Lions how do they live

Lions also make other noises. They meow, hiss and snarl, like domestic cats, but louder. Male lions are much bigger than females and they have large manes, or hair, which covers their head and neck and stretches underneath to their belly. Lion cubs have light spots on their fur when they are born. There are five types of big cat — tiger, lion, jaguar, leopard and snow leopard. The main two types of lion are the African and the Asian but there are thought to be eight in total.

African lions can grow to between 9 and 10 feet long 3 meters from head to tail, with the tail being about 2 to 3 feet long 60 to 91 centimeters , according to the Smithsonian National Zoo.

They typically weigh between to pounds to kilograms , with males reaching the higher end of that range. Asiatic lions also called Asian or Indian lions are slightly smaller than African lions.

They are 6. Lions tend to have loose skin hanging from their midsection, possibly to help protect them from the piercing hooves of their frantic prey. Asiatic lions also have a fold of skin that runs along their belly, a feature rarely seen in African lions, according to African Lion and Environmental Research Trust ALERT , a research and conservation organization. Compared to African lions, Asiatic lions tend to have shaggier coats, longer hair tufts on their elbows, and a longer tassel on the end of their tail.

Not only are male lions generally larger than females, but they also have a distinctive thick mane of hair around their heads that females lack. The biggest and most fabulous manes are more impressive to mating females and more intimidating to competing males, according to the San Diego Zoo.

The mane also protects the male's neck during fights over territory or mating rights. African lions tend to have bigger, more magnificent manes compared to their Asiatic cousins. Asiatic lions are found only in the Indian state of Gujarat, Western India, where most reside in the protected Gir Forest National Park , a square-mile 1,square-km wildlife haven.

The Indian government designated this land, which includes a deciduous forest, grasslands, scrub jungle and rocky hills, as a wildlife sanctuary in , according to Gir National Park. In addition to more than lions and leopards, the park is home to deer, antelope, jackal, hyenas, foxes, reptiles and more than species of birds.

Lions are social cats and live in groups called prides. Elephants and buffalo are quite capable of killing a cornered lion due to their size and strength. Lions may also climb trees to get better vantage points for identifying potential targets, or to avoid biting insects. The Asiatic subspecies is listed as Endangered.

Lions face a number of threats, including habitat loss, a decline in their prey species, trade in bones and other body parts for traditional medicine, and killing in retribution and defence of human life and livestock. What do you think will save lions from going the way of sabre-toothed cats?

More severe penalties for persecution? Greater restrictions on where people can live? Or a model that offers those Africans who live with lions some recompense for doing so? Lions are in trouble. Populations are declining across Africa, mainly because of increasing conflict with herders of cattle and other livestock.

Lions in some countries are fairing better than others. In South Africa, for example, the population increased by 7 per cent over two decades, largely thanks to the use of fencing that separates the predators from the people.

In Zimbabwe, numbers have grown by more than 1, per cent but from a very, very low base of about 50 , mainly on the back of trophy hunting. Now new research has found that lions are doing better in the Masai Mara ecosystem, in Kenya where in fact the overall country trend is down thanks to the creation of community conservancies.

Households with conservancy membership receive a share of the money that comes from wildlife tourism. Where there are lions and other carnivores, you get more tourists and local people are financially better off. Not only that, but those livestock settlements that were not members of a conservancy and were within the home range of a lion pride had a large negative effect on lioness survival rates. Find out about Living With Lions. Most lions flee, even from people on foot, but an attack is a possibility and knowing how to react could save your life.

Walking safaris are a relatively new concept, and lions still perceive humans on foot as a threat. Conversely, as the biggest tourist attraction in many African wildlife reserves, lions have become fairly habituated to vehicles and can be approached to within a few feet. Indeed, they often appear totally oblivious to them, despite the excited chattering of their occupants and the clicking of cameras.

Lion behaviour varies from region to region. Surviving cubs go on to perpetuate the bloody cycle. Males reared together typically form a coalition around age 2 or 3 and set out to conquer prides of their own.

Hard-living males rarely live past age 12; females can reach their late teens. As we crossed the plains one morning, the Land Rover—broken speedometer, no seat belts, cracked side mirrors, a fire extinguisher and a roll of toilet paper on the dashboard—creaked like an aged vessel in high seas. We plowed through oceans of grasses, mostly brown but also mint green, salmon pink and, in the distance, lavender; the lions we hunted were a liquid flicker, a current within a current.

The landscape on this day did not look inviting. Sections of the giant sky were shaded with rain. Zebra jaws and picked-clean impala skulls littered the ground. Packer and a research assistant, Ingela Jansson, were listening through headphones for the ping-ping-ping radio signal of collared lions. Jansson, driving, spotted a pride on the other side of a dry gully: six or seven lions sitting slack-jawed in the shade.

Neither she nor Packer recognized them. Jansson had a feeling they might be a new group. Jansson found what seemed to be a decent crossing spot, by Serengeti standards, and angled the truck down. We roared across the bed and began churning up the other side. Packer, who is originally from Texas, let out a whoop of triumph just before we lurched to a halt and began to slide helplessly backward. We came to rest at the bottom, snarled in reeds, with only three wheels on the ground, wedged between the riverbanks as tightly as a filling in a dental cavity.

Jansson stepped out of the truck, long blond ponytail whipping around, dug at the wheels with a shovel and spade, and then hacked down reeds with a panga, or straight-blade machete. Earlier I had asked what kind of anti-lion gear the researchers carried. Packer is not afraid of lions, especially Serengeti lions, which he says have few encounters with people or livestock and have plenty of other things to eat.

He says he once ditched a mired Land Rover within ten feet of a big pride and marched in the opposite direction, his 3-year-old daughter on his shoulders, singing nursery school songs all the way back to the Lion House. Packer never tried such a stunt with son Jonathan, now 22, although Jonathan was once bitten by a baboon. Packer and Pusey divorced in ; she returned to studying chimpanzees. Not being handy with a panga, I was sent a short distance down the riverbed to gather stones to wedge under the wheels.

I could not decide whether I should creep or sprint. As I bent to claw stones out of the ground, I knew suddenly, with complete, visceral certainty, why Tanzanian villagers might rather be rid of these animals.

After more than an hour of reed-whacking, stone-wedging and wrestling with mud ladders placed under the tires to provide traction, the vehicle finally surged onto the far side of the ditch. Jansson looked through binoculars, taking note of their whisker patterns and a discolored iris here and a missing tooth there. She determined this was the seldom-seen Turner Springs pride. Some of the sun-dazed lions had bloodstains on their milky chins. The first true lion probably padded over the earth about , years ago, and its descendants eventually ruled a greater range than any other wild land mammal.

They penetrated all of Africa, except for the deepest rain forests of the Congo Basin and driest parts of the Sahara, and every continent save Australia and Antarctica. In the Grotte Chauvet, the cave in France whose 32,year-old paintings are considered among the oldest art in the world, there are more than 70 renderings of lions. Sketched in charcoal and ocher, these European cave lions—maneless and, according to fossil evidence, 25 percent bigger than African lions—prance alongside other now-extinct creatures: mammoths, Irish elk, woolly rhino.

Some lions, drawn in the deepest part of the cave, are oddly colored and abstract, with hooves instead of paws; archaeologists believe these may be shamans. The French government invited Packer to tour the cave in This was somebody who was viewing them in a very cool and detached way.

This was somebody who was studying lions. Prehistoric human beings, with their improving hunting technologies, probably competed with lions for prey, and lion subspecies in Europe and the Americas went extinct. Other subspecies were common in India and Africa until the s, when European colonists began killing lions on safaris and clearing the land. Though devastatingly poor, the nation is a reasonably stable democracy with huge tracts of protected land.

But the Serengeti is the exception.