Mating Rituals

mating info

The reproductive cycle begins when a female becomes sexually receptive, a condition known as “estrus”. Males periodically sniff the female and her urine for signs of oncoming receptivity. In the final days before estrus, a male will often follow the female until she is ready to mate. Females may also solicit mating with agitated tail movements, “walking sinuously past” a male and assuming a mating position. During mating, the male often bites the female on the back of her neck; as the male starts to dismount, the female often snarls with bared teeth and swats at the male while rolling over on her back.

Females remain in estrus for approximately four days, mating 2–3 times an hour. The “consorting” male actively guards the estrus female from his companions, and fighting occurs if another male gets too close. If females fail to conceive they will re-enter estrus approximately two weeks later.

Lions give birth 3.5 months after conception and hide their cubs in dense thickets or kopjes until they are old enough to join the rest of the pride at about 5–6 weeks of age. Cubs subsist entirely on their mother’s milk until they are about six weeks old and are weaned by about eight months of age but remain dependent on their mothers until their second birthday. Females that lose their litters return to estrus within a week, otherwise mothers do not begin to breed again until their cubs are about 18 months old. Mothers will fight to the death to protect their cubs but will abandon starving cubs if they cannot provide for them.

Resident males sire all the cubs born their tenure in a pride and contribute to the care of their offspring. Fathers not only protect their cubs from strange lions, they also capture prey animals that are too large for the mothers to catch—and a buffalo or giraffe carcass will easily feed an entire pride. Males generally remain at a distance from the maternity group when the cubs are small, but older cubs will approach and try to play with their fathers. Occasionally an adult son will join his fathers’ coalition and move with them to a new pride.

When a new male coalition first takes over a pride, the cubs represent a major impediment to their reproduction. Mothers of surviving cubs will not mate again until their offspring are at least 18 months of age but will mate within days if their cubs are lost. Thus, incoming males are unwilling to be stepfathers and kill all the young cubs in their new pride; infanticide accounts for a quarter of all cub deaths. Although subadults often escape from infanticidal males, they become outcasts and must fend for themselves and suffer the risks of starvation and attacks from neighboring prides. Mothers will occasionally accompany evicted subadults until they reach independence.

Mothers directly defend their offspring against attacks by outside males, and females also reduce the risks of infanticide by inciting competition between rival males such that they only conceive again after the largest available coalition has become resident in their pride.

Female lions will kill the cubs of rival prides, but they never kill the cubs of their pridemates. The “egalitarianism” of female lions is strikingly different from the despotic behavior of wolves, wild dogs and many other species where dominant females prevent subordinates from breeding.

A male takeover resets the reproductive clocks of all the females in a pride such that pridemates often give birth synchronously. Mothers of similarly aged cubs form a “crèche” and remain together for 1–2 years. Crèche-mates often nurse each other’s cubs, though they give priority to their own offspring followed by the offspring of their closest relatives. Mothers of singleton cubs produce the same amount of milk as mothers of large litters, and single-cub mothers are the least discriminating in their nursing.

The primary advantage of forming a crèche is that a group of females is better able to protect their young against infanticide. Males are 1.5 times larger than females, so a male can easily overpower a lone mother, whereas a crèche with at least two mothers can successfully protect at least some of their cubs against an extra-pride male. However, the crèche can only withstand a brief male incursion, so the females must also rely on protection from their resident males, who patrol the pride territory and fiercely repel outside males.