Lions and tigers are inter-fertile, and their pairing in captivity produces a liger. The historical ranges of lions and tigers appear to have overlapped in parts of what is today Pakistan and India.
So I’m wondering why they never interbred in the wild. I know they have different ‘cutlures’, the lion being a cursorial hunter of the plains, while the tiger most often is an ambush hunter of the forests, but would that keep wild animals from breeding?
It should read “wild asian ligers”, not “Wild asian igers”
Thank you.
A female tiger in heat roars to attract a male, and can be extremely hostile to other critters (and not especially gentle even to the male tiger). Male tigers are attracted by the right kind of roar, and are prepared to fight rivals.
So there would be some serious hurdles to the odd male lion that happened to be in the vicinity.
It probably could have happened but animals like to keep to their own kind. They have had a few reports of things like Polar Bears and Grizzlies mating in the wild, but that is very rare
They are not only ecologically different, they have quite different social systems. Lions live in prides dominated by one or more males, while tigers are solitary. In lions, females mate mainly with the dominant males in prides. While females are capable of living solitarily, they are probably not going to do as well or raise cubs as successfully as members of a pride. Since a male tiger is never going to be a pride leader, he will have limited opportunity to sire cubs with a lioness.
There are no doubt other behavioral differences in courtship behavior that would limit interbreeding in the wild, though offhand I am not familiar with them.
While ligers and tigons, especially females, are not completely sterile, they are not a fertile as the parental species. Therefore any lion or tiger that was receptive to mating with the other species would on average have fewer offspring than one that only bred with its own kind, and hence would be selected against. It is this kind of selection that probably causes the evolution of behavioral barriers to mating between species.
Ligers and tigons may have been produced occasionally in the wild when lions were more common in Asia, but mainly in circumstances where the parents were otherwise unable to find a mate of their own species (as is the case in captive-bred hybrids).
Interbreeding between different species isn’t particularly rare in the wild. The statement that “animals like to keep to their own kind” is not factually correct. The concept of a “species” is something we impose on nature, and nature is not so black and white as we like to think it is.
Did anyone else expect to see this when they clicked on the ‘liger’ link in the OP?
I considered linking to that one but decided to go for the real animal instead.
If everything here and here is to be believed, there appears to have been some hybirds of large cats appearing in the wild. According to Wikipedia there have been leopard x tiger hybrids occur in the wild in india:
But nothing to indicate that ligers occured in nature.
They’re pretty much my favorite animal.
