By Stephanie Pappas, Live Science
Contributor | May 12, 2017 07:06am ET
A rare group of tree-climbing
lions living in Uganda must range farther and farther to find enough prey to
survive, a new study found.
The research discovered that the
lions of the country's Ishasha district have expanded their ranges and
shrunk the size of their prides since the 1970s. The lions live in Queen
Elizabeth National Park and are one of only two populations of lions in the
world that climb trees daily, according to the park. (The other group lives in
a park in Tanzania.) The lions may climb to avoid the heat at ground level or
to escape from biting flies. Their unusual behavior makes them a major tourist
draw for Uganda.
Poaching in the park has slashed
the biomass, or total weight, of prey animals for the lions, like antelope,
down from 50,7000 lbs. per 0.6 square miles (23,000 kilograms per square
kilometer) in the 1970s to just 17,750 lbs. per 0.6 square miles (8,050 kg per
square km) today, researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society wrote in
the Journal of East
African Natural History.
Home on the range
To find out how the animals have
adapted, the researchers fitted radio collars to 12 lions from the two prides
in Ishasha and followed the big cats between 2005 and 2010. The scientists used
the radio collar data to determine the lions' home ranges, calculating the
distances roamed both for the pride as a whole and for individual lions.
The data showed that the ranges
of the prides today vary between 18.7 square miles (48.5 square km) and 22.6
square miles (58.5 square km). In the mid-1970s, Ishasha lions stuck a little
closer to home: The northern pride had an average range of 13 square miles (34
square km), while the southern pride stayed within an area of 14.7 square miles
(38 square km), the researchers said. These are already small range sizes for
lions, the researchers wrote; in the Serengeti, lions
sometimes roam over 155 square miles (400 square km).
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment
You only need to enter your comment once! Comments will appear once they have been moderated. This is so as to stop the would-be comedian who has been spamming the comments here with inane and often offensive remarks. You know who you are!