Interaction between a leopard and a tiger at a kill site in India

Documenting interspecific interactions between sympatric large carnivores, such as leopards Panthera pardus and tigers Panthera tigris, are important for understanding ecosystem dynamics. In India, these interspecific interactions between the large carnivores shape ecological communities by determining the distribution, abundance, and co-existence of each other and also the prey community. Here, we present an incident where a tiger and a leopard were captured in the same frame by a camera trap deployed at a leopard kill of domestic cattle. The tiger was photographed again on the next day moving the remnants of the prey. While it is impossible to conclude what happened in between or afterward due to the lack of successive images, this rare event of capturing these two elusive predators at a kill simultaneously suggests that they interact at a much finer scale than often presumed.