African Leopards

[Jimmy]

(01-29-2019, 06:41 PM)Sanju Wrote: @Jimmy 
In south India, Tigers mostly eat, Chital, Muntjac, Blackbuck and wild boar not always sambar, water buffaloes but they are pretty good sized tigers still. So, if they don't hunt big prey that doesn't mean they should be small. The article is of BBC. 

It is because of absence of Competition for thousands of years in the island made their prey availability ample and some of them became Giants like Ivan. It can be due to Island gigantism in which the size of an animal isolated on an island increases dramatically in comparison to its mainland relatives. Island gigantism is one aspect of the more general "island effect" or "Foster's rule", which posits that when mainland animals colonize islands, small species tend to evolve larger bodies, and large species tend to evolve smaller bodies.

So this meso predator is the apex predator of that ecosystem niche.

*This image is copyright of its original author

The large Haast's eagle and moa from New Zealand (both extinct)

Yeah that's what it is, like South Indian tigers are average bengal tigers let's say, Now you can clearly see with kaziranga tigers they are very robust and big headed, their proportions are somewhat different but with leopards of Srilanka and from mainland it is not so different overall, Srilanka ones are big yes I understand that, but he mentioned things like more muscular, larger jaws etc which i dont see. it is fine, it's not so much bothersome but I felt sometimes the reporter or photographers says things just for the sake of saying. For eg srolankan leopards might just be big and lanky or have the same relative proportions as mainland but larger overall, but I don't think they are noticebly with more bigger jaws and stuffs, they look very similar to a mainland one but of course bigger version. That is what I meant to say.

Thanks btw, I know about island dwarfism and stuffs but I was just pointing solely towards the BBC description of a srilankan leopard. Nothing serious just free thoughts on my part! ; Reply