“The Domineering President” Contracts the Forest: What is the weapon of the biggest orange cat?

Tiger! Tiger! In the dark forest

The bright flames burning,

What kind of divine hand or divine eye is this?

Created a majestic figure like you?

William Blake, The Tiger, translated by Guo Moruo

Aside from pandas, big cats are probably the animals with the largest fan base (what? Lingna Belle?). The “lion-tiger fight” is a perennial topic. We are so fascinated by tigers because of their awe-inspiring physical abilities, which are inextricably linked to their adaptation to hunting large prey.

Awooo! | Pixabay

Is the cat a smaller tiger?

First of all, I want to make one thing clear. Although cats are the kings of poop-scoopers, they are not smaller versions of tigers. Cats are adapted to hunting small prey. Wild domestic cats rarely catch adult brown rats (usually no more than one pound). Although large rats are smaller than cats, they are already too big for cats. Tigers, as members of the Pantherinae subfamily, are highly adapted to hunting large herbivores. They can kill animals as large as themselves or even several times larger than themselves, such as adult white-lipped wild cattle, Bos gaurus.

Top: A male tiger feeding on a white-lipped buffalo. Bottom: A female tiger and her cubs feeding on a Javan buffalo, Bos javanicus | Supawat Khaewphakdee et al. / Ecology and Evolution (2020)

The tiger's bite force is the strongest among cats, second only to polar bears among terrestrial carnivores. However, simply having a strong bite force is not enough to explain how ferocious an animal's hunting ability is. Large animals naturally have a stronger bite force. So scientists invented the bite force quotient (BFQ), which introduces the weight of the animal. The bite force quotient is directly proportional to the absolute bite force and inversely proportional to the weight of the animal. Predators that hunt animals larger than themselves, such as tigers, generally have a bite force quotient of more than 100, while predators that hunt animals smaller than themselves, such as the European wildcat Felis sylvestris, generally have a bite force quotient of less than 100.

Domestic cats focus on catching small prey | pxhere

But it is not the case that the stronger the predator, the higher the bite force quotient. Canines that hunt large animals have a higher bite force quotient than cats that hunt large animals. Although the absolute bite force of tigers is stronger than that of wolves, the tiger's body is also larger than that of wolves. The terrestrial carnivorous animal with the highest bite force quotient is the bush dog Speothos venaticus, which weighs only 5 kilograms. In addition, cats do not rely solely on their mouths, but also use their forelimbs to control their prey.

How the Tiger Captured Wu Song

The saying that a tiger can only “jump, lift, and cut” to catch a person is fiction. Lifting the back hips and sweeping with the tail are not the hunting behaviors of tigers. The tiger’s weapons are teeth, front claws, and weight. According to a paper published by John Seidensticker and Charles McDougal in 1993, they observed tigers hunting in Chitwan National Park in Nepal and divided the tiger’s actions into seven categories:

Seizing the throat: As the title suggests, seizing the throat until the prey falls.

Pulling backward with throat bite: Grasping the prey's throat and pulling backward to bring it down.

Seizing throat with forepaw assist: As the title suggests, the prey is biting the throat all the time while using the forepaw to help hold it down.

The tiger wraps its front paws around the gaur's neck and bites its throat | NaturesKings / youtube

Upon back: If the prey is running away, or the tiger is approaching from behind, the tiger will first grab the prey's hindquarters with its front legs, or press on the prey, then climb up and bite the throat. Finally, the tiger slides down the prey's back while biting, thus pulling the prey down. The position of the bite may change midway, and sometimes it is necessary to change positions when biting the front of the body or the back, which are not life-threatening places.

Pulling back: The tiger first bites and holds the prey with its front paws, uses its own weight to pull the prey down, and then changes its mouth to bite the throat to kill it.

Seizing with forepaw and biting nape: First grab the prey with the front paws, then bite the nape to kill it.

Illustration of a tiger attacking a buffalo, from Brehm's Life of animals | Biodiversity Heritage Library

Blow from forepaw: To blow the prey with the forepaw like a human, then bite the throat or nape of the neck.

Seizing nape: Seizing the nape by biting the back of the neck and using the prey's own weight to crush it.

Tigers have a high degree of flexibility in their movements, and their "moves" can be arranged and combined to deal with different situations and prey.

The overbearing president who contracted the forest

The tiger's canine teeth are the longest among all living cats. The lion's canine teeth are relatively thick and short, while the tiger's canine teeth are more curved and long. Tiger teeth are often compared to swords and guns, but teeth are made of brittle calcium salts rather than tough steel from their evolutionary origins, and this cannot be changed. Therefore, large carnivores are always at risk of canine tooth fracture (the author's dog was given a pig bone as a gift, and it got too excited and broke one of its canine teeth...).

The larger the prey, the greater the risk of canine fracture. Lions have therefore adopted the path of thicker and shorter canines, which is beneficial for hunting large animals in open grassland environments, but tigers have retained longer canines. When hunting small prey, the long canines can directly penetrate the back of the neck and damage the cervical vertebrae and spinal cord. If hunting large prey, such as adult gaur or buffalo, tigers will choose to bite the throat, clamping the throat tightly with the upper and lower jaws to suffocate the animal, so as not to break the canines. In addition, the necks of large animals are too thick, and the canines are not long enough.

Wait patiently for it to suffocate to death... | NaturesKings / youtube

Although panthers carefully protect their canines, they will bite the skull hard in an emergency to kill quickly. Jaguars sometimes bite the back of the alligator's head and directly insert their canine teeth into the brain stem to kill their prey. Mitsuaki Iwagō, a Japanese wildlife photographer, filmed a fight between two male lions in the 1980s, with one lion biting the other's skull to pieces.

By the way, as the largest tiger subspecies, the Siberian tiger also has the largest territory. The territory of a tiger can reach 400 square kilometers, which is larger than the land area of ​​the Maldives. With such a huge real estate, shouldn't Fat Tiger be called "King"?

Hum (Arrogance) | Pixabay

Author: Red Queen

This article comes from the Species Calendar, welcome to forward

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