouble to prides of lions, if they truly were in the diets of leopards you would expect to see more cases of said predation documented, and yet it turns out that is not the case. It's curious that the only supposed case of a leopard killing one of the largest bovines in the world is narrated in a book as a story with no tangible evidence behind it. This claim of leopards killing bull eland is no different than the stories of cougars attacking adult bison. From Kenya once held some of the biggest lion populations in Africa, numbering over Twenty Thousand individuals in the early 1970s "For a lion to have a meal, it must stalk its prey stealthily, outrun them and pounce on them at the right time and the right places. On this occasion, this particular pride comprising four young adult males and more than seven females had successfully managed to kill an Eland. Elands are Africa’s largest antelopes; a full grown adult bull can weight anything between 400-900 kg’s. It was no easy job killing an Eland and this was demonstrated by the fact that one of the lead male Lion was left nursing a serious injury on its underbelly sustained from the sharp horns of the prey and the omentum was left hanging out. On assessment we concluded that a veterinary surgeon was urgently needed to stitch the wound and return some of the protruding organ back into place."  *This image is copyright of its original author  *This image is copyright of its original author  *This image is copyright of its original author I can assure you that no leopard in its right mind is messing with this:  *This image is copyright of its original author Quote:Leopards are also reported to kill Feral or Free-ranging Horses. I'm sure they do, although the ages are rarely given (only the first excerpt mentions one as an adult) and the sexes of the horses aren't given either to determine how big they could've truly been. We do have that data for cougars. Quote:Leopards also go for domestic animals. I never disputed that, domestic and free-ranging animals are two different ball games. One is more docile and lives in a confined environment where a predator can more easily subdue it, the other one is more aggressive and muscled, with natural instincts to defend itself against its natural adversaries. Quote:I am also convinced Leopards can take on the largest prey depending on the ecosystem or region. However, the Lion and Tigers take on prey like Gaur, Cape Buffalo, Giraffe and Rhinos. Leopards take on what they can take, gaur, buffalo, giraffe, and rhinos are far beyond the range of what a leopard can hunt. This is why adult buffaloes in places like Sri Lanka are never targeted by leopards despite the absence of tigers, and the supposed predation on banteng in South East Asia actually completely comes from scat sample and not registered kills, there is in fact no documentation of leopards killing adult banteng throughout their range. |
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