lion

the lion

The lion "Panthera leo" is a species of carnivorous mammals of the family Felidae. The female lion is the lioness, her cub is the lion cub. The adult male, easily recognizable by its large mane. has an average mass that can vary from one area to another, ranging from 170 kg for Kruger lions to 229 kg for Transvaal lions. Some very rare specimens may exceptionally exceed 250 kg. An adult male feeds on 7 kg of meat each day against 5 kg in the female. The lion is a gregarious animal, that is to say that it lives in large family groups, unlike other felines. Its life expectancy, in the wild, is between 6 and 11 years for the male and 14 to 19 years for the female. but it often exceeds 29 years in captivity.

The male lion only occasionally hunts, he is responsible for fighting intrusions on the territory and threats against the troop. The lion roars. There are no more than 15,500 to 29,000 wild relatives in the African savannah, distributed in about ten subspecies and about 310 in the Gir Forest National Park in northwestern India. He is nicknamed "the king of animals" because his mane gives him an appearance similar to the Sun, which appears as "the king of the stars". Between 1992 and 2016, their population decreased by 42%.

description

The lion is the second largest cat, after the tiger, and thus the largest carnivore in Africa. A male is 171 to 251 centimeters long2 from the tip of the muzzle to the base of the tail and has a tail averaging 89 centimeters3. Males reach between 144 and 215 kilograms as adults3. Adult females measure 158 to 192 cm 2 without the tail and have a tail measuring approximately 85 cm. They weigh between 83 and 167 kg3 and have an average corpulence of 20 to 51% less than that of a male4.

The size at the withers may vary from 100-128 cm2 "on average, 123 cm for males and 106 cm for females3". The largest males can exceptionally reach a shoulder height of 1.50 m5. necessary] They can have a shoulder height of 30 cm larger than that of tigers but are shorter than the latter. If a size of 189-300 cm6 from the tip of the muzzle to the base of the tail has often been evoked for the tiger, it is admitted that the tiger is at most 30 cm longer than the lion is a length of 2.80 m7 from the tip of the muzzle to the base of the tail. The largest lions live in southern Africa, the smallest in Asia. The world record in wildlife is held by a Transvaal lion of 313 kg8. Captive lions tend to be larger than lions living in the wild, and in some cases the lions in captivity weighed 375 kg, including the famous black mane lion Simba from Colchester Zoo in England. whose mass has been recognized by the Guinness Book of Records 9,10.

color the lion

Their short coat is sand, yellow-gold or dark ocher. The inner side of the legs is always clearer. as is the belly, buff in the male, almost white in the female. Young cubs have dark patches all over their body, but they are already disappearing in the first year. In very rare cases, these spots are still visible in adulthood, but remain insignificant, being only visible at close range 4.

As with tigers, lions have occasional cases of leucistism; less than one hundred specimens16 in the world possess this genetic characteristic due to a recessive gene, which gives a blond, cream or even white color to the coat. Leucistism is different from albinism, and poses no direct problem on the physiology of the animal. Note 1. The eyes retain their pigments and remain mostly of normal color (hazel or gold), but can also be blue-gray or green-gray. The lips and the pads also remain normally pigmented.

In the leucistic male, the mane and the end of the tail, normally dark or black, are very pale. The best-known specimens are probably the white lions of Timbavati in South Africa, where two white lions are born from a lioness and a tawny lion in a private nature reserve 17. Chris McBride was the first to observe them in October 1975 and wrote two books on the subject18,19. In 2005, two white-eyed, blue-eyed cubs were born in a zoo near Agen16 and four at Jurques zoo near Caen on 20 May 2007 from two white parents20. The Beauval Zoo in Loir-et-Cher was the first French park to present a pair of white lions to the public21.

There is no tangible proof of the existence of melanic lions (black) 21.

Phylogenesis

Phylogeny is the study of the appearance and formation of a species through fossils. The oldest lion fossil was discovered in Laetoli, Tanzania; according to the dating, it would probably be 3.5 Ma.

Panthera leo is identified for the first time in Europe, on the Italian site of Isernia, by the fossil of a primitive cave lion "Panthera leo fossilis" more than 500 000 years old. A lower lion jaw of the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, older than 1.75 Ma, shows striking resemblances to the primitive cave lion. These are considered the largest lions in Europe and hunted during the Cromerian interglacial more than 400,000 years ago, near Wiesbaden in Hesse and near Heidelberg in Baden-Württemberg. Some specimens were almost as long as the largest lions in Earth's history, the American lions "Panthera leo atrox" of California, which reached a record length: up to 3.60 meters long with the tail " length off tail, about 2.41 meters". Most of the lions' discoveries in Europe are cave lions "Panthera leo spelaea"; appeared during the Ice Age of Mindel, they correspond to an evolution of the lions of the primitive caves. Although not specifically related to any subspecies, DNA studies have confirmed that the cave lion is an authentic lion27,28. Another subspecies has been found in Beringia in the north-east Asia, at the level of the current Bering Strait, called Eastern Siberian Lion and Beringia (Panthera leo vereshchagini). In Central Europe, North Asia and America, lions were, until the end of the Pleistocene, a frequent species of local fauna that disappeared at the end of the last period of glaciation.