News Page 48
Lionesses Live Democratically
Lionesses Live Democratically
July 27 — When it comes to the birds and the bees, African lionesses are equal opportunity lovers. A 36-year study of about 560 female lions in Tanzania found that lionesses do not establish a hierarchy in which dominant cats breed more than subservient ones, researchers said on Thursday. This egalitarianism is highly unusual in animals that live in social groups, and contrasts greatly with the mating behavior of other status-conscious mammalian predators.
University of Minnesota behavioral ecologist Craig Packer, who led the study, said lionesses experience approximately equal reproductive success and even cooperate with one another in raising their cubs. The male of the species is not so accommodating. Packer said males establish a clear pecking order and a dominant lion usually sires most of the offspring, a trait confirmed by researchers with DNA testing.
"The male lion — the 'King of Beasts' — is a bit of a despot," Packer said in a telephone interview. "But the 'Queen of Beasts' is very democratic in her reproduction." Packer's team observed the behavior of lions in Tanzania's Serengeti National Park and Ngorongoro Crater. The scientists tracked every cub in 31 lion prides that reached its first birthday and identified its mother. Adult female lions live in prides containing a number of lionesses and the young. Adult king." Packer said none of the females reproduced much more or less than the others. In some years, only one or two females managed to raise a litter of cubs in a given pride of lions, but over time, all the females had the opportunity to breed.
"The major finding is that the females in the
lion pride really form a true community where there's no bosses and everybody's
pretty much the same," Packer said. "Their society is very even-handed.
That really stands in marked contrast to most other animal societies."
He said the strong advantage offered by mutual cooperation — for example,
caring for the cubs — was
one reason for the egalitarianism. But, using
some Cold War phraseology, he said "mutually assured destruction" was another
factor. the females in the pride are armed to the teeth, and they've
got claws, too," Packer said. "It would be very costly to try to impose
your will on another individual because they'll fight back." University
of Nebraska animal behavioralist Jeffrey French said in an article accompanying
the study in the journal Science that the large numbers of lions involved
and the length of the study made the findings very powerful. Among
many animals, females experience a dictatorship in which one or a few individuals
hoard all the reproductive opportunities. Because all other species of
cat live solitary existences, including
the tiger, the one most closely related to the
lion, researchers had no feline comparison for social behavior. "In
the lion pride, there's just no signs of dominance among the females. So
they really are partners. And their partnership really does revolve around
raising their cubs so that anybody who gives birth about the same time
as anyone else will seek each other out and they'll form these nursery
groups and collectively defend the whole batch," Packer said. The
researchers said lionesses, which also hunt together, avoid another behavior
practiced by females of some other species: killing the offspring
of other females. Female lions leave the pride to give birth to their young
and do not return until the cubs are several weeks old. The adult females
then join together to raise and defend the young.