Maybe I'm underestimating their speed. I just vtcan't imagine how a single jaguar gets the chance TO bite. I'm just imagining one punch from the silverback, and it's OVER.
Maybe the jaguar has enough speed to surprise the gorilla, and if they bite the throat maybe thats enough. But I just don't see the bite ever actually happening.
I think you might be over estimating the force of a gorilla punch. I mean don't get me wrong gorillas have ridiculous strength and can do some serious damage with just a few hits.
But lions aren't exactly glass cannons. They can take a few hits before quitting/dying. I mean they deal with things like wildebeests after all.
The context of the fight would definitely be a major factor though.
I wonder if the gorilla would be crippling the lions limbs by sheer brute force. Throwing, yanking them out of sockets, twisting and squeezing them. The lion would fight like any house cat. And the gorilla would respond like we do when playing with our house cat. Gorillas would want to hurt and stop the attacks and that means huge amounts of force. Force they are capable of.
Jaguars live in South America. Gorillas live in Africa. Even gorilla vs lion is very unlikely, since (most) gorillas live in the rainforest and African lions live in the savanna.
Leopards do attack gorillas, and they probably kill babies. But a leopard weighs, on average, about half as much as an adult gorilla, so attacks on adults might not be that common.
I'd like to put a case forward for gorillas please.
In a brawl where both parties are strong enough to survive the inital attack, the toughness of each party becomes the deciding factor. The gorilla is just much tougher by design, it's much harder to go for the neck when it has nothing but muscle for neck, or the genitials when gorilla dong averages around 3cm small. The lion's definitely more of a glass cannon by design.
Male gorillas and lions both top out around 500lbs. Do you think you could kill a cat the same size as you if that cat wanted you dead? With your bare hands?
Also, to add to this, mountain lions are cats that are roughly the size of humans and really aren't much of a threat to us. I'm not saying you could kill one with your bear hands, and they have been know to kill adult humans if they can get the drop on them, but they really aren't a huge threat head on. The safety advice for dealing them is to get aggressive, look big, throw rocks and sticks at them, and physically fight them off if they attack, as they're usually easily driven off. If we had the physiology and relative muscle mass of gorillas, we'd probably kill them pretty easily.