Lions of Tanzania (Serengeti, Ngorongoro and others)

[Mapokser]

@Spalea The Ngorongoro Crater is a small place home to maybe less than a dozen adult male lions of which are all the 5 Lake Quintet males and their sons, or some few more other unrelated lions.

There are like 50-60 lions in the entire Crater, even the Western Sector of Sabi Sands back in 2006 had more lions, and that is already a very small area, just a piece of the Sabi Sands Game Reserve which is already not particularly big.

So it's not like the Crater is a place that produces bigger lions than any other place, it's just a very small place that happens to have above average lions at this time in history. It'd be basically cherrypicking to claim the lions there are the biggest.

Also, they are not, we always see them with full bellies and huge thick manes, but to the more trained eye, once you look at a lot of footage of lions there and everywhere else, you realize they don't look like giants at all, especially their dimensions like height and length, which we can have a better notion by comparing them to the females from their prides.

There are chest girth ( and maybe other measurements I don't remember right now ) from Crater lions that may suggest an average weight of 212kg ( see this thread: https://wildfact.com/forum/topic-body-si...ater-lions ), which is a high average but it's a small sample, a very small area, so it doesn't mean the biggest lions are there.


Anywhere else in Africa you can probably cherrypick a small area that happens, at that point in time, to have some 10 male lions that'd average 212kg or higher, or even have some huge beast that weights over 250kg ( I doubt there's any lion anywhere as big as that in the Crater right now ), but if you're gonna pick a wider area, with a much bigger sample of say 40, 50, 60 males, it's very likely that the average, anywhere in Africa, as long as the population is healthy, will be similar, probably around 190kg.

Some also claim that Botswana lions or more specifically Okavango Delta lions are the biggest, but there's literally no evidence of that at all.

Some other say Kalahari lions are the biggest, or Mara lions are, but once more, no evidence.

Lions from certain areas do factually, on average, have bigger manes, but that's it, no evidence that their bodies are any bigger on average or that they produce the largest lions.

I think something that plays into these myths is that the most footage we have from lions comes from Kruger where TB and other diseases are a thing, as well as the fact Kruger lions don't have manes as impressive as those of some other places, so peoplr are used to see some sick or malnourished Kruger lion with a small mane, but always seeing big-maned, healthy males with full bellies from other places, getting the impression that these lions are bigger than say lions from Kruger or some other areas. Reply