he says that whenever a wolf pack and an equivalent number of Siberian Tigers fight for dominance in an ecosystem, the Siberian Tiger always wins.
I told him that this made no sense. If this was the case why are there still many thousands of wolves in the world, whereas there are only a few remnant Siberian tigers.
I told that if this was the case, then Siberian Tigers would have spread into Eastern or Western Europe a long time ago.
Which of us is right?
When competing for status and hierarchy, who will win a Siberian Tiger or a Wolf?
Money rides on this.
I don’t see any reason to believe it isn’t a classic false dichotomy. Lions share their territory with wild dog packs. So do pumas. There is no reason to believe this an either/or situation, or that they would ever fight. Compete, sure. I can only imagine that fighting would be limited to stealing one another’s kills.
“If this was the case why are there still many thousands of wolves in the world, whereas there are only a few remnant Siberian tigers.”
Because wolves breed faster, are better able to hide and most importantly don’t make good rugs. People hunted wolves to remove competition. Outside settled areas people mostly left them alone. Hunters travelled across the world to kill tigers. Poachers still go looking for them. Very few people ever went looking for wolves.
“I told that if this was the case, then Siberian Tigers would have spread into Eastern or Western Europe a long time ago.”
There are all sorts of reasons that this might not occur. Firstly is a lack of the forest cover tigers need. The next is that tigers are restricted to areas without people. Europe has been well settled for a long time. Lots of hunter, not much game. Then we have climatic requirements. Animals don’t just live wherever they can get to. You’d really have to know the pre-historic range of tigers to know how much sense this makes.
IANAB, but I’m inclined to think that a given area can support more wolves than tigers. Tigers have very large individual territories, larger than wolves I’d bet.
Almost certainly the idea of fighting is out to lunch. 1 on 1, I’d bet on the tiger too, but ten tigers aren’t going to stick together vs. ten wolves, they’re going to be smart and run. (And I don’t think they’re going to ever see each other anyway, unless you organize a cage match.)
Basically, I don’t think the existance or absence of wolves has much bearing on tiger population. IMHO, tigers stay in their range for totally un-wolfy reasons.
Tigers and wolves have co-existed in Asia for millenia and in India today it is likely there are more tigers than wolves ( which isn’t saying much, both are in bad shape there ).
Blake has already provided the answer. The relative abundance of one vs. the other has next to nothing to do with compeition between them, but rather with different ecologies and the impact of man. Roughly speaking wolves are better at surviving in remote wastelands, whereas tigers everywhere seem to be tied to heavy forest cover ( unlike wolves, they’re ambush predators that need very big game for that big body ). Also as very large solitary animals with very large ranges, tigers are probably much more vulnerable to disruptions of the breeding cycle than wolves, which due to their gregarious nature will not have as hard a time recovering from an overall drop in population density ( i.e. kill ten wolves and a few pack members may still survive to breed - kill ten tigers and male and female ranges may no longer overlap for them to come in contact in breeding season, locally dooming the next generation ).