When Craig said studying the mane would be challenging, he knew what he was talking about. He has studied lions in the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania for almost 30 years and endured all sorts of grueling ordeals in the name of scientific exploration. His hard work made my job easier though, because thanks to his efforts and those of other scientists, there is a vast database on the Serengeti lions. Not only has this work answered most questions about lion behavior, but demographic and physiological data let us study the heritability of traits and other questions that are difficult to answer for wild populations. Studying sexual selection in the field, in a long-lived species like the lion, would have been impossible without this prior research.
To start with, knowledge of lions’ social structure allowed us to refine our hypotheses about sexual selection. Female lions live in prides consisting of related females and their dependent offspring. As the cubs grow, young females typically join their mother’s pride, and young males form “coalitions” and disperse to look for their own pride. This creates a system in which a small group of males can monopolize many females, leading to severe reproductive competition. Predictably, males compete intensely for mates, and they compete on two levels. At the group level, male coalitions vary in size, and larger coalitions sire more offspring than small coalitions. Individuals within a coalition also compete: If a male discovers an estrous female, he will jealously guard her and prevent her from mating with his companions. As Craig and his colleagues discovered, this behavior skews the paternity rates for individuals in larger male coalitions.
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In contrast, female lions are egalitarian. Unlike some social carnivores, such as wolves and hyenas, all of the adult females in a pride reproduce, and female lions don’t have a dominance hierarchy, which often dictates reproductive success in other species. Furthermore, a key attribute of lion society is that females breed synchronously, which means that there are often more estrous females available at one time than there are resident males. Males cannot usually defend more than one female at a time, but they willingly mate with additional females if possible. Thus, if estrous females outnumber males, the “excess” females—those that aren’t actively guarded—are free to choose among coalition males. The bottom line is that this social system provides opportunities for sexual selection based on male-male competition and mate choice. This combination is not entirely surprising. Although historical studies of sexual selection focused on one or the other hypothesis, more recent work demonstrates that the two mechanisms often operate together.
Source: https://t-tees.com
Category: WHY
