ON THE EDGE OF EXTINCTION - A - THE TIGER (Panthera tigris)

[GuateGojira]

(06-26-2014, 10:25 AM)'GrizzlyClaws' Wrote: Consider that the modern Sumatran tiger can have the dual ancestry, then i will also take that chance for the modern Amur tiger.

The only difference is that the Sumatran tiger is basically 50% mainland tiger + 50% island tiger.

However, the Amur tiger's ancestry might be predominantly dominated by the Caspian tiger lineage, most likely at least 90% Caspian tiger + 10% Wanhsien tiger.

We all know that when the Caspian-Amur population was thriving, the Wanhsien tiger was already on the verge of extinction.

The Caspian population that moved eastward might just absorb the remaining population, maybe breeding with their females. Since some Amur tigers do have clustered with the South Chinese/Indochinese population in term of the mtDNA. Maybe this could be the founder effect?

 

I think that at 72,000 years ago, the Wanshien tiger per se (Panthera tigris acutidens) was allready extinct, however, following our original theory, modern tigers are in fact, just modern and more evolved Wanhsien tigers, as there was not another genetic mix in mainland since the Toba eruption.

In this case, we can surely say that the modern tigers are just more evolved Wanhsien tigers, and the variations (Amur-Caspian, Bengal, South China and Indochina) are probably just geographical variations made by humans in modern times by habitat fragmentation or by the availability of prey.

For example, check that the Bengal, Amur and Caspian tigers, which lived in places with good prey base and that competed with other large predators, evolved in large forms and the three weighed between 240-260 kg at normal maximum weights and up to 320 kg in extreme cases. However, those that lived in "closed" jungles, like those of South China, Indochina and the Malayan peninsula, all weighed between 160-200 kg at maximum, but they were smaller just because the prey density in high forested areas is lower. However, Mazák's taxonomy is based in the habitat fragmented by humans, not from a natural differentiation. For example, there is much more differences between the Kaziranga and the Sundarbans tigers (both Bengal, by DNA) than between an Indian and a Indochina tiger. Just those of the extreme areas, like the Amur region and the Malayan peninsula, presents some special characteristics, but even they can be mixed, at simple eye, with other tiger populations in mainland.

The mix of mtDNA of Amur tigers with those of Indochina and South China is easely explained by the fact that all the modern mainland tigers descend from the last remaining population of Wanhsien tigers that lived in South China and North of Indochina region.
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