A leopard youngster is seen sucking on a lioness in photographs published from a Tanzanian wildlife reserve. Yes, you read that correctly.
A visitor at a guesthouse in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, a United Nations World Heritage site, took the photos in 2017. (Since then, another lioness has been seen nursing a leopard pup, which you can read about below.)
According to the Associated Press, Ingela Jansson, the leader of the KopeLion conservation group, the nursing lion may have lost her own cubs and was willing to feed the leopard youngster. Meanwhile, the leopard looked to have lost its mother.
“To witness anything like this is really unique,” Jansson said, comparing the extraordinary example of cross-species breastfeeding to “confusion at the store,” when the lion “picked up the incorrect baby.”
Some birds have been observed nursing chicks of another species whose eggs were unintentionally put in their nests, while wild cats and other animals of the same species have been known to adopt and breastfeed cubs that aren’t their own. However, according to Panthera, a wild cat conservation organization located in New York, this type of cross-species breastfeeding is highly unusual among wild cats.
“It’s incredibly strange,” Panthera’s president and chief conservation officer Luke Hunter remarked at the time of the new photographs. It was uncertain whether the leopard’s mother was still alive and could have retrieved the cub from “lioness day care,” which would have been the greatest possible ending, according to him.
Hunter warned, though, that “the natural chances are set against this young fella,” who may have been murdered by other lions who realized it wasn’t one of their own. He went on to say that even in normal circumstances, only 40% of lion cubs in the Serengeti ecosystem’s territory survive their first year.
Until this year, when a lioness adopted… well, another leopard baby in Gir National Park in Gujarat, India, this was the sole observation of a lioness nursing a leopard cub, or, in fact, any type of non-lion kid. According to the New York Times, the odd relationship in this case lasted much longer.
The cub was around two months old, with furry ears and blue eyes. He was a cute little guy. The lioness nursed and fed him for weeks, treating him as if he were one of her own two offspring of the same age. Despite all of the love, the young leopard perished after a few weeks.
The surprising discovery was made even more intriguing by the fact that Gir National Park’s lions and leopards generally do not get along. Not at all.
“They compete with each other” for space and food, according to Stotra Chakrabarti, a postdoctoral researcher who studies animal behavior at the University of Minnesota. “They’re always at odds.”
The instance was published in the ecology journal Ecosphere by Dr. Chakrabarti and colleagues. A conservation officer and a park ranger were among the writers who first noticed the unique family in late December 2018, hanging together near a recently slaughtered nilgai antelope.
The crew followed the mother lion, her two cubs, and the leopard throughout Gir National Park for the next six weeks. “The lioness treated him like one of her own,” Dr. Chakrabarti stated, “nursing him and sharing the meat from her hunts.”
The new siblings of the spotty little fellow were equally welcome, playing with him and even following him up trees. In one shot, the leopard cub is seen pouncing on the head of one of his adopted brothers, who is over twice his size and apparently a good sport. Dr. Chakrabarti described it as “two huge cubs and one little runt of the litter.”
Dr. Chakrabarti, who has been researching Gir’s lions for over seven years, said this was “perhaps the greatest ‘wow’ moment I’ve come across.” He pointed out that his colleagues working on an Asiatic lion conservation project in India, some of whom had been studying the big cats for decades, had “not seen anything like this.”
Asiatic lions, unlike their African counterparts, live in tiny, sex-segregated groups, with lionesses typically separating from the rest of the pride for a few months after giving birth and raising their young on their own. The leopard may have been discovered as an imposter if the temporary family had interacted more with other adult lions, according to Dr. Chakrabarti.
However, they would never know what would have happened in such a setting because the leopard cub’s carcass was discovered by a drinking hole after around 6 weeks. He died most likely as a result of a femoral hernia he had from birth, according to a field necropsy.
“It would have been amazing to watch how things would be as the leopard cub grew up,” Dr. Chakrabarti added. “However, that did not occur.”