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Tiger Predation
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Sorry if these have been posted before, but 38 pages you know XD
Kaziranga  *This image is copyright of its original author  *This image is copyright of its original author  *This image is copyright of its original author  *This image is copyright of its original author Raja  *This image is copyright of its original author
Those Rhino were actually poached, the elephant was a kill by that Tiger though and same with the water buffalo. I have a few cool photos of that tiger with the water buffalo a few pages back. He's a monster!
I had forgot that tiger that killed the subadult elephant. It seems of the same size that the elephant killed by the lion, lonely, in southern Africa.
Interesting that the largest great cats can kill those young animals, that despite they sizes, are more afraid and less dangerous than a much smaller, but adult prey, like boars or wild cattle.  (11-04-2015, 10:08 PM)GuateGojira Wrote: I had forgot that tiger that killed the subadult elephant. It seems of the same size that the elephant killed by the lion, lonely, in southern Africa. Agree ! We cannot compare some adult bovids with jung elephants weighing the same weight or even more. They are much more difficult to hunt and kill. When we etablish the more biggest preys which could be killed by tigers and lions we have to consider the ages as concerns the elephants, rhinos and hippos... 
tigers ability to kill gaur's is beyond me, it's incredible that a tigeress can kill an adult bull gaur, any info on the gaur was it injured or something before the attack? did not look like it put up much of a fight, but maybe the tigers had tired the beast out long before the cameras where on place and the gaur was all empty and had given up. sure is amazing.
(11-04-2015, 09:51 PM)Pckts Wrote: Those Rhino were actually poached, the elephant was a kill by that Tiger though and same with the water buffalo. I have a few cool photos of that tiger with the water buffalo a few pages back. He's a monster! That's Raja for you! Bandipurs biggest, would love to see more of his gaur kills considering he's a specialist in them.
Which account @Pantherinae?
 (07-01-2015, 09:37 PM)Pckts Wrote: "Just when you think it is safe to be the World's largest wild cattle....think again!!" The amazing thing is that there is more and more evidence of grown Cubs helping mothers hunting large prey and some with courting couples. Are we seeing the formation of tiger prides to maximize access to resources? Evolution in action!!
Very well could be, there are accounts of this happening in the past though. I think the evolution of the safari and the technology that has come along with it have given us new big cat traits to view.
Contrary to common belief, tigers are not entirely solitary. There are several records in old literature that shows group of tigers, but contrary to what Sankahla believed, this doesn't mean that they are not territorials.
Tigers have a good plasticity about they territorial behavior. For example, when Schaller (1967) studied tigers in Kanha, he found that although male tigers were territorials, females overlapped very much except for some core areas. However, Sunquist (1981) stated that in latter years, with better care on the park, Panwar found that tigresses in Kanha no longer overlapped but had very well defined territories and had a behavior just like that of the females in Nepal. Other great case is that of the males that "share" areas. In fact, this is incorrect and is proved in Nepal. During the studies of Sunquist, he found that the large male M-105 shared some time with its son T-104, and although there were not exactly "together", they were sometimes at less than 100 meters. Fiona Sunquist stated that this is the reason why some old hunters (included Sankhala) believed that tigers were not territorials, but without knowing the real social (and familiar) relation between the tigers, such incorrect interpretations continued until now. The largest tiger group recorded in modern days was of 9 specimens, with adult females, one adult male and cubs, but all were related according with Valmik Thapar, which saw the entire account. In Nepal and Panna, it is proved that female tigers share part of they territory to her daughters, which create clusters of related females. This is, in a form, like a large dispersed pride of tigresses that avoid conflict and even can share a kill, even more peacefully than between a lion pride! Of course, this doesn't mean that conflict don't arise, as there are well know cases of young tigers debunking they own mothers for the territory. Tigers have the same capacity of been as social as lions, but they habitat did not help to create this form of life, this was very well explained by Sunquist (1981) and the recent study of cephalization of Yamaguchi et al. (2009) suggest that the social life of tigers could demand more intelligence to "remember" old familiars or the ways of its own territory. The social life of the tiger is very complicated and deep, and the new studies, like radio-collared animals and camera traps, are helping us to found what is a "real" tiger, not the mythical animals but the flesh and blood been that even at 2015, has more secrets for us. (11-07-2015, 12:34 AM)GuateGojira Wrote: Contrary to common belief, tigers are not entirely solitary. There are several records in old literature that shows group of tigers, but contrary to what Sankahla believed, this doesn't mean that they are not territorials. Tigers are capable of social behaviour much more than other solitary cats, after the lion prides, the male cheetah coalitions, and the domestic cat sisterhoods, the tiger family units are the fourth strongest social Felid association . As a teenager I worked with captive lions and tigers raised together and they all behaved as if they were one species and members of the same group which I found remarkable...lions treated tigers like they treated other lions and tigers vice versa. Tigers remain territorial and hostile toward unrelated Tigers of course, but they exhibit more social behaviour than leopards, Pumas, or jaguars for example. Who knows...if Asia had massive plains away from human encroachment that could contain hundreds of thousands or even millions of large bovids ( like Cape Buffalo in Africa ) could we have seen prices of tigers to maximize the utilization of such food source, communal defence of cubs, and keeping enemies away? Interesting assumption. But Asia always had massive human density it its southern and eastern regions and its population of gaur,banteng, and water buffalo is just a fraction of that of Cape buffalo. As you said Guate the cryptic and timid nature of tigers, their nocturnal behaviour and their preference for dense vegetation habitat made much of their ecology and behaviour unknown to us and what we learned about them in the past few decades is amazing.
Male Tigers killing bull gaur's in Kanha
 *This image is copyright of its original author  *This image is copyright of its original author Unidentified male tiger on large bull *This image is copyright of its original author  *This image is copyright of its original author  *This image is copyright of its original author Munna on a large bull *This image is copyright of its original author Pattewala on gaur, not sure if this is a bull
(11-05-2015, 12:58 AM)Spalea Wrote:(11-04-2015, 10:08 PM)GuateGojira Wrote: I had forgot that tiger that killed the subadult elephant. It seems of the same size that the elephant killed by the lion, lonely, in southern Africa. Young elephant reach 600 kg by age 2 and some exceed 1000 kg by age three and by the time their tusks erupt around four years of age they are larger than any other terrestrial mammal except other elephants, their skin is thicker than any other mammal and a killing throat bite is very difficult to obtain, killing them is an enormous task and the presumed ease on how some lions kill them from documentaries is misleading ..the kill is taking much much longer than four minutes and is usually done by expert elephant hunting prides in Botswana and Zimbabwe other than that all predation on African elephants by lions and Asian elephants by tigers is anecdotal and occasional, I could only find four scientifically verified accounts on tiger predation on elephant calves and very little details on the age and condition of the victim. 
I agree with Dr. Panthera, even a young elephant is an massive task to cope with. About one year back, i saw a documentary about lion's and buffalo's on the french/german channel "arte", where it was shown how difficult it is to kill even a young elephant. It showed a sequence where the lion pride, which was used to hunt buffalo's most of the time, was forced to switch to elephant's for a short time because the buffalo herd moved to the area of a neighbouring pride. They managed to take down a young elephant of about 5 years, but they couldn't kill him with a throat bite because of the thick skin. After some time of trying, the lion's decided to eat the elephant alive. The narrator commented also that the featured lion pride had no experience in hunting elephants before. I forgot the location, but i think it was Okavango Delta...
Everyone who had the oppurtunity to touch a elephant will most likely agree, that some (if not even the most) parts of the body feel almost like massive cement! However, i wouldn't say that (young) elephant's are tougher prey as buffalo's or vice versa. Even if i agree that young elephants are a massive "meat wall" which is harder to kill than bovine's on one hand (due to the reason mentioned), but on the other bovine's are for sure more capable to kill their potential attacker's than juvenile elephant's. I could imagine that the the claims.... harder to kill -> subadult elephant higher chances to get killed -> (adult) bovine's ...fit very good to this question. Killing an adult elephant should be therefore almost impossible for a single predator with no support of a pride. Anyway, i wouldn't dismiss Jim Corbett's report's of tiger's killing adult tusker's as fictional tale's. The long lasting fights where tiger's and elephant's are said to fight the whole night with each other, could be exaggerated, but still could be based on a true happening. It all depends on the way it occured in my opinon. Fighting violently the whole night in a brave face to face combat is of course unlikely...but tiger's for sure have an advantage at night over most of their potential prey. Therefore it isn't fictional at all, if a tiger is capable to deliver heavy wounds, while at the same time he is able to dodge the majority of the elephant's attacks. And if the tiger attacked in intervall's with break's during the fight -like attacking the elephant once, deliver a deep wound, retreat for a couple of time and repeat it the whole night- chances are high that there is a badly injured elephant the next morning. If not even dead... That would of course require much skill and experience, but Raja already showed what is possible if a tiger possesesses both... |
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