Pantanal Jaguar vs African Bushpig

[Bolushi]

vs

[Bolushi]

I'd say 50/50 assuming 2 dominant males. And hopefully the board wakes up. Has been pretty dead for the past 24 hours or so.

[Deleted]

They're similar in size so the Jaguar wins.

[Bolushi]

Jun 28, 2023 9:20:54 GMT @ling said:

They're similar in size so the Jaguar wins.

That's why the jaguar doesn't win... tossup at equal weights.
What we need to work out is which is bigger, on average, for males. Bushpig boars can be 330lbs.
You don't know hogs so I'll point this out- a bushpig and red river hog are different. A red river hog could also trounce a jaguar but it would be pushing a 70lb weight disadvantage here and lose.

[Hardcastle]

From what I've heard the bushpig is basically perfectly analogous to a wild boar. What I would call the "normal" sub-species. So not like Carpathian and Ussuri boars which can regularly attain weights over 550 lbs/250 kg, nor like mediterranean or indonesian boars which are often only around 150 lbs/70 kgs full grown. More like central european or Indian boars (and most feral hogs) where the typical max size for a very big male is around 150 kgs/330 lbs.

The bushpig is the same size and by all accounts extremely similar insofar as how formidable an adversary it is for a quadrupedal predator.

Jaguars are certainly well equipped to prey on wild boar, and do engage in doing so through much of their range. However it has been noted that they are usually still pretty selective with which individuals they target, and doubts have been raised if they realistically target the large adult males over 100 kgs. This article seems to suggest they'd even prefer to target cattle.

Although jaguars are known to prey on feral pigs in Pantanal (Cavalcanti & Gese, 2010), we are skeptical that the jaguar's population size would increase and the distribution expand based upon preying on the pigs, and we doubt that jaguars will control the invasion of feral pigs in Brazil. First, feral pigs in the Pantanal are much smaller (body mass ~40 kg, Desbiez et al., 2009) than in the Atlantic forest (body mass ~100 kg, Oliveira, 2012), where they are therefore less likely to be preyed upon by jaguars, unless jaguars selectively prey upon juveniles and piglets. Second, prey's behavior is as important as their body size in determining the predator's success (Hopcraft, Sinclair & Packker, 2005); feral pigs are more aggressive (Graves, 1984) than native species or cattle (Montenegro, 1998; Cavalcanti et al., 2010; Cavalcanti & Gese, 2010). Third, although prey availability is one of the main issues for recovering top predator populations (Galetti et al., 2013; Ripple et al., 2014), jaguars are seen as a significant threat to cattle ranching (Ripple et al., 2014; Tortato et al., 2015). Currently, there are 10 million head of cattle in São Paulo state (Bueno, Martins & Caser, 2015) and they are probably a more logical choice for jaguars (Cavalcanti et al., 2010; Cavalcanti & Gese, 2010). Although cattle are bigger than feral pigs, they are constrained within fenced fields and are less aggressive due to domestication (Cavalcanti et al., 2010). Therefore, any increase in the population of jaguars is likely to negatively impact the attitude of farmers to this predator.

We believe that the most effective means of garnering support for controlling invasive feral pigs is to demonstrate their socioeconomic impacts (Jeschke et al., 2014; Massei et al., 2015). Increasing human hunting pressure on feral pigs may decrease hunting pressure on jaguar's prey (Desbiez et al., 2011), thus indirectly benefiting jaguars.

link

I'm not entirely sure if there isn't some kind of agenda there, scientists can be very reluctant to acknowledge any "benefit" to an invasive species because they are so hell-bent on promoting the anti-invasive agenda, which at this point is basically like dogma in the religion of lefty environmentalism.

That said, I do recall another study which seemed to show jaguars were quite rarely taking large adult hogs.

This is in contrast to say, siberian tigers, which actually show a PREFERENCE for larger males in studies I have seen. And a preference makes sense, adult males are much slower and live alone and therefore have less eyes looking out for them. They are basically sitting ducks who can ONLY fight off predators, and I'd say this is why the ussuri boar evolved so big. The precise reason for it. Likewise the carpathian who dealt with tigers at least as recently as the middle ages. The prime 150 kgs male boars were overmatched by the tiger, and had to adapt.

The Indian boar is not big and deals with bengal tigers, BUT its actually weirdly fast relative to other boars, and pretty nasty. Maybe more gregarious as well (a lot of prey animals in the indian forests also rely on alarms from monkeys and birds and other animals - a luxury you don't get in siberia).

All in all, I think I'd give a slight edge to the bushpig, best vs best. In what would be a fairly well balanced predator/prey situation, I tend to give the edge to the prey. Its defense is fighting off predators, so the best males should succeed in doing that during their prime. The predators can survive ambushing the lesser specimens here and there. I think bushpigs would make great prey for jaguars, but that is why I favour the best bushpigs. Unlike many carnivora members who typically say "predator vs prey, open and shut case". It's actually the opposite of that for me.

[PumAcinonyx SuperCat]

Tough call honestly. I haven't seen anything serious on leopard predation on bushpig which is what makes it difficult to decide this match.

I think this is comparable to "Siberian tiger vs Ussuri Wild boar" seeing that in both cases, the feline and suine are of similar size.


I think it's something like a draw, maybe 52-48 in favour of the pig in a fair fight. I honestly can't confidently assign percentages to this match, but basically I think it's a scaled down version of what happens in Siberia.


The jaguar should win and lose in both an ambush and a face-to-face fight just as many times as a tiger would against an Ussuri Wild boar. That’s what I think for now.