Asiatic Lion - Data, Pictures & Videos

[Rishi]

@Spalea @Matias 
Ranthambore's tiger T-25 made headlines by adopting his motherless daughters. He did exactly the same thing by shrinking his home range & actively driving away other tigresses like T-17. There have been other cases, inspite of only about 100 of India's 2500-3000 tigers being known & followed.

But lions are easier to observe & still such behaviour is being recorded for the first time. So it's probably less common in them, as other lionesses tend to their dead sister's cubs. But this pride was started by just a mating pair & she had no adult daughters either.

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As asiatic lioness units can't practically grow beyond a certain size (2-5), larger prides keep fragmenting away all the time, both males & females. It's just as tigresses do, except the daughters break away from the mother with their own daughters/sisters after a threshold is reached & those females might split, share or squabble for the pride's lands, or settle around it.

Often such young females venture into territories controlled by other males (as the "sub-prides" rarely meet unlike African lions ...& males are males... they're often allowed to linger in the area). 
In this case such newcomers would have been greatest threat to the cubs! So, Bedhia's shunning of females was a necessity.

I think strong paternal instinct is an edge in natural selection, as good fathers would have higher likelihood of passing on their genes!

*This image is copyright of its original author

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