Biologists Finally Know What's Killing The Nilgai In Texas--And They're More Dangerous Than Expected

There is a carcass in the South Texas brush right now that shouldn't exist. A full-grown nilgai bull, nearly six hundred pounds, dragged into cover off a Sinderos road north of Raymondville and fed on across three nights. The ranch hand who spotted it radioed it in as a poaching cleanup, because for a hundred years, that was the only explanation that had ever made sense in the coastal plain. It wasn't. And what actually killed it changes everything the wildlife community thought they understood about mountain lions in South Texas. For a century, one sentence had been the whole story of the nilgai in Texas. Nothing here was big enough, fast enough, or bold enough to bring one down. That sentence just stopped being true. Biologists at the Caesar Kleberg Wildlife Research Institute at Texas A&M-Kingsville, working through the South Texas Lion Project, have documented what nobody expected to still be possible in this fragmented, cut-off corner of the range — a small number of individual mountain lions actively hunting adult nilgai. Prey outweighing the predator three to four times over. Cached in brush. Returned to over multiple nights. The exact feeding pattern lions reserve for their largest, most valuable kills. This is the story of what happens when a species introduced from India in 1924 meets a native predator no one thought could still do this. Make sure to subscribe for daily uploads on animals in your area.