On a darkish evening in February, two male lions stood within the shallows of the Kazinga Channel in Queen Elizabeth Nationwide Park, in Uganda, and regarded throughout the water. Almost a mile away was the shore on the opposite aspect. Hippos and 16-foot crocodiles inhabit the channel, which might be 20-feet deep in locations.
Barely 12 hours earlier, the 2 males had misplaced a battle for territory and had been fortunate to nonetheless be alive. Remaining on this aspect of the channel was harmful, they usually may in all probability hear the roars of feminine lions within the distance.
As with many cat species, lions don’t wish to swim. And one of many lions, referred to as Jacob by researchers, has solely three legs. He misplaced a limb in a poacher’s lure in 2020. However neither Jacob nor his brother, Tibu, had been deterred. The 2 huge cats set out for what the researchers name the longest-recorded swim ever taken by lions. The scientists describe their findings in a paper that has been accepted for publication within the journal Ecology and Evolution.
The lions struggled on their first three tries to cross. Throughout the second try, the drone that was monitoring them picked up a big thermal signature that will have been a crocodile or a hippo in pursuit; the 2 male lions cut up right into a Y formation earlier than hurrying again to shore.
Lower than an hour after their first try, the 2 set out once more for a 3rd time. The trail appeared clear they usually stored going till they crossed the channel.
“It was fairly dramatic,” stated Alexander Braczkowski, a conservation biologist working with Griffith College in Australia and Northern Arizona College who has been learning the lions since 2017. “It appears to be like like two tiny little warmth signatures crossing an ocean.”
The Kazinga Channel cuts the nationwide park in two. Dr. Braczkowski and his crew had seen Jacob and his brother on the opposite aspect of the channel 3 times, and had assumed that the lions had swum between the 2 shores. However they’d lacked recorded proof of the lions swimming all the way in which throughout.
Lions have been noticed swimming in Okavango Delta in Botswana, however hardly ever farther than 150 ft. In 2012, a lion swam round 330 ft throughout the Zambezi River, from Zimbabwe to Zambia. In November 2023, a younger male lion swam throughout the Rufiji River in southern Tanzania, crossing as a lot as 985 ft of water. Anecdotal proof means that lions have swum between the shore of Lake Kariba (additionally on the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe) and one of many lake’s islands, a distance of 0.6 miles, though this has by no means been confirmed on video.
Different huge cats are extra at residence in water. Jaguars are identified to hunt caimans in rivers in Brazil. A 2022 examine reported a swim of practically three-quarters of a mile by a mountain lion within the Puget Hold forth the coast of Washington State. In the identical yr, a male tiger swam an identical distance throughout the Brahmaputra River in northern India.
However Dr. Braczkowski estimated that the 2 lions in Uganda swam practically a full mile throughout the Kazinga Channel.
Why would lions make such a harmful crossing?
“Intercourse,” stated Craig Packer, who ran the Serengeti Lion Undertaking for 35 years and wasn’t concerned within the examine. “If there’s no one to mate with, what are you doing? You’re a male lion. You don’t have a really lengthy life span, so you need to get on with it, particularly in the event you’re wounded.”
Native situations additionally performed a component. In accordance with Dr. Braczkowski, the park’s lion inhabitants has fallen to round 40 right now from 71 lions in 2018, with at the least 17 lions, principally females, poisoned by close by residents aiming to guard their livestock. Males outnumber females two to 1.
“These males and these swimming occasions are a symptom of this downside,” Dr. Braczkowski stated. “The males will not be discovering females within the space the place they’d tenure. The one females they will get to could also be throughout the channel.”
In such circumstances, Dr. Packer stated, lions might resolve to take their probabilities elsewhere.
“If they will inform that there are females over there and no males, it will be, ‘Signal me up! Signal me up!’” he stated.
