Two African lion brothers recently broke the record for the longest documented swim across a body of water. The swim was made more impressive by the fact that the water was teeming with crocodiles and one of the lions has only three legs.
The pair of African lions (Panthera leo), locally known as Jacob and Tibu, swam roughly 1.5 kilometers (0.9 miles) across Uganda’s Kazinga channel in Queen Elizabeth National Park in February. Researchers documented the historic swim with a thermal camera attached to a drone. Before this, lions have been documented swimming just 10-100 meters (32-328 feet).
Jacob, the three-legged 10-year-old lion, is somewhat famous in the region. Researchers have been documenting the challenges of his life for years.
“I’d bet all my belongings that we are looking at Africa’s most resilient lion: he has been gored by a buffalo, his family was poisoned for lion body part trade, he was caught in a poacher’s snare and finally lost his leg in another attempted poaching incident where he was caught in a steel trap,” Alexander Braczkowski, a conservation biologist at Australia’s Griffith University and lead researcher on the study, says in a statement.
The Kazinga channel is well-known locally for having a high density of crocodiles, the study’s authors write. On land, lions are known to hunt crocs occasionally, but in water lions are at a huge disadvantage. Yet, the researchers observed the brothers swimming across the channel six times.
Their biggest motivation, the researchers say, was likely a lack of lionesses locally. The brothers live in Kazinga village region. But the highest density of lionesses is on the other side of the channel in the Mweya-Kasenyi region. Once there, though, the brothers also encountered Mweya-Kasenyi’s male lions. The researchers observed two occasions in which Jacob and Tibu fought with the resident male lions over territory, forcing the brothers to swim back across the croc-filled channel.
There is a bridge across the channel, the authors write, but it is guarded by two armed guards. The researchers suggest the lion brothers took the risky croc-filled swim to avoid human contact.
African lions have vanished from more than 90% of their historic range, largely due to habitat loss and fragmentation. The species is locally extinct in 26 African countries and is currently listed as vulnerable on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List. In Uganda, lions are found mainly in the three largest savanna parks.
Reduction in habitat forces lions to take risks, the researchers say, like crossing dangerous water bodies, to find food and mates. One upside of this finding, the researchers write, is that it changes the understanding of what should be considered a barrier between lion populations. “We urge future research to explore these long-distance swimming behaviors and functional habitat connectivity of big cats in human-dominated landscapes,” they conclude.
Banner image: Jacob and Tibu courtesy of Griffith University
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