According to a recent paper, Asiatic lions (Panthera leo leo) and Bengal tigers (Panthera tigris tigris) have, in fact, shared habitats across Asia for centuries.
- Today, though, they are found together in the wild in only one country: India. Here too, their geography-specific habitats means that they no longer occur in the same localities.
- As per the study, their co-existence is an interplay of their different ecological and behavioural adaptations rather than an internecine conflict between the species.
- Sympatric speciation’ in biology usually relates to two related species (both lions and tigers belong to the family Felidae) which exist in the same geographic area and thus frequently encounter one another.
- Lions, along with cheetahs (Acinonyx jubatus venaticus), wolves (Canis lupus), hyenas (Hyaena hyaena), antelopes, wild ass (Equus hemionus) and aurochs (Bos primigenius) were likely the characteristic fauna of the more arid and open parts belonging to the Afrotropical biogeographical realm, a characteristic of the western part of the Indian subcontinent.
