Hans-Georg Michna writes ...

Bill,
thanks for the interesting information!
One reason for my belief is that I have seen
lions very often over many years, and I have always seen lions
that were very clearly one pride. I have also seen very small
prides, typically one male, one female, and one to three cubs.
... These small prides always moved carefully

Hans-Georg, I realize you have more experience in Africa and with lions
than I do and I respect that (I read your Kenya web pages carefully
before going ... my experience agrees with most of what you wrote
but the one thing that I was disagreeing with was when you said "Pride
males never tolerate any stranger males within their territory" because
it didn't agree with the research of Schaller for the Serengeti.

Schaller takes pains to make it clear the behavior he observed was for
the Serengeti lions and that research in other areas like Lake Manyara
and Nairobi National Parks and Ngorongoro Crater lions showed different
behaviors because of their different environments (typically less space
and fewer 'new' lions wandering by). While he agrees with you that
pride males are 'antagonistic' toward other pride males and nomads he
also writes "Nomads sometimes lived for weeks or months within a pride
area, and prides wandered with impunity around areas usually occupied
by others" (pg 62 in the paperback edition of "The Serengeti Lion").
He seems to feel this is partly because the pride territories are
larger than in other areas and partly because with the wildebeest
migration you have large numbers of nomads drifting thru pride turf
several times a year following the migration, so the pride males will
aggressively defend if a stranger seems to challenge them but will let
them pass if there is no challenge ... otherwise they'd spend too much
time fighting, given that up to 1/3 the adult lions in the area are
nomads in the dry season.

I have also seen very small prides, typically one
male, one female, and one to three cubs

It's interesting to compare this to the Serengeti ... Schaller lists
the pride sizes for the 14 main prides they studied for the first three
years before he wrote his book ... none of these prides had a single
male because there were so many nomads willing to challenge for
leadership ( all prides were controlled by 2-4 males in coalitions) and
none had a single female (one pride had two females and two males, a
few had 3-4 females, the rest up to 11 adult females) ... this is in
Table 2, pg 415 in case you can find this book at the library.

The nomad females were studied in more detail for Craig Packer's book
and of course most of these would be single mothers ... IIRC none of
these nomad females were able to raise a single cub because the cubs
were always killed when she would have to leave to hunt, either by
hyenas or other lions. So a pride with a single female would I assume
also have a tough time since the males don't help with feeding or
babysitting the cubs.

I might also point out that Schaller had a hard time distinguishing
nomads from pride members. I would think it would be easy (when I
first went I assumed groups of females with cubs were in a pride, for
example) but the more he studied the lions the more subtle the
interactions. As an example of this he mentions that the nomads would
often join together peacefully for a while (few hours, few days,
occasionally a few weeks on the plains during the wet season) and it
can be hard to tell whether they are a pride or not ... from page 65
.... "Some large groups {of nomads} may persist in one locality for
months and give the appearance of a pride before sudddenly splitting.
The compositions of three such large groups we 2 males, 7 females,
and 2 cubs; 5 males and 7 females; 2 males, 3 females, and 8 cubs."
Had I seen one of these groups I would have immediately thought it was
a pride, but this would be incorrect.

He also mentions how hard it was to ID all the members of a pride
because all members were rarely together and he felt it took several
months of observation to be certain lions were members of a given pride
.... "On one occasion I located several lionesses and cubs of the Masai
pride. Eleven kilometers away were several others belonging to the
same pride, and 5 km further on were the rest. The casual observer
would have no intimation that these animals belonged in fact to the
same pride. Not once in over three years of observation did I see all
the members of the Seronera pride together." I found that last
statement surprising given that for most of the study there were only 8
adult lions in this pride and it's the pride located closest to the
Serengeti Research Institute headquarters, so the most easily observed.

In reading this I remember a post from last fall where the guy was
surprised to see two groups of lions not too far apart ... from
Schaller's work you could reasonably infer they were likely members of
the same pride, though at least in the Serengeti you couldn't be sure
without observing both groups for quite a while. Interesting stuff ...

Bill