Author Archives: Simon Black

Barbary lions as part of the wider story of the species Panthera leo

The Barbary lion was isolated in the Maghreb in North eastern Africa where the Atlas Mountains provided a natural barrier to the encroachment of the Sahara to the south. The map below shows the distribution (in green). Lions formerly ranged across Africa, the middle east, southern central Asia into India. Only the most inhospitable deserts and impenetrable rainforests and swamps were free of lions.

The demise of the Barbary lion population in North Africa in the 1800s and 1900s mirrored the disappearance of the Asiatic lion from the Middle East over the same period. IN more recent times the shrinking of populations in Central and West Africa has been equally alarming.

Today lion populations are extremely fragmented as indicated by the blue patches in the map. The only stronghold of the Asiatic lion is in the Gir Forest in Gujarat, India (although lions form this national park have since started to spread west to coastal forests and scrub and on occasions north into the mountains bordering Pakistan).

Distribution of lions (Panthera leo) past and present Adapted by S Black

Further links on past and present distributions of charismatic species:

https://www.thedodo.com/8-shocking-infogrpahics-that-s-602830279.html

Big shaggy beast & other myths

Contemporary descriptions of the fabled Barbary Lion tend to emphasise the size, hairiness and ferocity of the sub-species. It would seem that these views are a mix of ancient historical accounts (for example use of the lions in the Roman Coliseum Games), descriptions of the animals as ‘large maned’ and perhaps some exaggerated hunting records.

Scientific accounts give a more sober view. Both Guggisberg (1963) and Hemmer (1978) describe the animal as a medium sized lion. However it did perhaps have a thickset build, emphasised by a relatively short leg length and deep body when compared with lions on the African savannah. These features may have been an adaptation to a mountainous habitat, with a different mix of prey species and are reflected in some of the artistic images of the animal.

One of the most striking depictions is the Arab Courier taxidermy by Jules Verreaux, arguably the most spectacular (and at one time controversial) taxidermy ever created and which is now housed in the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburg. This diorama includes two mounted lions thought to be of North African origin (but not yet genetically tested), collected as wild shot individuals in the mid 1800s, certainly no later than its creation in 1867 for the Paris Exposition. Interestingly the attack on the camel is by a pair – male and female, suggesting, if collected together, they were both sexually mature adults (however dozens of barbary lions were shot by French colonial hunters in Algeria around this period, so we cannot be sure that they are a true pair).

The ferocity of the attack is evident in the diorama, but interestingly, both animals are of relatively modest size. The medium sized animals described by science, perhaps?

Further Reading:

Guggisberg C.A.W. (1963) Simba: the life of the lion. London: Bailey Bros. and Swinfen

Hemmer H. (1978) Grundlagen und derzeitiger Stand des Zuchtprogrammes zur Rückerhaltung des Berberlöwen (Panthera leo leo). In: Seifurt S, Müller P, editors. Congress Report, 1st International Symposium on the Management and Breeding of the Tiger, 11^th and 12^th October 1978 in Leipzig, Abb. 1. Zoological Garden. Leipzig: International Tiger Studbook. 65–72.

Yamaguchi N, Haddane B. (2002) The North African Barbary lion and the Atlas Lion Project. International Zoo News 49 (321): 465-481.

History of Moroccan Royal Lions

Lions in the Sultan’s palace at Fez circa 1920

The traditional royal collection of lions in Morocco is an important part of the Barbary lion story. The sultans of Morocco kept animals in palace gardens for centuries and lion cubs were offered by tribes from the Atlas mountains as tributes to the ruler. In the 1500s and 1600s prisoners were reputedly thrown in with the beasts; artwork produced at the time alludes to this practice. By the 1800s the collection had become more benign and the lions in the palace at Fez were eventually transferred to a purpose built Rabat Zoo in the late 1960s.

The label “Moroccan Royal Lion” was revived in the paper by Yamaguchi and Haddane (December, 2002) which revisited the history of the animals of the royal collection in Morocco and links to certain lions in zoos today.

The television series ‘Museum Secrets’ series included some background on the Barbary lion in an early episode on London’s Natural History Museum, the home of lion skulls discovered in the Tower of London in the 1930s. The following clip includes a short historical overview of the potential link between the Moroccan Royal lions found in zoos and the Barbary lion.

Museum Secrets Season 1 (Natural History Museum

The Mediterranean Maghreb

The Barbary lion lived in the Mediterranean Maghreb, the northern, mountainous area separated from the rest of Africa by the Sahara, with the Atlantic coastline to the West and the Mediterranean sea to the north. Historically the species was seen in the lowlands to the coast right up to the High Atlas (at 4000m). This varied ecosystem included snow in the winter months in the Atlas mountains, dry forests in the lower valleys and arid plains south of the Atlas edging the desert.

The following figure shows the distribution of lions as sighted between the years 1500 and 1900 (see Black et al 2013). Light green shading indicates Mediterranean scrubland ecosystems running from Morocco in the west along North Africa, north of the Atlas, Saharan Atlas and Tell Atlas mountain ranges into Tunisia. Few if any lions survived east of this region (in Libya) after 1700.

Earliest accounts in the western Maghreb from 16^th to the 18^th century are indicated as open circles, whilst documented sightings from 1800 to 1900 are indicated as black circular markers in the western Maghreb and as triangular markers for sightings in eastern Maghreb. Asterisks (*) denote locations of human population centers. Dashed lines indicate national boundaries.

The Worrying Decline of Lions in West Africa

The Barbary lion story of decline and survival in remote micro populations rarely encountered by humans is relevant to the current demise of lions in West Africa. Lions have been reduced to perhaps just 250 individuals across the entire region. Just 10 years ago estimates for the population in this region ranged from between 850 and 1163 lions, suggesting something like a 75% decline over the decade since.

A brief article outlines some of the recent research findings.

The BBC produced a nice article on this topic with a range of information

It is likely that radical approaches will be required to sustain lion populations in future. For example the establishment of fenced reserves is currently being seen as one part of the solution.

Brian Clark Howard has summarised the situation well in National Geographic Daily News – click on their map link below.

Ancient DNA work opens the book on Barbary lion genetics

Several research studies over the last few years have started to identify where the lions of North Africa sit in the family tree of lion populations across the globe.

The 2006 paper by Barnett, Yamaguchi, Barnes and Cooper explored how mitochondrial DNA sequences could be used to differentiate lion populations, using ancient samples of known origin. This work included identification of a sequence apparently unique to Barbary lions. These techniques were used to confirm that the lion skulls retrieved from the moat of the Tower of London in the 1930s were in fact Barbary lions (these skulls are now held by the Natural History Museum).

In the same year Burger and Hemmer published mitochondrial DNA analysis of a cub derived from the collection of the King of Morocco, now held at Rabat zoo.

A recent follow-on study by Barnett et al (2014) has continued to show similarities between Barbary lions and Asiatic lions, differentiating them form sub-Saharan African lions.

Matt Walker at the BBC Nature website has written a good summary of the latest research.

Recent extinction of lions from North Africa

Popular consensus is that the last lions disappeared from Morocco nearly one hundred years ago, clinging on in the remote Atlas mountains up to the 1920s, but exterminated from the rest of North Africa much earlier and certainly by the 1890s. However recent research has challenged this view.

The established consensus was previously, based largely on the historical accounts of colonial travelers and European big game hunters. Although Ángel Cabrera (1932), Charles Guggisberg (1963) and Helmut Hemmer (1978) recognised the possibility of later survival in remote areas, Yamaguchi and Haddane (2002) were the first to identify reports of a specific sighting later than 1930. Separate to this, in Algeria, ongoing research over recent years has uncovered an extensive set of eyewitness accounts from local people. A deeper examination of historical and first hand oral reports by local people in Morocco and Algeria identified how micro populations of lions survived in remote regions across the North African Maghreb. The study (Black, Fellous, Yamaguchi and Roberts, 2013) uses recently gathered data on the last sightings of the Barbary lion in Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco makes for interesting reading:

See: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0060174

The research has prompted a number of interesting summaries for example John Platt’s blog article in Scientific American.

Research on the zoo population of lions from the Moroccan Royal Collection

The link below takes you to the 2010 article which identified the total population of animals derived from the collection of the King of Morocco, which was moved from the lion garden at the palace in Rabat to a then newly constructed Rabat zoo in 1969.

Since that time several animals and their progeny have moved to zoos around the globe. Their descendents are now only found in zoos in Europe and Israel, plus the remaining animals in Morocco, recently moved to a modern park, le Jardin Zoologuique de Rabat.

A number of other zoos across the globe claim to have animals descended from this lineage, or considered descendents of the Barbary lion, but have this provenance is yet to be confirmed.

The research article on Moroccan and European-based animals can be found here:

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10344-009-0280-5

Welcome to the blog

A new resource for natural history and research on the Barbary lion