Cats vs Dogs

I made a pretty nice map. It's 60 kb.

<a target='_blank' rel='nofollow' href='http://www.geocities.com/financewizardofozz/ cats_vs_dogs.gif'>cats_vs_dogs.gif</a>

The greener areas are where there are more species of dogs (strictly Canidae) than cats (strictly Felidae). The red areas have more cat species. And the middle brownish area has equal species of both. The gray areas don't naturally have cats or dogs occuring in them.

2 things. First, the strongest thing that pops out immediately from taking just a glimpse of the map is that dogs rule in the cold, and cats in the tropics. Second, no surprise, is that dogs tend to beat cats in grassy/desert/open areas, and cats tend to win in closed/forested areas.

Regarding the first point, I have wondered long time about the very big division within the Carnivora group. As I see it, the dog/cat division of the order Carnivora could more appropriately be considered an omnivore/carnivore division. The dog group tends to be omnivorous (bears, dogs, raccoons, skunks, badgers) and the cat group tends toward carnivorous (cats, hyenas, mongooses). And this could explain the climatic division between both groups, which isn't limited to just cats and dogs: weasels, skunks, bears are concentrated in the northern Old World, while mongooses, civets and hyenas are even more severely restricted to the south. And over in the New World, many of the cat-group species weren't even able to cross over from the Old World (mongoose, civet), so far to the north that the Bering land bridge is located. So instead, we have at least 1 cat trying to evolve into a type of mongoose, the yaguarundi.

And why would carnivores do better in tropics and omnivores in the cold? Because the tropics are stable year round (at least relative to the northern climates). So you have full-time dedicated carnivores and omnivores, aka carnivores and monkeys. But in the north things get trickier, strict carnivores can shrug it off, but monkeys (strict omnivores) lose big time and are fully replaced by their northern equivalent, the omnivore group of dogs, bears, foxes, raccoons, weasels, etc. These latter animals (dogs) are better adapted (for X reasons, I dunno which) to living the omnivore life-style under such a wildly fluctuating climatic background.

So you relate species distribution to diet and climate difference? Interesting...

Working link:

Actually the north/south dichotomy between canoids and feloids was noticed a long time ago by Flower who coined the name Arctoidea (a name which explicitly conveys the relative dominance of canoids in the north).

I would have though that it was from the Greek _arctos_, meaning bear (which is also the root of the word _arctic_, via the circumpolar constellations _Ursa Major_ and _Ursa Minor_), and not a direct reference to the distribution of the clade. Have you a cite for Flower's

Stewart, You're right. My error. The carnivores were divided into Arctoidea (bear-like) and Aeluroidea (cat-like).