201518Oct17:26

Secrets of female African lion repro­duc­tion revealed

Infor­ma­tion
pub­lished 18 Octo­ber 2015 | mod­i­fied 18 Octo­ber 2015
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African lion cubs SmithsonianFor the first time ever, zoos will have access to the most com­pre­hen­sive infor­ma­tion about female African lion repro­duc­tion as the result of an eight-​year study from the Smith­son­ian Con­ser­va­tion Biol­ogy Insti­tute (SCBI) and part­ners. The find­ings were pub­lished Tues­day, 13 Octo­ber, in the sci­en­tific jour­nal PLOS ONE, and should lead to a more sta­ble pop­u­la­tion under human care.

The lion repro­duc­tive cycle has been a mys­tery for many years, but now we have a base­line for what hor­mone lev­els should look like and how to diag­nose fer­til­ity prob­lems in ani­mals that are not fol­low­ing those patterns.
« Sarah Put­man, lead author, tech­ni­cian in the endocrinol­ogy lab at SCBI

Main­tain­ing a healthy pop­u­la­tion of any species requires a basic under­stand­ing of their repro­duc­tive biol­ogy,” said Putman.

From 2004 to 2014, 19 zoos, includ­ing the Smithsonian’s National Zoo, pro­vided SCBI with fae­cal sam­ples from 38 female lions, rang­ing in age from 0.9 to 13.9 years. Using those sam­ples, researchers from SCBI were able to deter­mine the length of preg­nancy for a lion, the hor­mone pat­tern that con­firms preg­nancy or non-​pregnancy, the aver­age age that lions begin their repro­duc­tive cycle and the asso­ci­ated body weight, and the length of effec­tive­ness of spe­cific contraceptives.

SCBI has a long his­tory of devel­op­ing and using these non-​invasive hor­mone mon­i­tor­ing tech­niques to bet­ter under­stand a num­ber of species,” said Bud­han Pukazhen­thi, a repro­duc­tive phys­i­ol­o­gist at SCBI, co-​author on the paper and repro­duc­tive advi­sor for the Asso­ci­a­tion of Zoos and Aquar­i­ums’ African Lion Species Sur­vival Plan (SSP). “When zookeep­ers were strug­gling to breed lions and the prob­lem was pre­sented to us, our expe­ri­ence made SCBI best-​suited to con­duct this study with part­ner sup­port and enthu­si­asm from ani­mal care staff.”

Live lion cub births at Smithsonian’s National Zoo, 2 March 2014:

His­tor­i­cally lions had been easy to breed com­pared to other great cats, most of which are soli­tary. In 1994, the SSP put a mora­to­rium on lion breed­ing after a boom in the pop­u­la­tion. Once that mora­to­rium was lifted in 1999, how­ever, sci­en­tists were baf­fled by a short­age of births. This kind of boom and bust cycle should be pre­vented with the results of this study. SCBI sci­en­tists are also final­iz­ing a sim­i­lar base­line study for male African lion reproduction.

The next step in the research is to develop arti­fi­cial insem­i­na­tion tech­niques for lions as a man­age­ment tool, in addi­tion to bank­ing frozen sperm from male lions to pre­serve genes that could later help strengthen the health of or grow the pop­u­la­tion, Pukazhen­thi said.


(Source: Smith­son­ian National Zoo­log­i­cal Park press release, 13.10.2015)


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