ON THE EDGE OF EXTINCTION - B - THE LION (Panthera leo)

[GuateGojira]

(11-19-2019, 09:13 AM)BlakeW39 Wrote: Ah interesting. I'm curious as to where the 174kg is coming from because your chart says ~180kg(?) and thanks for the chest girths, I found some pretty good ones :) I got an average of ~125cm for lions, and ~120cm for tigers over on that thread. I assumed tigers had slightly bigger chests due to their slightly larger size, are my numbers correct? I guess they could make up for that in a bit if body length.

The East African lions though are a puzzle for me. Prior to joining this very helpful forum, I had heard that they were mostly pretty similar to the lions further south. But it seems you have come to the conclusion that the South African lions are slightly larger. I generally had a hunch that the lions of S.A. would be very slightly larger, but others said E.A. was. Are the smaller lions recent or has it always been this way? You'd think that with more open spaces and greater prey numbers that E.A. lions would be the biggest - maybe Bergmann's rule? It seems strange. How much do we have on the Maasai Mara? Are they the same as the Serengeti, smaller, larger, etc.? Can't find anything on them haha. Thanks again for your efforts!

Good question. In fact, the original source of all the measurements and weights for the East African lions is a paper that I published in 2014 and contains ALL the lion measurements and weights that I found from that area at that moment (attached file). As you will see, the list itself gives an average of 179.5 kg for the 39 males collected, but we need to include the sample of 11 lions from Bertram & King (1976) with an average of 187 kg and the sample of 21 males from De Almeida (1990) with an average of 155 kg. So the "overall" average for all the 71 males in the entire East Africa region is of 174 kg.

Now, the average of 181 kg and 178 kg in my comparative image is based only in the 39 male lions in the document and ignore the other two samples. Also they are separated by time, in order to see if there was a temporal variation in the body mass of those males, as you can see the samples are divided in time ranges.

*This image is copyright of its original author

In my list there are several lions from the Serengeti, but sadly I don't know if some of the specimens are specifically from the Masai Mara, as some of them just say "East Africa" like the largest specimen in the list. However, following the same line as the lions from Southern Africa, if we take the sample by countries and independently of the timeframe, these will be the results:

Kenia - Males: 181.8 kg (n=25) - range: 149.2 - 234 kg.
           Females: 128.3 kg (n=21) - range: 92 - 185.5 kg.

Tanzania - Males: 172.2 kg (n=45) - range: 145.4 - 235 kg. 
                Females: 120.4 kg (n=21) - range: 90.5 - 138 kg. 

Somalia - Males: 182.3 (n=1)

If we include the aberrant cattle-lifter male of 272 kg from Kenya, the average increase to 185.3 kg (n=26), still under the larger average figures of male lions in Southern Africa. If someone ask why I did not included the large male of 480 lb (218 kg) quoted in the book of Patterson (2004), you will need to know that is the same male of 204.7 kg reported by Rodgers (1974) but with an empty belly, so is included.


About chest girts, Bengal tigers (130 cm) had larger chest girths than other lion populations, except those from Namibia (130 cm) which match them. Modern Amur tiger chest girts (119 cm) are smaller than the other male lion populations, except those from India (111.3 cm) in modern records. Smuts et al. (1980) present an average chest girth of 117.4 cm (n=8) for male lions in East Africa, but Pfefferle et al. (2007) present an average figure of 122.1 cm (n=13) for male lions in the Serengeti. Reply

Attached Files

  Valvert-2014_Body size East African lion.pdf (Size: 89.69 KB / Downloads: 2)