600 cats, 1,200 pigeons, a few ant colonies, and an island the size of New Zealand. How do you think they’ll evolve?
600 cats, 1,200 pigeons, a few ant colonies, and an island the size of New Zealand. How do you think theyll evolve?
600 cats, 1,200 pigeons, a few ant colonies, and an island the size of New Zealand. How do you think they’ll evolve?
If the cats don't instantly starve you'll see a big cat/ostrich equivalent as quick as evolution allows
Isolated evolution is fascinating, local science exhibits or towns should make those sealed glass terrariums but bigger and put them on display. Imagine going to the park and checking up on the latest evolution and battles of the isolated insects and plants.
I've always been fascinated by the idea of gradually adding more water to a large terrarium
Most cats die off relatively early. If the species does survive, its members will be very few and they'll behave as lone hunters that need a very large range to hunt. Pigeons diversify, some of them becoming piscivores kinda like puffins. Ants will be fine. I learned today that leafcutters can farm fungi in their nests for food, using leaf cuttings as a substrate for the fungi to grow upon. Truly amazing shit. They'd make up like 80% of the animal biomass on the island.
The cats would probably be whittled down to 100-150
i’d suspect that many of the cats would die initially, and the survivors would become highly specialized. The pigeons would have an INSANE populaton boom followed by rapid radiation into grouse-like birds. The cats would likely end up being specialized into civet and medium-predator (think bobcat) niches, and the pigeons would become birds of prey, remain the same, and become ground-nesting Birds.
I saw a lot of people say that all the cats would starve, and while their population would definitely be small, at least initially, the island would be bursting at the seams with pigeons pretty damn quickly. As someone who’s seen both feral cats and pigeons come and go, pigeons can balloon from 40-60 birds to 300 in a month, with cat predation in mind, and this island has way more then 40 birds. Pretty good premise OP.
Cat would breed like rats and kill all the pigeons, ants will eat whatever and probably evolve to fight each other once there's too many colonies
Cats would kill off all the pigeons and then die off themselves. Ants would eat the corpses. Maybe some pigeons would find some place safe and survive and become flightless. No cats would survive.
I mean there’d probably be a massive cat boom at first but I doubt they’d all starve
*be extirpated
No. The island is the size of New Zealand so the pigeons can easily stay safe from 600 cats. All cats will starve within a few months. Pigeons will multiply like crazy, then some will evolve to be carnivores as fast as evolution allows it. At the same time some pigeons will become flighless and large. Maybe some will get specialized beaks to eat ants. It will basically be a complete pigeon ecosystem.
Ants will just stay ants but instead of other insects they'll eat each other.
Oooh I thought you meant the cats would eat them to extinction and then starve
That makes sense my bad
???
The post you're responding to was my first post.
Well which one is it starvation or evasion
What if the island were smaller, like the size of Corsica, and instead of pigeons it was rabbits
Still 8,722 km2 so that's about 1 rabbit per 8 square kilometers.
So there’s a cat population drop and a rabbit boom, with the population balance being heavily in favor of the rabbits. I just really want a cat island lol
Cats would go extinct in no time. A typical population density for rabbits is 100 per square kilometer, so if you multiply your number of rabbits by 1000 it might work.
Why would rabbits inhabit an island with the same population density they inhabit continents with
It’s far more likely that their overall population would be smaller
And i highly doubt you’d need 12,000 fucking rabbits to support a starting population of 600 cats
> I just really want a cat island lol
>pigeons can easily stay safe from 600 cats
The reason feral cats are so destructive in their invasive range is partially because they are effective hunters.
>Pigeons will multiply like crazy
Which would feed the cats, 600 is far from a population bottle neck and the cats would likely scavenge each other.
I agree with you on the evolution path of the birds and ants but I really think there's carrying capacity for the cats on this island. If they survived I'd bet they stay small and specialize on a specific branch of pigeon. Along the lines of a civet.
So you think the cats would become heavily arboreal?
Depends on flora/landscape but I think lots of cats go that way evolutionarily
>The reason feral cats are so destructive in their invasive range is partially because they are effective hunters.
Not when there are 1200 prey animals on an island the size of New Zealand. Also in real life we artificially boost cat numbers so they can be destructive without actually being able to sustain themselves.
cats are able to drive species with much wider ranges then the size of New Zealand to extinction, often on continents
Pigeons are really, really easy prey
And with how many pigeons there are, the likelihood that cats would starve is pretty low
>cats are able to drive species with much wider ranges then the size of New Zealand to extinction
Those species also have to compete with other animals and, as I already said, cat populations are artificially boosted. They're not brought to extinction by 600 cats who will instantly starve to death. Even 1200 chickens would survive the cats because New Zealand is 268,021 square kilometers so on average the cats would have to explore an area of 200 square kilometers to find one chicken.
First off, pigeons and chickens are very, very different animals
Second off, do you have any idea how fast pigeons reproduce?
>Second off, do you have any idea how fast pigeons reproduce?
Doesn't matter, all cats will starve before there are enough pigeons. You're still ignoring how big New Zealand is.
Feral cats have basically a permanent population in the more or less uninhabited Australian Outback, which is much, much bigger then New Zealand, and much, much more hostile to life
>so these birds will likely double their population in a matter of months and keep doing so.
That's nothing. I just looked up how long a cat can go without food. It's only two weeks lmao, it's worse than I thought.
>pigeons have a preferred nesting ground and are social animals. They're not going to spread out at random they are going to cluster in flocks around rocky cliffs.
I guess then it could depend on whether you intentionally drop the cats off at the right spot, which OP didn't specify.
>two weeks
Exactly, that's literally just a couple of birds per cat until the first squabs start to fledge. Sure all of the cats won't manage but I addressed that.
But yeah the biggest flaw with OP's situation is not knowing what the landscape is like, not knowing if there's other native animals, where and when the cats and pigeons will get dropped off etc. Too many variables really.
Sorry bout that, the fictional island I had in mind is mostly grassland with a few wooded areas
Think Michigan terrain
So as I pointed out pigeons are social and prefer rocky cliffs to nest, this is also why they do well in urban areas. They're gonna group up around any landscape like this that they can find. They feed primarily on seeds. So open flat grasslands is where they will go to feed and that's when they're gonna be vulnerable. So if the cats do survive and hone in on these birds they would adapt to ambushing in the grass, which they're already pretty good at. Then it's just the evolutionary arms race after that.
Feral cats in real life prey on several rodent, lizard and bird species. Pigeons usually aren't a major part of their diet and only being able to hunt for one species is limiting.
>all cats
Majority, but I can see a solid 1 cat/km stable population at least.
Pigeons have pretty quick turn around. No mating season, always laying clutches of two eggs, from laying to fully fledged is less than two months. 600 mating pairs. That island is gonna be swarming with birds in no time and it only takes a handful of cats to be successful to keep they're population going. I really think they have a chance.
1,200 mating pairs actually
Wait no I’m stupid sorry
To add to this I would also point out that pigeons have a preferred nesting ground and are social animals. They're not going to spread out at random they are going to cluster in flocks around rocky cliffs.
Like I said they propagate like crazy so the biggest limiting factor is the cats, so these birds will likely double their population in a matter of months and keep doing so.
Then on the cat side of the equation, as long as there's enough genetic viability spread throughout they could theoretically bottleneck down to a handful of animals with no issue and specialize in on catching these birds before reaching a stable population size.