User blog comment:Lord Loss/Monster Hunter Theory... Blog/@comment-1758220-20110713183743/@comment-1011548-20110713205237

- I don't know, but they're certainly very closely related. I'm not sure I'd go as far as to call them subspecies, but I'd welcome another point of view of this. - Definitely relatively close, just because of the huge amount of shared Monsters. Nargacuga found in the Great Forest and Jungle is almost exactly the same as the one found in the Mountain Stream, so either the populations in both places are mixable, or the populations only separated very recently (perhaps due to a landbridge getting flooded or something). Admittedly it doesn't make a great deal of sense that the Rathian found in the Jungle and the Mountain Stream are pretty different. I've not worked that one out yet. - Whatever happens to fish during the dry season in any climate like that, I suppose. The populations become more concentrated due to lack of space, only the toughest/luckiest ones survive, most managed to retreat to deeper water. Stuff like that. The dry season in the Flooded Forest, however, did give me a lovely mental image (thanks to Pinky for coming up with the idea) of Gobul lying below the mud of Area 5/6, like a lungfish, just waiting for return of his water. And ignoring all the noise going on above him. D'aww. - Extreme adaptability, I'd guess. They can survive and breed in such a wide variety of places, and travel great distances, so their populations are bound to spread out a lot. Except Diablos, and he's pretty much fine in whatever Desert he stumbles into, to be honest.