EcoTraining’s newest online course gives a rare glimpse into the secret lives of lions and the knowledge and insights needed for lion conservation across the African continent.
Ask Dr Paul Funston what a thriving lion population looks like, and he gives you a simple metric: the average number of adult females per pride. That number, he says, should be four. A single figure that tells a scientist almost everything they need to know about how a lion population is functioning.
“If I went into an area and the data showed that the average number of adult lionesses per pride was four, I would immediately know that the population of lions is in its best possible state,” he explains. “If, on the other hand, the average was two adult females, I’d know that there is high adult female mortality, and high cub mortality – and those two things are most likely being driven by humans.”
Here, he’s referring to poaching. The biggest threat facing lions today is the commercial poaching of their prey: when ungulate populations (think buffalo and zebra, as well as antelope like impala, kudu and nyala) are depleted, cubs starve, and adults fall victim to the same snares set for the bushmeat trade. Lions also fall foul to poachers’ snares, gin-traps and poison set for other species; generally referred to as bycatch. Persecution along reserve boundaries – lions killed in retaliation for livestock predation – adds further pressure, as do roads and railway lines that intersect protected areas. Increasingly, however, it is the targeted poaching of lions for body parts that is raising alarm. Claws, teeth and bones are being harvested for the traditional medicine or ‘muthi’ and ‘luxury goods’ trade (both in Africa and abroad). It is, says Funston, “a rising and potentially huge threat.”
And underpinning almost all of it is a chronic funding shortfall: Funston and colleagues estimate that it costs around two billion US dollars annually to properly manage the protected area network where lions occur in Africa. Currently, roughly a fifth of that is being invested.
“We have to find the difference,” says Funston. “We have to implement programmes that focus on park security and park management, and programmes that connect to the communities around protected areas.”
But education is key. EcoTraining’s Inside the Pride comes at a time when poaching and trophy hunting across Africa, and captive lion breeding in South Africa, are making headlines. Rather than fanning the flames of controversy, the new online course focuses on lion biology, behaviour, social structure, communication and conservation – subjects Funston has studied for the better part of his 30-year career.
Myths, misconceptions and the secret life of male lions
EcoTraining MD, Anton Lategan, believes it is the perfect course for field guides, conservation students, wildlife professionals and anyone with a serious interest in lion ecology and conservation – including teams within national parks looking to design and implement scalable conservation programmes.
“Lions are, paradoxically, both the most iconic and misunderstood of Africa’s wild animals,” says Lategan. “This three-week course covers everything from the evolution and ecology of the lion to pride dynamics, coalitions, territorial battles, survival strategies and more. Importantly, it also covers current threats to lions and the conservation responses required.”
It is a fascinating journey into the heart of the pride alongside Funston, with many myths debunked along the way.
“People think male lions don’t hunt and kill for themselves. They very much do,” says Funston. Male lions, he explains, spend the vast majority of their territorial lives patrolling and defending the pride’s home range – keeping it safe so that females can raise cubs in the core of that space. “Both sexes invest a long time in their offspring. Females invest three years, males two years, to make sure the cubs have the best chance of making it.”
The second misconception runs deeper. Many people assume that lion prides operate around a dominant female – a matriarch, a leader. In fact, lions are what Funston describes as an egalitarian society. “All female lions have the same rank as each other in a pride, and all males in a coalition generally have the same rank as each other. They don’t fight over status. They make group decisions in most things; but individual decisions when breeding,” says Funston.
“When lionesses detect prey, they stop, and they all stand next to each other. They look at each other, then decide which way to go. There are no roles. It’s cooperative decision-making.”
This cooperative architecture – shared duties, no hierarchy, no laggards – is not incidental to lion society. It is the reason lions became social in the first place. As the most abundant and dominant large carnivore in African savannahs, lions cannot survive the territorial pressures of that abundance alone.
They coalesce into prides and male coalitions because, as a group, they can hold space, defend cubs from infanticidal males, and regulate their territories in ways no individual animal could sustain. “The whole fundamental reason why lions are social,” Funston says, “is that as a group, they will cooperate to keep that space safe to raise cubs in.”
Understanding this – really understanding it – matters enormously for conservation. And this is where Inside the Pride moves from fascinating to genuinely important.
The cost of not knowing
For years, scientists working in West and Central Africa observed lion populations that appeared to have a fundamentally different social structure to those in Eastern and Southern Africa. What those studies couldn’t account for, Funston suggests, is that the lions themselves were already compromised – socially disrupted by human killing, persecution and poaching.
Once those reserves were properly managed, the lions reverted to the same basic social fabric seen everywhere else: prides of around 12 to 14 animals: four females, two males, six to eight cubs (once they have survived the first year). “That’s the way lions evolved to live when we don’t kill them as rapidly as we do,” says Funston. “The magic number is four lionesses per pride.”
If you get it right for lions …
Protecting lions has a positive knock-on effect. Lions are both a keystone species and an umbrella species, meaning if you manage a landscape for lions, you are almost certainly managing it well for a whole host of other species too. Remove them, and the system begins to collapse. “If you get it right for lions,” he says, “you’re probably going to protect the vast majority of other species as well, and retain critical ecosystem functioning.”
This is why Inside the Pride is more than a course for wildlife enthusiasts, though it is unmistakably that too. Funston says he hopes the material reaches conservation managers and government officials – people who are making decisions about how reserves are run, but who may never have been given the tools to understand what “right” actually looks like for lions. “I don’t think there’s a game reserve in Africa where managers have explicitly said: we want to manage towards having an average of four adult females per pride,” he says. “That target – four – tells you about the health of the whole system. That’s the message I want to get out.”
Although the first run of the course is almost over, the lectures have been enthralling. Allowing field guides, conservationists and advocates to deepen their knowledge. Ensuring wildlife professionals have the latest information. Sharing new science – and giving advice on how guides and rangers can photograph them, should be interacting with them, and communicating about them.
“What I’d love is for people to leave this course able to communicate about lions with confidence,’ says Funston. “To correct the misconceptions that still exist – and to convey, clearly, what is required when it comes to protecting Africa’s lions.”
The team at EcoTraining believe this course hands wilderness guides something no guidebook ever could. It offers the kind of deep, nuanced understanding of lion society
that transforms how you see every pride you encounter in the bush, and how you speak about them with conviction.
Immerse yourself in the African wilderness, expand your knowledge, and embark on a transformative learning experience with EcoTraining.
Sign up for our Inside the Pride Course today!
For more information on our Inside the Pride Course, contact [email protected] or call +27 (0)13 7522532
Lioness stepping into the Water
We join Christoff Els as he shares with us a very different kind of encounter. While out on an activity with a new group of EcoTraining students, they came across a pride of lions. One lioness showed great interest in something lying in the water. At first glance, it appeared to be a rock; however, it was an Eland carcass. Then it happened…the lioness carefully stepped into the water… Let’s take a look and see how it played out…
