Battle of the big cats sees tiger hunt and devour a lynx

It’s a cat-eat-cat world. A tiger has been reported stalking, killing and feasting on a lynx in Russia’s far east – the first time a lethal encounter between the two animals has been documented.

In March 2014, Ivan Polkovnikov, a worker at Bastak Nature Reserve, spotted the lynx’s carcass surrounded by tiger tracks, imprinted in a thick layer of snow. Polkovnikov and his colleagues examined the lynx’s remains and retraced the tracks to piece together what happened.

Based on this the team have now published a description of how the deadly meeting of the carnivores unfolded.

An Amur tiger (Panthera tigris altaica) first followed the Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx) stealthily, occasionally hiding behind a tree and a mound of snow. The tiger then sped up and bounded after the lynx, which tried to escape – in vain.

The two animals rolled together in the snow for about 4 metres, before the tiger killed the lynx. It then dragged the carcass uphill and sampled some meat from the right back hip of its victim.

But it only ate a small portion of the carcass (see picture), which means it probably didn’t target the lynx as a source of food, says Dale Miquelle of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Russia programme, who co-authored a study on the attack.

Competing carnivore

Rather, the tiger would have killed the lynx to get rid of a competitor whose prey overlaps with its own. “They are basically programmed to kill other competitors,” says Miquelle. “We know that competing carnivores will do this kind of thing.”

John Goodrich at the big cat conservation organisation Panthera in New York agrees. “Carnivores will kill other carnivore species, and especially those that they compete with for food,” he says. Tigers have previously been reported to kill wolves.

Though the ranges of lynx and endangered tigers in Russia overlap, this is the first recorded case of predation between them, say the team.

Still, it doesn’t mean this is the only instance of this behaviour that has ever occurred. “I think this is happening more often than we think, but it is always difficult to confirm and document,” Miquelle says.

The new findings show us how wild animals really coexist, says Miquelle. “Things aren’t always peaceful and tranquil in the wild, and animals come into conflict and are battling over resources,” he says.