Jacob He is Africa’s toughest lion. He survived being gored by a buffalo, his family was poisoned and sold on the black market for lion parts, and he lost a paw when he fell into a poacher’s trap. “He really is a cat with nine lives,” jokes the biologist. Alexander Braczkowskithat has followed him closely for years. As if that were not enough, recently Jacob has once again demonstrated his resilience by crossing a river full of crocodiles and hippos with his brother Sharkthe longest swim ever recorded for their species. The reason: the scarcity of females in Queen Elizabeth National Park (Uganda), which has led these two felines to seek a new horizon that will guarantee their survival and reproductive capacity.
On the dark night of February 1 this year, the two male lions stood facing the Kazinga Channel knowing that a perilous journey awaited them. These dangerous waters, which in some places reach six metres in depth, are home to predators as tall as five metres, more than twice their size. Their destination, the shore on the other side, awaited them a kilometre and a half away. But they were not able to escape. Jacob nor his brother Shark They were frightened. Crossing was the only way to survive.
The biologist’s team was there in the front row, with cameras and drones to record the crossing. It took the brothers three attempts to cross. During the second attempt, the drone following them caught what could be a crocodile or a hippopotamus stalking them using heat detection, forcing the lions to quickly retreat to the shore. Less than an hour later, the path seemed clear and they continued on until they crossed the channel. Braczkowsi, who works with the Griffith University in Australia and the Northern Arizona University (United States), who has studied lions since 2017, describes the feat as “quite dramatic.” He describes his findings in an article published this Wednesday in the magazine Ecology and Evolution.
Of all the skills the kings of the savannah have, swimming is not exactly one of them. The longest recorded journeys for this species range from 10 to 300 meters and some resulted in deaths from crocodile attacks. In the search, researchers found evidence that other lions have swum a distance of close to a kilometer between the shore of Lake Kariba and one of its islands, located on the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe, but there is no video evidence. “The feat of Jacob and Shark “It is a record and an amazing display of resilience,” the author explains.
It was the local conditions that led the brothers to take the risk: competition for lionesses in the park is fierce. Only hours before the crossing, they had lost a fight for territory against other males and staying in the area could be dangerous for them. Researchers believe that this defeat probably prompted them to undertake the journey, in an attempt to reach the females whose roars they heard on the other side of the canal. Males do not have a very long life expectancy, especially if they are injured, so reproduction is vital.
For Braczkowski, this behaviour is a direct symptom of the sex imbalance among lions and the declining population in the area. In just five years, the lions have dropped from 71 to around 40 today. Human pressure and hunting are making matters worse: at least 17, mostly females, were poisoned by nearby residents, presumably to protect their livestock. Males outnumber females by a ratio of two to one.
Since 2018, Jacob and Shark are part of the 11 lions that the team of associations WCS Uganda and Lion Recovery Fund fitted collars with GPS tracking. This has allowed them to monitor the movements of the specimens in real time and minimize deaths caused by hunting and other conflicts between humans and wildlife.
“The fact that these brothers have managed to survive for so long is an achievement in itself,” says Braczkowski. Their journey is a clear example of the difficult decisions that wild species have to make just to find a home and a partner “in a world dominated by humans,” the author concludes.
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