STORY OF AFRICAN LIONS

 Biologists long believed that lions band together to hunt prey. But Craig Packer and colleagues have found that's not the main reason the animals team up. Anup and Manoj Shah

Crai  Ig Packer was behind the wheel when we came across the massive cat slumped in the shade beneath a spiny tree

It was a dark-maned male, elaborately sprawled, as if it had fallen from a great height. Its sides heaved with shallow pants. Packer, a University of Minnesota ecologist and the world’s leading lion expert, spun the wheel of the Land Rover and drove straight toward the animal. He pointed out the lion’s scraped elbow and a nasty puncture wound on its side. Its mane was full of leaves. From a distance it looked like a deposed lord, grand and pitiable.

Since arriving in Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park only that morning, I’d gaped at wildebeests on parade, dawdling baboons, gazelles rocketing by, oxpecker birds hitching rides atop Cape buffaloes, hippos with bubblegum-colored underbellies. The Serengeti usually dazzles first-time visitors, Packer had warned, making us giddy with an abundance of idyllic wildlife straight out of a Disney song-and-dance number.

The sublime brute only 15 feet away was my first wild Panthera leo. Male African lions can be ten feet long and weigh 400 pounds or more, and this one appeared to be pushing the limits of its species. I was glad to be inside a truck.

Packer, though, opened the door and hopped out. He snatched a stone and tossed it in the big male’s direction.

The lion raised its head. Its handsome face was raked with claw marks.

Packer threw another stone. Unimpressed, the lion briefly turned its back, showing hindquarters as smooth as cast bronze. The beast yawned and, nestling its tremendous head on its paws, shifted its gaze to us for the first time. Its eyes were yellow and cold like new doubloons.

This was one of The Killers.

Packer, 59, is tall, skinny and sharply angular, like a Serengeti thorn tree. He has spent a good chunk of his life at the park’s Lion House, a concrete, fortress-like structure that includes an office, kitchen and three bedrooms. It is furnished with a faux leopard-skin couch and supplied only sporadically with electricity (the researchers turn it off during the day to save energy) and fresh water (elephants dug up the pipelines years ago). Packer has been running the Serengeti Lion Project for 31 of its 43 years. It is the most extensive carnivore study ever conducted.

He has persisted through cholera outbreaks, bouts of malaria and a 1994 canine distemper epidemic that killed off a third of the 300 lions he’d been following. He has collected lion blood, milk, feces and semen. He has honed his distressed wildebeest calf call to get his subjects’ attention. He has learned to lob a defrosted ox heart full of medicine toward a hungry lion for a study of intestinal parasites. And he has braved the boredom of studying a creature that slumbers roughly 20 hours a day and has a face as inscrutable as a sphinx’s.

Packer’s reward has been an epic kind of science, a detailed chronicle of the lives and doings of generations of prides: the Plains Pride, the Lost Girls 2, the Transect Truants. Over the decades there have been plagues, births, invasions, feuds and dynasties. When the lions went to war, as they are inclined to do, he was their Homer.

“The scale of the lion study and Craig Packer’s vigor as a scientist are pretty unparalleled,” says Laurence Frank, of the University of California at Berkeley, who studies about African lions and hyenas.

One of Packer’s more sensational experiments took aim at a longstanding mystery. A male lion is the only cat with a mane; some scientists believed its function was to protect an animal’s neck during fights. But because lions are the only social felines, Packer thought manes were more likely a message or a status symbol. 

He asked a Dutch toy company to craft four plush, life-size lions with light and dark manes of different lengths. He named them Lothario, Fabio, Romeo and Julio (as in Iglesias—this was the late 1990s). He attracted lions to the dolls using calls of scavenging hyenas. When they encountered the dummies, female lions almost invariably attempted to seduce the dark-maned ones, while males avoided them, preferring to attack the blonds, particularly those with shorter manes. (Stuffing still protrudes from the haunches of Fabio, a focal point of Lion House decor.)

Consulting their field data, Packer and his colleagues noticed that many males with short manes had suffered from injury or sickness. By contrast, dark-maned males tended to be older than the others, have higher testosterone levels, heal well after wounding and sire more surviving cubs—all of which made them more desirable mates and formidable foes. 

A mane, it seems, signals vital information about a male’s fighting ability and health to mates and rivals. Newspapers across the globe picked up the finding. “Manely, lady lions look for dark color,” one headline said. “Blonds have less fun in the lion world,” read another.

Lately, Packer’s research has taken on a new dimension. A long dispassionate student of lion behavior and biology, he has become a champion for the species’ survival. In Tanzania, home to as many as half of all the wild lions on earth, the population is in free fall, having dropped by half since the mid-1990s, to fewer than 10,000. Across Africa, up to one-quarter of the world’s wild lions have vanished in little more than a decade.

The reason for the decline of the king of beasts can be summed up in one word: people. As more Tanzanians take up farming and ranching, they push farther into lion country. Now and then a lion kills a person or livestock; villagers—who once shot only nuisance lions~have started using poisons to wipe out whole prides. 

It is not a new problem to them, this interspecies competition for an increasingly scarce resource, but neither is it a simple one. Among other things, Packer and his students are studying how Tanzanians can change their animal husbandry and farming practices to ward off ravenous felines.

Scientists used to believe that prides~groups of a few to more than a dozen related females typically guarded by two or more males—were organized for hunting. Other aspects of the communal lifestyle)  the animals’ affinity for napping in giant piles and even nursing each other's young~were idealized as poignant examples of animal~kingdom altruism. 

But Packer and his collaborators have found that a pride isn’t formed primarily for catching dinner or sharing parenting chores or cuddling. The lions’ natural world~their behavior, their complex communities, their evolution~is shaped by one brutal, overarching force, what Packer calls “the dreadful enemy.”

Other lions. 

The Jua Kali pride lives far out on the Serengeti plains, where the land is the dull color of burlap, and termite mounds rise like small volcanoes. It’s marginal habitat at best, without much shade or cover of any kind. (Jua kali is Swahili for fierce sun) Water holes look more like wallows, prey is scarce and, especially in the dry season, life is not easy for the pride’s four females and two resident males, Hildur and the researcher 

Early one morning last August, Serengeti Lion Project researchers found Hildur, a Herculean male with a blond mane, limping around near a grassy ditch. He was sticking close to one of the pride’s four females, whose newborn cubs were hidden in a nearby stand of reeds. He was roaring softly, possibly in an effort to contact his darker-maned co-leader. But the researchers saw, had been cornered on the crest of a nearby hill by a fearsome trio of snarling males whom Packer and colleagues call The Killers.