Panthera leo (Lion)
Adult male Lion
Description: Lithe and muscular with a deep-chested body. The skull and jaws are short and powerful. The upper surface of the tongue is covered with back-ward curved papillae.
The coat is light to dark tawny, lighter on the underside and the insides of the legs. The backs of the ears are black, but the tips are pale. Males bare a mane on the head, neck, throat and shoulders, sometimes extending onto the chest, this is blonde through reddish-brown to black. The tail of both males and females is tipped with a brown tuft of course fur. The eyes are orange and their skin is black where visible and the whiskers white.
Adult female Lion
Adult male Lion
Size: Male: Head and body length 170-250cm, shoulder height 120cm, tail length 60-100cm.
Female: Head and body length 160-190cm, shoulder height 110cm, tail length 60-100cm.
Weight: Male: 150-240kg. Female: 122-182kg.
Senses: They rely primarily on vision and hearing to find prey. Their sight is particualrly good at spotting and judging movent.
They can climb and swim well when there is need.
Lions can reach speeds of 58km/h (36mph).
Habitat: Varied, from savanna woodland to desert sands.
Range: Lions live in prides and each member of the pride has a role to play in territorial defense. Males travel widely to protect the ownership of the prides range, while the females guard to core, central area of the pride. Males maintain the territory by roaring, urine marking and patroling.
Males will seek out intruders and attack them, whereas females will often merely react to the presence of strangers within their territory. As females mature they become increasingly involved with expelling tresspassing females, whereas young males are relatively indifferent to such females.
The pride range covers an area of 20-500sq km (8-200sq mi), depending on the size of the pride and prey availability. Sometimes seperat prides will have an area of overlap, but they will avoid straying into one anothers central areas.
When defending their home range lions are most cooperative, females are also very cooperative when hunting and rearing their young. Some females always lead the way during inter-pride relations and other lag behind. Certain females are more active when the pride is outnumbered and their pridemates need them most, others join in more when their pride has the greater numbers.
Distribution: S Sahara to S Africa, excluding the Congo rain forest belt, Gujarat, India in Gir Forest Sanctuary.
Status: CITES listed and ranked Vulnerable by the IUCN, with numbers declining with habitat loss.
Lions are declining due to habitat loss due to agriculture and also their prey animals are decimated by sickness brought by the livestock. Ecotourism has helped with preserving some land for the lions to live, as lions prides need large areas that can surport their prey.
Daily Rhythm: Lions prefer to hunt at night or at cooler times in the day, they tend to rest in the shade in the heat of the day. In undisturbed areas they are often active during the mornings and evenings, however they become nocturnal where they are hunted.
Voice: Everyone knows that lions roar, but why do they roar? Although lions live in prides they spend much of their time alone, when they are separated they must keep in contact somehow. They do this by roaring, we can hear a lion roar 8km (5mi) away and lions can probably hear further than that. The roar follows a sequence: a slow series of long, low groans, followed by a rapid succession of staccato grunts. Males and females both roar, but males have louder and deeper voices. Most roaring takes place a t night when the air is still and they are msot active, but they only roar if they are part of a pride with a territory, otherwise they keep a low profile and are content to listen to where the other lions are to keep out of harms way.
Roaring lions answear one another and females hearing strange females will approach them in numbers slightly larger than those of the calling lions. So if three strange females are calling, rarely three females will approach but more often 4 or 5 will approach. Females relax when they hear familiar males roaring and they tense and sometimes take their young into hiding when they hear strange males calling. This proves that lions can count the numbers of calling
lions and tell their gender and who they are individually.
A deep growling is used as a contact call, it is also used as a warning and they cough before attacking. Females call their young with a soft growl, and the young greet their mother with high wimpering. Males moan when mating while the female purs. Both sexes pur when pleased.
Enemies: Lions share their habitat with other large carnivores, including leopards, cheetahs, wild dogs and spotted hyenas. The spotted hyena is probably the lion's strongest competitor, but lions can consistently steal meat from hyena kills and males are persistant scavengers. Lions will not only steal from these other predators but will also kill them and are very aggressive towards them, therefore these smaller predators rarely coexist with them in the smaller reserves.
Unguarded young are at risk from hyaenas, leopards and pythons. Hyeana and wild dog packs may attack adult lions.
Prey: Mainly hoofed animals (weighing from 50-500kg) such as gazelles, zebra, antelopes, giraffes and wild hogs, and the young of larger animals such as elephants and rhinos. Also takes smaller prey such as hares, rodents, small birds and reptiles.
Food and Feeding: Adult females require 5-8kg of meat per day and adult males 7-10kg. Only one in four hunts are successfuly on average, when large prey is brought down it is killed by a claping bite to the throat or muzzle, which sufforcates the animal. So that when large prey is killed the animals gorge themselves, eating huge meals once every 3-4 days, adult males can eat as much as 43kg at one meal.
Lions can reach speeds of 58km/h (36mph), however their prey can reach speeds of 80km/h (50mph), so the hunter must use stealth to get close to their prey, usually within 15m, before grabbing or slapping their quarry on the flank to bring it down. Lions are thought not to consider the direction of the wind when they are hunting, even though they are more successful when stalking upwind.
Although lions have a reputation for hunting cooperatively, this only occurs when they have less than about 10% chance of capturing prey themselves. They also use cooperation when capturing large and dangerous prey. When hunting in a group the lions fan out trying to partially encircle their prey, cutting off potential escape routes.
In most other cases only one or two members of the larger pride will attempt to hunt, while the rest of the pride watch from a safe distance, joining the hunters once the prey is down to feed. For such hunting to take place there must be at least a 20% chance of success.
Females capture most of the small to medium sized prey with males hunting the larger, slow-moving prey, such as buffalo and giraffe.
Males are dominant at a kill and females are dominant over young animals, to protect their share of the kill they clamp down on the carcass with their teeth and slap their pride mates with their paws, sometimes causing nasty laserations. Often, the animal that successfully brought down the prey, is focused so much sufforcating it that the other pride members begin eating before the killer has a chance.
Lions will rarely eat humans, they usually resort to this when they are very old or wounded and cannot hunt other prey succesfully.
Grouping: The universal feature of lion society is that daughters join their mothers' pride, whereas cohorts of young males venture off together to join new prides after a time of nomadic existence. Males lead more intense lives than females and will probably only remain with their pride for a few years, females spend two years raising their young and when a group of new males join the pride and oust the fathers of the existing cubs they will often kill the youngest cubs. The females will sometimes successfully defend their cubs and they may survive the males change over.
Most social of all the felids, the pride consists of 3-10 adult females and a coalition of adult males numbering 2-3, there are also a number of dependant offspring attached to the females. Lions do not remain in constant contact with the other members of their pride, each lion spends days or weeks living alone or in small sub-group.
Female pride members are always genetically related, but they are never related to the males of the pride. The males may of may not be related to the other males in their coalition. When males reach maturity they leave their birth pride and become nomadic, seeking a pride to take over, they form a coalition with other males, usually from their natal group. Usually these coaltions contain 3-4 males but as many as 9-10 cousins and brothers have been counted. Larger coalitions tend to rule a pride for longer and gain access to more females, though their are more males to share them with.
Grooming their coats is a daily activity and they sometimes clean one another, mutually grooming one another. They also enjoyy rubbing and rolling in loose soil.
Breeding: Females can come into season at anytime of the year, and estrus lasts 2-4 days with a 2-3 weeks interval between cycles. Females will give birth to another litter when her last litter is about 2 years old, however if her young die she will come into estrus very soon after the loss.
A mating pair copulates about 3 times an hour and do so in sitting possition.
The resident coalition of males in pride sires all the cubs born during their tenure, but the pattern of paternity is complex. In smaller coalitions the males have an equal share of mates but in larger coalitions some males inevitably go without a mate, they become non-breeding helpers to their successful male relatives.
Both members of an unrelated male partenership benefit from their joint leadership of the pride, they are very affectionate to one another and surportive in any encounter. Their behaviour is indistinguishable from that of related male partenerships.
Mortality can be high for cubs, with as many as 80% dying before their first birthday, although this can be a low as 10% in good years.
Gestation: 100-119 days.
Litter Size: 1-6 cubs are born to each litter, usually 2-3.
Young Description: Immature animals have a rosette pattern which fades as they mature, some adults retain some of this pattening, mainly on the lower legs and sides.
Young males begin to grow their mane when they reach full size at about 2 years of age, but the mane is not complete until they are 4-5 years old.
Cubs lack the tail tassel and have a white tip to the tail on the underside. Cubs are born at 1-1.75kg. 22cm head and body length, 8cm tail length, at six weeks they weigh 3.5-6.3kg. At 6 months they weigh 18-20kg and by 20 months they weigh about 90kg.
Their eyes open at 6-9 days and their first teeth come at 3 weeks.
The spots are gone at about 10 months and the tail tip is black at about 15 weeks.
Nest: The den is hidden among rocks, in high grass or a thicket etc.
Young Care: Females care for their young within the pride unit, if more than one female within the pride gives birth within a few months of another, they will rear their cubs together, even suckling one anothers cubs, although the female can recognise her own young and will always make sure they get a greater share of her milk.
Cubs start eating meat by 3 months but continue to nurse until they are about 6 months old. Cubs start to become independant at about 18 months.
Orphaned young may be cared for by other females within the pride, and young are sometimes seperated into seperate groups within the pride depending on their age.
When young females reach maturity they remain with the pride and may stay with their mothers pride for the rest of their lives, young males, however, are driven from the pride at 1 1/2-2 years.
Young animals become capable hunters at about 2 years and they are fully grown at about 5-6 years.
Sexual Maturity: Females mature sexually at about 36-46 months, occuring earlier in captivity, at about 24-28 months.
Longevity: Females live about 13-18 years in the wild but generally stop breeding at about 15 years. In captivity they live about 30 years.
Geographical Varitations:
Panthera leo bleyenberghi (Angolan Lion)
Distribution: Zimbabwe, Angola, Democratic Republic of Congo.
Panthera leo massaicus (Masai Lion)
Distribution: Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda.
Panthera leo senegalensis (Senegalese Lion)
Distribution: West Africa.
Panthera leo krugeri (Transvaal Lion)
Distribution: Transvaal.
Panthera leo persica (Asiatic Lion)
Distribution: Gir Forest, North West India.
Description: Coat: Thicker than nominate race, with longer tail tassel, more mane on males belly and elbows but less mane in general.
Status: Critically endangered.
Panthera leo melanochaiatus (Cape Lion)
Distribution: Cape to Natal.
Status: Extinct.
Panthera leo leo (Barbary Lion)
Distribution: North Africa.
Status: Extinct.
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