Asiatic Lion Survives in Africa

African lions form two distinct genetic groupings, one of them closely related to India’s own Gir lion

While lions are divided into several subspecies, this classification has always been inexact due to conflicting evidence from various sources. But, in general, researchers have noted that the lions of West and Central Africa are smaller than their counterparts in East and South Africa. They have smaller manes and eat smaller prey. The two lion populations are separated by geographical features such as the Rift Valley and Central African rainforest, a habitat unsuited to lions. When researchers at the Institute of Environmental Sciences and Leiden Institute of Biology in Netherlands began their genetic study of the lion population, it was not clear whether this geographical isolation had led to the differences between the two populations. Their findings were a surprise. Their studies, published in Journal of Biogeography, found that the lions of West and Central Africa were far more closely related to the Indian lion than they were to their African counterparts. The researchers have proposed that severe drought conditions in this region that persisted for some 30,000 years till about 8,000 years ago may have wiped out the lion population. Lions in the meantime continued to thrive in West Asia all the way up to India. These lions, in all likelihood, repopulated the region. The authors argue in their paper that the hypothesis is ‘further supported by the fact that the West and Central African clade shows relatively little genetic diversity and is therefore thought to be an evolutionarily young clade’.

The lions of this region number barely 1,700, just a tenth of the entire African population, but substantially larger than the Indian, which numbers in the hundreds. The recent entry of these lions into Africa suggests that they may be very closely related to the Indian lion. Given the refusal of the Gujarat government to allow any relocation of the Asian lion, this raises the possibility that African lions from that region could be used instead.

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Hartosh Singh Bal