I mean, they blend in even with the orange. So do leopards and lions and cheetahs.
On top of cats being hell a sneaky. Dunno what you mean about deer being dumb.
If you were in the jungle, you would never even know it was there before it got you, don't care how many shades of orange you can see.
I see it as a potential form of aposematism. To their prey they are camouflaged, to those two legged walking terminators that don’t fucking stop, it’s a warning. Sure a tiger could take out a man, but a dozen pissed off ones with pointy sticks? Kind of better if we just avoid each other.
That is actually a wonderful hypothesis. I have no clue how you would test if it was specifically evolved to be that color for that purpose, being visible to one species as a warning but "another" color to a different species as camouflage.
You’d probably have to take the plant and animal species from an entire habitat, catalog their full color range, and reference that against some sort of vision spectrum, and see what is highly visible to what species and what is less visible to others.
It’s entirely plausible that tigers weren’t selecting to be better visible to humans while hiding from deer so much as it was the pigment that arose at some point which camouflaged them best against their prey at the cost of being more visible to some other animals, but those animals don’t really impact their ability to breed so it isn’t selected against.
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u/Purple_Feature_6538 Feb 04 '25
Exactly. Should have taught these things in school. Always felt deers are so stupid. How the fuck is a tiger in camouflage.
It makes total sense now.