Who would win in a fight  between a tiger and an elephant?

What about a wolf versus a puma? Or an alligator versus a python?

Well, I have news! These ultimate animal showdowns  aren not just hypothetical. These are things that  actually happened in the wild.

And the animal that comes out  on top might surprise you. After all, we are taught in school  that nobody beats an apex predator. They are at the top of the food chain.

But when two of them come head to head, sometimes even an apex predator becomes prey. So let’s look at what the research says about these clashes of the titans. And you can see how many of the champions you can guess. [♪INTRO] So in India, there are about 3,000  Bengal tigers and 30,000 elephants.

And the elephants not only outnumber the tigers. They are also a lot bigger, too. Indian elephants weigh up to 6,000 kilograms, while tigers typically top out at a mere 230.

So you might think the pachyderms  have this fight in the bag. But they’re also vegetarians. Herbivorous elephants don’t want to fight tigers.

I mean, we’ve never asked them  about it, but they usually make themselves scarce when they  hear a tiger approaching. Same elephants, I also do that. See, tigers might be smaller  than full grown elephants, but not elephant babies.

And if you’re a tiger, a baby elephant probably sounds  like a nice little snack. Actually, like a nice several meals. So to complement their diet of deer and antelope, tigers eat elephants too.

They won’t  usually pick a fight with a herd, but they have been known to  pick off an elephant calf. So round 1 goes to tigers. But that  victory may be short-lived… literally.

Now there aren’t a ton of  peer-reviewed publications about elephants killing tigers, but in 2021, a tiger was found dead where a herd of elephants had been the previous day. A post-mortem of the tiger suggested that it had been stomped to death. I’ll spare you the gory  details here, but suffice it to say that elephants can end a tiger.

Which means this first showdown will have a different winner depending on the circumstances. And since picking on babies  is a low move even for tigers, I’m gonan give this one to the elephants. Either way, “pick on someone  your own size” doesn’t really apply to this match up.

But  the next one comes closer. If you spend enough time boating  around the coast of South Africa, you might see orcas and great white sharks. But I cannot promise that  you will like what you see.

As formidable as white sharks  are, orcas are the real apex predator in pretty much all  of their observed interactions. Orcas will hunt white sharks  in pods or one-to-one. Basically, they are always ready to pick a fight.

And they don’t just start the fight, they end it. In 2022 five orcas were filmed  surrounding a white shark. One of the orcas got underneath the shark and pushed it up to the ocean surface.

Then, the orca rolled the  shark over and bit into it. The altercation ended with orcas  feasting on the shark’s liver. That’s one point for orcas.

The following year, scientists  observed another face off. But this time, it looked like  it would be more evenly matched. One orca went up against one shark.

And the orca “eviscerated” the shark. And that is the actual exact  word that they used in the journal article that was published in the “African Journal of Marine Science”. It all happened in under two minutes.

The orca grabbed the shark by its  pectoral fin and charged forward. Then the orca … you guessed it … ate its liver. As it turns out, a white shark’s liver  has many of the nutrients an orca needs to be healthy, as well as the  convenient fact that livers float.

So at least the orcas are getting a  solid meal out of the deal... yikes. So that puts the score at orcas-2, sharks-0. Just another reason to stop  calling them “great” white sharks.

They aren’t even apex predators  when an orca’s around. Not to mention they are the only white sharks. But they are not the only marine  animals on this list of showdowns.

Tuna and jellyfish both live  in the Mediterranean Sea. It’s a great place to make  babies. Who can blame them?

But as relaxing and romantic as  that sounds, things can get tense. Researchers have analyzed the  stomachs of bluefin tuna and found that more than half of their diet is  gelatinous animals like jellyfish. Depending on how big the tuna is  and how much energy it needs to swim around, the number of  jellyfish casualties could go up.

So tuna are definitely formidable  predators when it comes to jellyfish. They’re the kind of predators  that you wouldn’t expect to have any trouble swimming  through jellyfish swarms and picking them off for  snacks throughout the day. Bluefin tuna are some of the  fastest fish in the world, reaching 70 kilometers per hour  when they really go for it.

But, just like elephants,  tuna can switch from predator to prey fast depending on how old they are. Baby tuna take a while to develop their tail fins, making them vulnerable to hungry jellyfish. And, yes, the jellyfish take advantage  of this weakness and eat them.

So this one might seem like kind of a toss up. But we can’t call it quite yet,  because there’s one more round to go. See, tuna protect their babies by avoiding dangerous jellyfish when they breed.

By spawning where there are fewer jellyfish, tuna have better chances of surviving past youth. The only problem is that  there’s a reason jellyfish don’t hang out in that part of the Mediterranean. There’s less food there.

Tuna might successfully avoid  becoming prey to the animals that they eat, but it comes at  the risk of their own starvation. With so little food around,  some tuna resort to cannibalism. So in the battle between  jellyfish and tuna, the tuna start taking themselves out and do  the jellyfish’s work for them.

Ultimately, when they steer clear of jellyfish, 90% of the baby tuna survive and 70% make it through their fin development stage. So the trade off is probably worth  it, but it puts this battle at a draw. Not all animal showdowns have a  winner as clear as in the next battle.

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In this corner, standing 76 centimeters tall and weighing 45 kilograms, it’s the gray wolf! And in this corner, standing 65 centimeters tall and weighing 75 kilograms, the mighty puma! People put these two in the same ring in 1995, knowing pretty well who was  going to come out on top.

We introduced gray wolves to  Yellowstone National Park in the US with the intention of keeping the  mountain lion population in check. And they might be doing too good of a job. In just 15 years, the puma  population there dropped by almost half.

Now, the wolves  aren’t the only ones hunting pumas. Humans do that too. But they’ve really turned pumas into what researchers call a “subordinate apex predator.” Which sounds like an oxymoron based on what you might have learned in school.

If an apex predator is at  the top of the food chain, they can’t be subordinate. Unless they don’t stand a chance  against another apex predator. And that’s what’s happening here.

Gray wolves have devastated pumas in a few ways. First, they’ve cleared out all of the pumas’ food. Sometimes they scare away prey like elk, and sometimes they just eat the  prey that the pumas took down.

Classic cafeteria bully behavior. The wolves’ other approach is more … traditional. Wolves also outright kill pumas.

Ultimately, about the same number of pumas starve to death as are killed by wolves. So the more wolves there are roaming around, the fewer pumas survive. Which means the winner is: definitely the wolf.

It just goes to show you that apex  predators aren’t always top dogs… and not just because they’re cats. Reptiles can have the same problems.   In the Florida Everglades,  alligators were living large. Literally.

Alligators there can  weigh more than 450 kilograms, as much as a grand piano. And these apex predators have all the qualities that a peak performing athlete would want: speed, agility, knowledge of all  the best spots for sunbathing. They were so large and in charge that they had an international sports  drink named after them.

It was actually named after the  mascot of the University of Florida which is named after the Florida apex predator. But with some of the most let’s  say eccentric people in the world living in Florida, circumstances  were bound to change. See, some Floridians have  dangerous and exotic pets.

And from time to time, they  lose track of those animals. What I’m trying to say is, there are a lot of escaped pythons in the Everglades. Oops!

Who woulda thought? The pythons, native to Southeast Asia, have become invasive in Florida, to the point that the US Fish and Wildlife Service has started calling them an injurious species. So that’s not good for the  alligators that already lived there.

Especially because these pythons are some of the largest snakes in the world. They can grow to be 6 meters long  and weigh more than 90 kilos! Don’t get me wrong, the mighty  alligator can handle an intruder.

The US Geological Survey has  reported alligators eating pythons. Even cyclists biking around Florida have stumbled upon alligators mid-munch on pythons. But, pythons also eat alligators.

Researchers poking around the stomach contents of the snakes have found evidence  of alligators in there. At the end of the day,  these two top level reptiles have both been found eating each other. Sometimes, they’ll end up in a  day-long fight that nobody wins.

One fight that both alligator  and snake managed to slither away from involved an alligator  four and a half meters long and a python that measured 2.7 meters. But they can both die as one  tries to eat the other, too. So in this reptilian rumble, there’s  kind of no winner.

They both lose. However, since it’s our fault  that they know each other at all, humans are working to set things straight. Researchers are helping the alligators retain their dominance by introducing more pythons.

But this time with trackers on them. The tracked pythons find  other pythons in the wild, leading researchers right  to them so they can remove the serpents from the  alligators’ stomping grounds. Just the kind of backstabbing behavior  you would expect from a snake.

So there isn’t always a clear winner when two of the world’s deadliest animals  come across each other. And clearly, the whole idea of  an apex predator is relative. Even the most cold blooded  killers can be dethroned.

But as far as I’m concerned,  all of them can have the title. I just don’t want to go up  against any of these guys myself. [♪OUTRO]