Tiger Predation

[Spalea]

@Apex Titan :

I'm not allowed to participate at the "On the edge of extinction" tiger thread (Why ? Only booked to the eminent specialists of the forum, I imagine...), thus I'm answering you here through the John Goodrich's text whose the link was given by @Pckts at #2609. ..

In order to be truly objective you can also quote this part of the text:

" There were numerous reports of tigers preying on both brown bears and Asiatic black bears, but the relationship, it seems, was not that simple; there were also reports of bears killing tigers. As the years progressed and we tracked both bears and tigers, the picture of a complex relationship emerged. The largest brown bears — and we recorded bears with weights up to 800 lbs in the area — would usurp kills from tigers and even track them from kill to kill (meeting those bears when searching for tiger kills is another story for another day!). In one case, tracks in the snow told the story of a tigress and bear reluctantly sharing a red deer the tigress had killed. The tracks suggested some bluffing and blustering on the part of both species, but no actual fighting. Rather, it seemed when the tiger had eaten its fill for the day, the bear was able to scare it off, but when the tigress returned hungry and the bear’s stomach was full, the bear would yield to the cat. Once, my colleague Ivan came home from tracking a tigress and told the story of how it spent the better part of a day trying unsuccessfully to pull a black bear with cubs from her winter den.  "

I just deduct that Amur tiger is the doubtless apex predator of the taiga, being even able to kill a large brown bear which on the other hand are able to steal a tigress's prey. Thus not a 100% completely one-sided fight outcome...

More interesting, I think, is the upheaval among the predators of this biotop provoked by the tiger population recovering its ancient level. That confirming this undeniable tiger's status. Reply