Study to look at risk for giraffes living alongside lions in the wild
RESEARCHERS ARE calling for an urgent review into how populations of giraffes are managed in the wild when living alongside lions.
The giraffe population has declined by 40 per cent in the past 30 years, with lions the primary predator to the world’s tallest mammals.
In a first, a study from the University of Bristol investigated the impact of the presence of lions on giraffe populations in the wild.
It found that the number of calves is likely to be reduced up to 82 per cent when lions are kept in the same conservation area as giraffes.
The work, published in the journal PLOS One, examined giraffe populations at two adjacent sites in Kenya – one with no lions and one with a high density of lions.
In areas with no lions, juvenile giraffes – less than a year old – made up 34 per cent of the population, but made up only six per cent in areas with lions. Zoe Muller, a PhD student at the University of Bristol, warned of an “unrecoverable situation” if giraffe calves continued to decline.
“This research has significant practical implications,” she said.
“Giraffes are a threatened species, suffering ongoing decline in the wild, and this research highlights how managing giraffes alongside lions inside a conservation area – a common practice in Africa – has detrimental effects for giraffe populations. The continual loss of juveniles within a population due to lion predation may lead to an unrecoverable situation where the population crashes, since population growth and sustainability rely on enough calves surviving until they are sexually mature.”
She called for an “urgent reassessment” of how populations of giraffes are managed in the wild, given their “severe and ongoing decline”.