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| credit: Panthera |
Ten thousand years ago the lion
(Panthera leo) was the most populous land predator not counting man. Its range extended across the Eurasian and African continents and into the New World. Africa alone was home to hundreds of thousands of lions of regional subspecies.
The Sahara Desert once harbored the the North African lion but the last Algerian lion was shot in 1891. Once the West African lion ranged continuously from Senegal to Nigeria. Today a new report from
Panthera, the organization dedicated to conservation of large felines, concludes this subspecies is dangerously close to extinction. Dr. Phillip Henschel the organization's lion survey head and his team found just 250 adult lions capable of breeding remained in five countries during a exhaustive six year study that covered eleven countries where lions were thought to live: Senegal, Nigeria and a group living in a trans-border area of Benin, Niger and Burkina Faso. The study published in
PLOS ONE shows lions are enduring a catastrophic collapse in West Africa. They are genetically distinct from other lions including those few in zoos or other captivity. Whether these unique lions can be save from extinction is problematic. The five East African countries they live in now are desperately poor with no funds for a coherent breeding program or protection from human predation or habitat loss. Lions are under threat across the continent of Africa as human populations expand converting savanna to crop land and expanding livestock herds. Less than 35,000 wild lions are estimated to remain. As large predators disappear from landscapes,
cascading ecological effects occur that have been documented by science. The decrease of lions and leopards in some parts of Africa have led to a dramatic increase in olive baboons which raid farm crops and livestock. Predators have a right to co-exist with man on Earth, but not only do they have a moral right they perform valuable ecological functions in the web of life as ecologist
Aldo Leopold (A Sand County Almanac) observed decades ago.