W. African lions under threat of extinction
He’s studied bears in Alberta, hares in the Yukon, wolves in Ontario and lynx in Montana. Now a Canadian ecologist with an impressive record of wildlife research across North America has lent his expertise to a landmark — and deeply discouraging — study of West African lions, which are destined to disappear without urgent action to end illegal hunting of the beasts and moves to protect their fragmented territories.
University of Alberta scientist Cole Burton and seven colleagues from Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Britain, Australia and the United States have just published the grim results of the sixyear assessment of lion populations from Senegal to Nigeria, concluding that the animals now occupy barely one per cent of their traditional range and have suffered plunging numbers from tens of thousands in historical times to just 400 individuals today.
The lion’s “catastrophic collapse” in the region, detailed in the latest issue of the Public Library of Science journal PLOS ONE, is made all the more tragic by other recent research that suggests the West African cats represent a genetically distinct sub-set of the continent’s overall lion population, which includes about 25,000 of the iconic felines in Africa’s eastern and southern regions.
Burton’s work in Africa was informed by his Canadian research. And it is now influencing his ongoing wildlife studies in Alberta, where he’s using the same kinds of “camera traps” employed in monitoring African lions to carry out mammal-population experiments aimed at protecting grizzlies, caribou and other species.
Describing motion-sensitive, infrared cameras as an “increasingly important tool for wildlife surveys,” Burton said the technology was key to gaining accurate counts of West African lions and is likewise indispensable in estimating animal populations in Canada, especially “for some of the more secretive, smaller carnivores — bobcats, lynx, martens, fishers — you can get a lot of good information.”
But the findings in the West African study, which was funded by the U.S.based conservation group Panthera and headed by its top lion expert, Philipp Henschel, convinced the international research team that the region’s vanishing lion population should immediately be declared “critically endangered” and emergency protection measures should be enacted in the few tiny pockets of viable habitat left of the creature’s historic range — a startling 98.9 per cent of which, the scientists concluded, has been lost.
“The situation for the lion in West Africa is dire,” they warn, urging swift action to “correctly recognize the genetic uniqueness of West African populations” and — owing to the “relative poverty” of nations in the region — “the mobilization of substantial and urgent investment by the international community.”
The Ontario-born Burton, a researcher with the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute who is also affiliated with B.C.’s University of Victoria, said his fieldwork focused on assessing the status of lions in Ghana — a country he was particularly thrilled to work in because his father had spent years there studying livestock farming as a visiting scientist from the University of Guelph.
But the results of Burton’s research in Ghana typified the team’s overall findings.
“Our experience was a quest for the lions, and then increasing frustration and disappointment as we realized that they weren’t where we expected them to be,” he said. “The unfortunate result was that we were able to document that lions appear to have declined quite significantly to the point of being lost from all of the parks (in Ghana).”
In the country’s Mole nature reserve, Burton’s primary study zone, the Canadian’s only encounter with a member of the species came when he was shown the severed head of what may have been Ghana’s last wild lion. In addition to the loss of former lion “strongholds” such as Mole, hunting of the animals for bush meat or as “bycatch” in traps set to snare lions’ prey is considered a leading cause of the precipitous population decline.
In some places, lion parts are coveted for traditional medicine. Ironically, when one of Burton’s field assistants broke his leg in a motorcycle accident, he was fitted with a split made from lion bones.
“Here’s this guy working on the lion conservation project,” said Burton, “and he was getting first-hand experience in one of the uses of lions.”
The real or perceived threat lions pose to livestock in the region is also blamed for many deaths annually as farmers try to protect their herds from Africa’s apex predator.
Burton and his colleagues argue in the published paper that efforts to prevent the lion from dying out in West Africa by protecting its few remaining refuges could help save other species on the brink of extinction.
“Lions persist in some of the largest and most intact protected landscapes in West Africa, where they cooccur with some of the last remaining populations of critically endangered mammals including Northwest African cheetahs, Western giant elands and African wild dogs,” the study states. “Further deterioration of those last wilderness areas in West Africa will likely cause the loss of genetically distinct populations of charismatic megafauna, and further preclude already tenuous, potential future revenue streams from photographic tourism for West African nations. Without immediate action, we believe the opportunity to save both will be lost.”