Next, to see if other females were using the same strategy, the team spent four years monitoring nine female prides-including FLG10’s-and 11 male coalitions. In addition to observing radio-collared lions, Chakrabarti and his team pieced together FLG10’s family tree using observational data collected by researchers in the decades since his mentor, Yadvendradev Jhala, began the long-term monitoring project in 1996. “Females mate with multiple males and confuse paternity among the males so they’ll consider all the cubs their own.” A successful strategy ( Read why animals sometimes kill their babies.) “If an adult lion comes across a cub that he feels was not sired by him, he’ll kill that cub,” which then leads the female to breed again, says study co-author Stotra Chakrabarti, a biologist at the Wildlife Institute of India. It worked-none of her cubs were killed, the researchers claim in a new study in Behavioral Ecology. As it turns out, she was.īy mating with males from every coalition that entered her territory, the now 10-year-old lioness was likely protecting her cubs from infanticide by deliberately obscuring the identity of their father. To the scientists tracking her, FLG10 appeared to be mating with a strategy in mind.
( Read more about Asiatic lions and why they’re thriving.) Then, around 2015, she did something never before observed in lions: She mated with males from a nearby coalition. Like most young females of this endangered lion subspecies, FLG10 reached sexual maturity and mated with members of her primary coalition, the group of males that most frequently patrolled her pride’s territory in Gir National Park.
The lioness known as FLG10 is a good mother and fierce hunter, providing for her cubs in the last stronghold of Asiatic lions in Gujarat, India.īut until recently, no one knew just how extraordinary of a parent she really is.
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