Lion Predation

[Dr Panthera]

I will post a series of incidents where big cats have switched from their usual and customary prey to preying on unusual prey items with the circumstances involving it.
I will start with lions.
All over Africa buffalo, zebra, and large antelopes (wildebeest, gemsbok, kudu, eland, waterbuck) dominate the diet of lions and contribute most of the biomass eaten by lions....specific situations have made certain lions specialized hunters of unusual prey everything from crocodiles to seals to humans to giraffes to hippos to elephants.
The first episode I will dedicate to lions predation on giraffes, usually giraffes are secondary prey to lions in East Africa and a bit more important in southern Africa ( Kruger, Namibia, Zambia, and the Okavango to name a few areas) in two areas in Kenya and Tanzania they have become primary prey:
1- Dr. Stephanie Dolrenry studied lions that live in the pastoral lands in southern Kenya that lie between Tsavo national park and Amboseli national park, she studied the lions between 05/2004 and 08/2012 where a pre-drought period ( 2004 to 09/2004) and after the drought of 2009 a post-drought period 10/2009 to 05/2012 occurred.
In the pre-drought period ( 4 years ) lions only killed one adult giraffe and three juveniles indicating that giraffes were not a common prey item of the 11 prey species taken then, in the post-drought era the lions expanded their prey spectrum to 23 species with incredible increases in the predation of ostrich and giraffe , two species that tolerate arid conditions well, in three years 2009 to 2012 lions  killed 53 giraffes ( 45 adults and 8 juveniles ) 53 times more adults killed than the pre-drought period.
Notable kills included a single lioness that killed in one week an adult giraffe and two juveniles and a lone sub-adult male lion that killed two adult giraffe bulls in one week!!! A giraffe bull weigh anything from 1200 kg to 1900 kg so two bulls combined can be over 3 tons of meat in seven days, clearly much more than what that sub-adult lion could have eaten!!!
37 of the giraffe kills were killed by a lone sub-adult male, a lone young adult female, or a pair of young adult females this means that these lions have become accomplished giraffe hunters and must have all learned the art by themselves since their mothers rarely hunted giraffes in the pre-drought period. A somehow similar situation was observed in the Namib desert by Dr. Flip Stander where a lioness and her five sub-adult male cubs hunted giraffes, the lioness died because of injuries sustained attacking a giraffe bull but her sons went on to kill giraffes routinely including an incident of killing two adult giraffes in the same hunt.
2- Dr. Dennis Ikanda and his team noticed that a pride of lions in the vast Selous game reserve in southern Tanzania have become overnight accomplished giraffe hunters where half of the lion diet comes from giraffe kills!!! The extent and sudden development of this predation is threatening the giraffes with local extinction and it is the subject to a documentary by the Smithsonian channel ( entitled ''Nature Shock" if memory serves me right ) Reply