The Indian Express (Delhi Edition)
Why a 3-legged lion, its brother swam across a crocodile-filled river
ON A dark night in February, two male lions stood in the shallows of the Kazinga Channel in Queen Elizabeth National Park, in Uganda, and looked across the water. Nearly a mile away was the shore on the other side. Hippos and 16-foot crocodiles inhabit the channel, which can be 20 feet deep in places.
Barely 12 hours earlier, the two males had lost a battle for territory and were lucky to still be alive. Remaining on this side of the channel was dangerous, and they could probably hear the roars of female lions in the distance.
As with many cat species, lions don’t like to swim. And one of the lions, named Jacob, has only three legs. It lost a limb in a poacher’ strap in 2020. but neither Jacob nor his brother, Tibu, were deter red. they set out for what the researchers call the longest recorded swim ever taken by lions. The scientists describe their findings in a paper that has been accepted for publication in the journal Ecology and Evolution.
The lions struggled on their first three tries to cross. during the second attempt, the drone that was tracking them picked up a large thermal signature that may have been a crocodile or a hippo in pursuit; the two lions split into aY formation before hurrying back to shore. Less than an hour after their first attempt, they set out again for a third time. the path seemed clear and they kept going until they crossed the channel.
“It was pretty dramatic,” said Alexander braczkows ki, a conservation biologist working with Griffith university in australia and Northern arizona university who has been studying lions since 2017.
The Kazinga Channel cuts the national park in two. braczkows ki and his team had seen the two lion son the other side of the channel three times, and had assumed that the lions had swum between the two shores. But they had lacked recorded proof of the lions swimming all the way across.
Lions have been observed swimming in Okavango Delta in Botswana, but rarely farther than 150 feet. In November 2023, a young male lion swam across the Rufiji River in southern Tanzania, crossing as much as 985 feet of water. Anecdotes suggest that lions have swum between the shore of Lake Kariba on Zambia— Zimbabwe border and one of the lake’s islands, a distance of 0.6 miles, although this has never been confirmed on video.
Other big cats are more at home in water. Jaguars are known to hunt caimans in rivers in Brazil. In 2022, a male tiger swam three-quarters of a mile across the Brahmaputra River.
But Braczkowski estimated that the two lions in Uganda swam nearly a full mile across the Channel. Why would lions make such a dangerous crossing?
“Sex,” said Craig Packer, who ran the Serengeti Lion Project for 35 years. “If there’s nobody to mate with, what are you doing? You’re a male lion. You don’t have a very long lifespan, so you have to get on with it, especially if you’re wounded.”
Local conditions also played a part. According to Braczkowski, the park’s lion population has fallen to around 40 today from 71 lions in 2018, with at least 17 lions, mostly females, poisoned by nearby residents aiming to protect their livestock. Males outnumber females 2 to 1.
“These males and these swimming events are a symptom of this problem,” Braczkowski said. “The only females they can get to may be across the channel.” I
“If they can tell that there are females over there and no males, it would be, ‘Sign me up! Sign me up!’” he said.