The same that they use for the rest of the already known tiger cat species?! This one diverged from its closest relatives 1.3 million years ago. There are other tiger cat species that diverged later than that. Read the paper if you want to know more. You sound like there’s a >epsilon probability you, a random HN reader, found a gotcha in a paper by the experts of the field because you’re so smart that you know that the definition of "species" is sometimes fluid. Great job, I’m sure the authors don’t know that.
Could you maybe be a little bit more charitable than snarky? "Just read the paper" is not helpful when the paper is like 50 pages. It's not like I know what makes the other cats different species either. Nobody is trying to "gotcha" the researchers here, I'm just trying to understand what makes the cats a different species vs. a subspecies. We all know the definitions are fluid and I've heard of a couple in the past but I've never heard of one that solely looks at DNA divergence, so I'm pretty clueless and trying to learn something here. If you know the answer, this is not the way to share it.
