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The future of this spectacular species may depend on such experiments. Last fall animal conservationists were caught catnapping when a new survey revealed a sharp and unexpected drop in Africa's lion population. While the cat-conservation world was worried about the fate of Asia's endangered tigers, lions--considered vulnerable but not endangered--were quietly slipping toward oblivion. Ten years ago, the species was thought to number as many as 100,000. But the new appraisal, made public last September and published in the journal Oryx in January by Hans Bauer of Leiden University and Sarel van der Merwe of the African Lion Working Group, was a paltry 23,000. More than half live in six protected areas, which is why tourists in Kenya's Masai Mara or South Africa's Kruger National Park can still see plenty of lions. But outside these megazoos, lions appear to be in alarming decline.
Why? For the same reasons that virtually all the world's big cats--tigers, cheetahs, snow leopards, jaguars and, to a lesser degree, cougars--are in trouble, reasons that have to do with the very nature of being a top cat in a world dominated by the top primate. Moreover, the reasons point to the limits--and ultimate failure--of the traditional strategy for safeguarding big cats: protecting them in wildlife reserves.
Big cats, by nature, are territorial, live in low densities and hunt their prey over vast stretches of land (a tiger in the Russian Far East roams over 400 sq. mi., and a cheetah in Namibia will traverse 600 sq. mi.). A wildlife reserve has to be huge to support such animals, and even large parks can contain just so many of the fiercely territorial creatures. Big cats that roam or live outside reserves increasingly find themselves on turf staked out by farmers, herders and loggers, especially in parts of Africa and Asia where the human population is booming. Wild prey and cat-friendly habitat are scarce. Instead, the cats encounter humans who don't hesitate to use guns and poison to protect themselves and their livelihoods. Poachers only add to the cat catastrophe. "Clearly, protected areas alone are not the solution," says Joshua Ginsberg of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), which is based at New York City's Bronx Zoo.
Even populations inside wildlife sanctuaries are not necessarily secure. In 1994 one-third of the lions in the Serengeti died from an outbreak of canine distemper, a viral infection transmitted by feral dogs. Inbreeding, a problem on small, isolated reserves, makes big cats more vulnerable to disease. African lions, says Frank, who is also funded by WCS, "are heading toward the tiger situation in Asia--small populations in widely separated national parks. Inbreeding, disease and political instability [which has sometimes disrupted management of parks] will soon destroy those populations."
In his recent book on large predators, Monster of God (Norton; 2003), naturalist David Quammen is equally pessimistic: "The last wild, viable, free-ranging populations of big flesh eaters will disappear sometime around the middle of the next century." Quammen argues that as the world's population continues to rise, alpha predators will be squeezed out.