![]() Photo by Thomson Safaris guest, Neil Rabinowitzįemales will stay with the pride their entire lives, but males are ejected when they start to grow their manes, around two years of age. ![]() ![]() Overall, somewhere between 60 and 70% of the cubs will die within their first year, and even fewer-about 1 in 8, or 12.5%-live to adulthood (lions mature around two years old).īut another major killer of lion cubs is even crueler than starvation: it’s other lions. Injury, teething, and disease can also carry off young cubs. If she stayed with the pride to give birth, a lioness’s milk would likely never make it to her own young. That explains part of the reason lions go into hiding when giving birth lionesses will allow any cub in the pride to suckle (they group-mother the cubs), and older cubs are as hungry for mother’s milk as brand-new-babies. And once cubs have returned to the pride, when food is scarce, they often go unfed, meaning they regularly starve. A female lion has only four teats, so litters larger than four generally won’t all survive. Part of that is just the harshness of life in the wild many lion cubs starve, both in infancy and beyond. The odds are already stacked against a female lion bringing a cub to term though pregnancies last just three and a half months, and female lions can go into estrus (a period of fertility) at any time of the year, it’s estimated that a female must copulate, on average, 3,000 times for each cub that survives past a year. Why all the secrecy? It’s simple: survival. Once a female lion realizes she’s going into labor, she’ll sneak away from the pride and hide herself in a secret lair, where she’ll give birth to a litter of 2-6 cubs and stay with them for around three months. Lions, though, are notoriously secretive, if not about their pregnancies, than at least about giving birth. We’ve all heard of someone trying to hide a pregnancy the entire period-drama genre would implode without the trope.īut usually, that someone is human, not feline. ![]()
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