Talk:Lion

Should there be a mention of Namibia's desert lions in the "Distribution and habitat" section? For example see these sources: Hakai magazine, RFI. Mika1h (talk) 22:33, 26 August 2025 (UTC)

Egalitarism has been reported mostly in lionesses and their prides.

This study was done from a focus on reproductive behaviours.

Most typical female animal societies, including mammals and birds, tend to be despotic and have a highly differentiated social hierarchy, where the dominant female has a notorious reproductive privilege.

The rest of the females are usually subordinate and their main function within the community is to assist in the care of the communal litters.

The dominant female, when she has the opportunity, usually kills the cubs of the subordinate females, if the latter have any.

But lionesses would be one of the few, if not the only, social species reported to lack hierarchical structures.

All females of reproductive age within a pride breed in the same season and have a similar number of cubs surviving.

Furthermore, infanticide by females towards pups that are not their own has not been reported.

The reasons for this could be twofold:

-Firstly, despite their social nature, lionesses still keep their cubs of few weeks of born in individual litters which are kept away from other lionesses. A behaviour more typical of other non-social felids. This makes it difficult for other lionesses to locate the cubs for killing.

-Secondly, lionesses prefer to cooperate with each other rather than fight to establish a hierarchy. Perhaps because the lionesses consider the other lionesses valuable enough as members of the pride, because cooperation increases the pride's chances of survival and defence. And also lionesses avoid the risk of being injured in a confrontation even if they win it.

Also, unlike in other animal societies, the lionesses' role as partners in communal breeding is completely voluntary.

If they do not have cubs of their own, they can opt out of communal breeding.

Therefore, it must be specified that it is the lioness prides that have no social hierarchies.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/11868804_Egalitarism_in_female_African_lions

https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-lions-mane

LeandroPucha (talk) 05:53, 3 September 2025 (UTC)

You know, the part about the lion's acceleration, which I added•, I'm either going to remove it or edit it extensively.

I see that it has caused a lot of confusion, and I apologise for that.

I found a later book** by the same author (R. McNeill Alexander) in which he explains the point better.

Analysis of films of lions hunting has found that lions have an initial acceleration of 9.5 m/s², while a Thomson's gazelle has an initial acceleration of only 4.5 m/s², even though lions only reached 50 km/h (14 m/s) compared to the gazelles' nearly 97 km/h (27 m/s).

This indicates that initial acceleration is more important than maximum running speed and constant running speed for lions' hunts.

However, this is not an indication of an athletic difference between species, but rather that lions, when attacking by stalking, have the advantage of being prepared to start running, while their prey start running unprepared.

A human sprinter starts from the starting blocks with an initial acceleration of 10 m/s², but their maximum speed is 40 km/h (11 m/s) in the first 50 m of the 100 m race.

Furthermore, as maximum running speed is reached from zero, the acceleration in metres per second squared (m/s²) decreases.

**-Alexander, R. M. (2003). Principles of animal locomotion (PDF). Princeton University Press. pp. 3, 103, 143.

• "The lion accelerates at the start of the chase by a rate of 9.5 m/s (34 km/h; 21 mph) per second, whereas zebras, wildebeest and Thomson's gazelle accelerate by a rate of 5 m/s (18 km/h; 11 mph) per second, 5.6 m/s (20 km/h; 13 mph) per second, and 4.5 m/s (16 km/h; 10 mph) per second respectively; acceleration appears to be more important than steady displacement speed in lion hunts." [130: -Alexander, R. McNeill (1993). "Legs and locomotion of carnivora". In Dunstone, N.; Gorman, M. L. (eds.). Mammals as Predators: The Proceedings of a Symposium Held by The Zoological Society of London and Mammal Society: London, 22nd and 23rd November 1991. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 1–13.]

LeandroPucha (talk) 06:31, 25 September 2025 (UTC)

Although lions in other parts of Africa, such as the Serengeti and Kruger National Park, tend to hunt porcupines only occasionally, in the Kalahari they form an important part of the lions' diet, accounting for 25.6–32.3% of their total prey.

Hunting porcupines can be dangerous for lions because the wounds caused by their quills can lead to a slow and bitterly death from starvation and hardship.

On the other hand, gemsbok accounts for 25–39.5%, despite being very dangerous to lions by their long horns.

Kalahari lions have learned to hunt gemsboks by modifying their hunting tactics depending on the circumstances, showing that lions in general as a species are quite flexible in their hunting habits.

For example, when lions hunt gemsboks, they usually bite the lumbosacral joint and, to a lesser extent, the cervical spine of these ungulates.

Other element found in the Kalahari lion diet is ostrich eggs.

https://doi.org/10.4102/koedoe.v27i2.584

https://journals.co.za/doi/epdf/10.10520/AJA03794369_2816

LeandroPucha (talk) 04:04, 7 December 2025 (UTC)

LeandroPucha, this information is granular. This FA is already over 8,000 words and is comprehensive enough for average readers. It shouldn't be treated like a dumping ground for more and more information and your time would be best spend building up less developed non featured articles. LittleJerry (talk) 19:45, 14 December 2025 (UTC)

So next time I will just leave some information here for you to see, I will leave suggestions of what you could do, and then I suppose you will know what to do. LeandroPucha (talk) 20:19, 14 December 2025 (UTC)

I agree with LittleJerry that more details are not needed as this page already contains sufficient info in every section and subsection. And I question whether more details are an improvement of the FA status. If so, then we should also think about what to remove to keep the optimal word count. BhagyaMani (talk) 21:22, 14 December 2025 (UTC)

A question. Since the lion entrance is overloaded (and the tiger one possibly too): Can I go to the big cat entrance to post a little more technical but relevant information? I'm thinking of putting in there some information about the locomotor performance of some big cats that I have and know. Something like this: """Lion and tiger thigh muscles do not exceed and only approach the mass predicted for their body mass""". LeandroPucha (talk) 00:54, 15 December 2025 (UTC)

I don't care about that. I'm only concerned about the FAs. LittleJerry (talk) 01:03, 15 December 2025 (UTC)

It has been found that in the Luangwa Valley, where lions' diet consists of 60% very large animals such as Cape buffalo, giraffes, hippopotamuses and elephants, the frequency of individuals with blunt trauma in their skulls and broken teeth associated with struggling with these prey was high, at 51.7% and 62.1% respectively, while in the Kafue ecosystem, where the diet consists of 10–30% very large animals, the frequency of blunt trauma and broken teeth was lower, at 30.4% and 43.9% respectively.

Bite and scratch injuries in the skull associated with fights between members of the same species were similar among lions in the Luangwa Valley and those in the Kafue large ecosystem, at 31.7% and 30.4%, respectively.

This indicates that lions are more at risk of injury when hunting large prey than when fighting each other.

https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.11313 LeandroPucha (talk) 00:18, 15 December 2025 (UTC)

You can just add that a 2021 study found that lions are more risk of injury when hunting large prey than when fighting each other. I think you should focus on other articles now. LittleJerry (talk) 00:58, 15 December 2025 (UTC)