SuPer Qt, the Super Cute Lion
#### Today’s guest post is from Daniel Rosengren, one of the full-time field researchers on the Serengeti Lion Project. ####
The prettiest lion born in our study area lately got the code name “SPQ”. “SP” because she was born in the Spurs pride and “Q” because that’s the order she was born, starting from A. Fittingly, her more personal name thus became SuPer Qt (Super Cute). One might think that lions all look alike. But SuPer Qt definitely stands out with her striking looks.
The other day I found the still young SuPer Qt together with her mother and another adult female. They were resting in the tall grass, at least the old females were. SuPer Qt sat up scanning the plains around her for anything to eat. Suddenly lightning struck really near. Close enough not to give a thundering sound but a very loud bang. SuPer Qt jumped while the adults didn’t even react.
After the rain passed SuPer Qt spotted two warthogs in the distance and started stalking. She’s young but not too young to participate in hunts. The other females lifted their heads, saw the pigs and followed suit. I drove around in a big semi-circle to get closer without disturbing. The lions were lucky, the hogs walked straight towards them. Then their luck vanished, just like the warthogs down a burrow. At first, the lions seemed confused and looked around widely as they slowly pushed forward. I don’t know what gave the hiding place away but once the lions came within about 15 meters of the burrow they instantly knew the hogs were there.
All lions took turns digging. The two older and more experienced lions dug with more force and determination. SuPer Qt seemed to dig more randomly. Her inexperience showed in more comical ways too. Twice she managed to place herself in a position behind a digging lion, getting her face full of dirt. Another time she circled the burrow and instead of walking around the oldest female she decided to walk under it. Something got SuPer Qt’s attention down the hole and she stood up while still under the old female who got her hind legs air borne. The old female was too busy looking down the burrow to seem to notice. They stood like this for a good while until the old female ungracefully, one leg at the time, managed to get her hind feet on the ground again.
SuperQT getting a face full of dirt
Wrong place, wrong time.
After a long time of digging, the lions finally gave up. They lay down about 20 meters from the hole and rested. Half an hour or so later, the warthogs emerged. They were watched by the lions as they walked away but never had to run for it. The warthogs lived to see another day and must have had a very thrilling time.
Caracal
Today’s post is a guest post from Lora Orme, an undergraduate conducting directed research with us at the University of Minnesota.
Hailing from regions of Africa as well as India, the Middle East, and southwest Asia, the caracal prefers a dry habitat such as savanna or woodlands. This preference distinguishes the caracal from its feline cousin, the serval, which primarily lives in wetter climates. The difference encourages the caracal’s more open eating habits; the carnivorous caracal will hunt and consume almost any source of meat that is available, from rodents scurrying across the plains, to monkeys or birds overhead. In fact, the caracal is an expert bird hunter, using its powerful hind legs to leap up to ten feet in the air. That is twice as high as the height of the average human!
The caracal looks like a slightly overgrown housecat, around three feet long when full-grown. It has red-brown hair and very distinct facial markings. But the most distinguishing feature of the caracal is the ear tuft. These tassels of long black hair play an important role in pinpointing prey, working with 20 muscles within the ears themselves. The tufts may also act like little flags that help the caracal communicate with others of its kind. Visually, the tufts make a caracal resemble a lynx. For this and other similarities, the caracal has been nicknamed the “African lynx” or the “desert lynx.” It is important to discriminate, however, that the caracal has no spots or stripes, longer legs, and a slimmer body than the lynx. These characteristics allow the streamlined caracal to be among the fastest small cats.
Because of the caracal’s impressive agility, it was once bred in India as a status symbol and for the sport of bird hunting. Present day caracals are generally known to be elusive and secretive, camouflaging into tall grasses and quickly escaping from sight. However, if wild prey is scarce, caracals have been known to attack livestock and other domesticated animals. Due to the caracal’s natural tendency to hunt, they are sometimes considered pests and shot by ranchers.
Predatory instincts drive the caracal to live a solitary life when not mating. The majority of communication occurs in mews, hisses, and purrs with mates and kin. Even when a pair joins together to mate, the male does not stay to help raise the young. Thus, the female is left to watch over the litter of up to six kittens. She keeps them hidden in a burrow that has been borrowed from the den of an aardvark or porcupine. They stay hidden until they are one to two months of age and begin eating meat alongside their mother. Finally, when they reach about one year of age, they leave her side to begin lives and possibly families of their own.
And the winner is …
Surprisingly, the easiest animal to identify is the PORCUPINE. Of all porcupine images in Season 4, only two classifications were wrong. Here are the rankings for the top ten, along with the percentage correct for each animal.
| Rank | Animal | Percent Correct |
| 1 | Porcupine | 99.4% |
| 2 | Human | 99.2% |
| 3 | Ostrich | 98.3% |
| 4 | Giraffe | 97.1% |
| 5 | Elephant | 97.0% |
| 6 | Zebra | 95.9% |
| 7 | Hippopotamus | 95.1% |
| 8 | Guinea fowl | 92.1% |
| 9 | Wildebeest | 91.9% |
| 10 | Spotted hyena | 91.2% |
The Night Belongs to the Lions
Lions are a different species at night. During the day, they must remain hidden from their prey. But there is nothing secretive about a lion’s behavior on a moonless night. There is no skulking, no need to hide. The lions own the darkness.
The Kalahari Bushmen still live the traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyle of our ancestors, and they frequently hunt at night – but only when the moon is above the horizon and bright enough for human eyes to detect shapes and movements. Without the light of the moon, say the Bushmen, the night belongs to the lions. So they divide the night with the lions according to the phase of the moon.
And if there is a lunar eclipse? That is just a hungry lion, placing her paw in front of the full moon, stealing a little extra darkness.
The Serengeti lions don’t feed well on moonlit nights. Lions have fuller bellies around the new moon; they are thinnest at the full moon. To compensate, they scavenge or hunt more during daylight hours. Wild herbivores are available to lions throughout the night, no matter what the moon is doing. However, humans universally stay up until around 10:00 pm or so and sleep until sunrise. If we’re going to be out and about at night, we’re out in the evening not before dawn.
By the full moon, the hours after sunset are so bright that you can read a newspaper. But the next night, the moon doesn’t rise until an hour after sunset; by the fourth night, the darkness persists for over three hours before the moon finally rises.
Outbreaks of man-eating lions have killed hundreds of people in southern Tanzania over the past twenty years. These are agricultural areas where lions mostly survive on bush pigs – agricultural pests that cause people to sleep in their fields to protect their harvests. Thus pigs provide the link between lions and vulnerable humans.
Former graduate students Hadas Kushnir and Dennis Ikanda visited survivors and victims’ families and recorded the precise time and date of 450 attacks on humans. Most occurred between sunset and 10:00 pm, and while the last few nights before the full moon were the safest, the first few nights after the full moon were three-and-a-half times more dangerous. After enduring the bright evenings prior to the full moon, the lions were hungry, and they mostly attacked people upon the return of evening darkness.
The full moon can feel spooky, and humans have constructed moon-related myths about werewolves and lunacy and Halloween. But there is no linkage between moon phase and suicide or admission to psychiatric institutions.
So what if the full moon doesn’t make you crazy but just makes you nervous? What if it keeps you safely indoors for a couple of nights?
The full moon isn’t dangerous in itself, but after a few million years of dividing our nights with lions, it would be surprising if we didn’t somehow sense the monthly dividing line between our time and lion time.
—
Here you can read the original research article about lions and the full moon.
Bat-eared Fox
Today’s post is a guest post from Lora Orme, an undergraduate conducting directed research with us at the University of Minnesota.
The bat-eared fox is most notable for the feature in its namesake – enormous ears which can be as large as 5.3 inches long! In human terms, this may not seem like much. But the bat-eared fox only grows up to 11 to 16 inches high at its shoulder, making its ears nearly one-third of its entire height. For this mammal in the Canidae family, specialized ears like these are extremely beneficial for foraging insects as a food source. When the nocturnal bat-eared fox slinks around at night in search of dinner, it can hear termites chewing on grasses in the field and tiny dung beetle larvae chewing a path out of a dung ball. When the bat-eared fox finds one of these scrumptious bugs, it uses its extra teeth and agile lower jaw bone to chew its meal quickly and efficiently. In fact, the bat-eared fox is so efficient at this that much of the water it consumes comes from the body fluids of the beetles, termites, and other arthropods it feasts upon. Bon appetite!
According to an animal rights seo consultant, to stay near its preferred diet, the bat-eared fox typically lives in short grass plains where its ashy yellow color blends into the landscape. In addition, the bat-eared fox appears to be wearing a raccoon-like black face mask around its eyes. Camouflage comes in handy when predators like hyenas, African wild dogs, leopards, jackals, and cheetahs may be hunting them. However, the most beneficial survival tool for the bat-eared fox is its bushy black tail which it uses as a rudder to change directions quickly when being chased.
Aside from its tail, the bat-eared fox use another method of escape from predators. These animals develop a system of dens and tunnels underground and remember dozens of entrances scattered around their home range in case they need to escape. One family will create multiple den systems for the best protection.
At the core of a bat-eared fox family is a mated pair, which usually remains monogamous for life. Sometimes two females will mate with one male and share a communal den. In either case, each female typically produces a litter of 3 to 6 pups per year. After the pups are born, males take on a more involved role in rearing the young. Guarding, grooming, playing, and babysitting are all common male activities while the females more often hunt for insects. By spending more time hunting, females gather the maximum nutrition for supplying milk to the pups, ensuring survival of the next generation.
Looking for Leopards
Today’s guest blogger is Lucy Hughes, an undergraduate working with us since “Serengeti Live” (Snapshot’s predecessor). Lucy lived and worked on a private nature reserve in South Africa for four years, carrying out field research that included a camera-trap study into the reserve’s leopard population and twice monthly bird surveys for Cape Town University’s Birds in Reserves Project (BIRP).
The purpose of my study on this relatively small reserve was to try and identify how many leopards were using it as part of their home range. Leopards were rarely seen on the reserve but signs of their passing – scats and tracks – were plenty. The fact that there was only an occasional lion passing through the reserve lead us to believe that perhaps the leopard density was greater than expected. So a colleague and I set out to try and identify the individuals using camera traps. Part of our strategy was to look for animals killed by leopards and then set up camera traps nearby in the hope that we would get plenty of shots of a leopard with which to start identifying spot patterns. The method worked well except it meant spending a lot of time hanging around decomposing carcasses. It’s amazing to see a leopard usually thought of as picky munching on a rotting carcass that you would think was fit only for spotted hyenas and vultures. In fact we had a wealth of animals recorded at these carcasses. As well as the expected leopard and spotted hyena we recorded brown hyena, jackal, honey-badger, civet, bush-pig, warthog and even a kudu picking at the remains of ruminant. Needless to say the high smells made us super efficient at putting up our cameras quickly.
The leopards on our reserve were not under pressure from lions and so tended to stash their kills under bushes rather than up trees, probably to keep them out of sight of the vultures. This meant it was easier to set the cameras. On a number of occasions we would return to a kill to collect the camera only to find the bare bones strewn far from the original bush and thousands of pictures of squabbling vultures.
Whilst out scouting for leopard signs, I once came across a dead juvenile baboon. It was lying at the bottom of a power pylon that the baboons would sleep in at night time. It had no obvious injury so I presumed it had fallen from the pylon that night. I decided to put up a camera trap at the site as leopard in this area are quite partial to baboon. I left the camera trap for two nights then went back to check. The baboon had gone and I had around 150 shots on the camera. What I found on those shots is why camera traps are so fantastic. Over 80 shots where of the troop of baboons returning to the site at dusk. The troop of 30 or so baboons each spent time with the dead individual, some touching it, some just sitting around it, some sniffing but for over an hour they remained with the dead individual as if saying good bye. The troop seemed more fascinated with the body than distressed. The following evening, the body by now grossly swollen, four juveniles came close to touch again but then ran off. I think the smell must have scared them. After dark, two spotted hyena came and took the body away. The leopard evaded us this time but thanks to the unobtrusiveness of camera traps we where privileged to witness an amazing moment in the life of a baboon troop.
The Snaran Story
You may have seen a snapshot of the lion Snaran when you were classifying:
The Lion Project is familiar with the individual lions in the area where the camera traps are set up, and so we can give you Snaran’s back story. Craig Packer writes:
Field assistant Ingela Jansson first saw Snaran on 22-Sept 2009 together with three other males along the Ngare Nanyuki River in a favorite area for two of our long-term study prides, the Loliondos and the Young Transects. The four new males were all shy, but Ingela eventually managed to get close enough to take photos and note down their ear notches and whisker spots. These identifying marks are how we keep track of individuals. She named them Snaran (Snare in Swedish), Faran (Danger), Karan & Twaran (made-up names).
Snaran had a fresh large scar around his neck, obviously caused by a snare, but it was impossible to tell if the snare was still there. Eight days later, Ingela found Snaran and his three brothers together with the Loliondo females. Ingela asked a veterinarian to come dart Snaran with tranquilizer and treat his snare wound. No wire was found, so Snaran must have wounded his neck while pulling himself free from the snare.
A year or so later field assistant Daniel Rosengren asked the vets to handle Snaran a second time, because his wound wasn’t healing. They worried that a snare may still be well dug into his flesh, but a metal detector found nothing. Snaran has otherwise remained in good shape, and the four males have stayed on as resident males for both the Loliondo and Young Transect prides.
The camera trap snapshot of Snaran is from March 25, 2011. Comment on it on Snapshot Serengeti’s ‘Talk’ pages.
Earth Wolf
### Today’s post is a guest post from Lora Orme, an undergraduate conducting directed research with us at the University of Minnesota. ###
Often mistaken for a hyena, the aardwolf (whose name means “earth wolf”) of southern and eastern Africa is actually smaller and more docile than its carnivorous cousin (which belongs to a different sub-family). Both the striped and spotted hyenas primarily call large mammals “dinner,” but the aardwolf is more interested in a tasty termite column than meat. Because of its food choice, the aardwolf’s jaw is much less powerful and smaller than a hyena’s jaw, but the aardwolf has a specialized tongue that is longer and sticky. It licks up various insects (with a preference for termites) off of the ground, rocks, and trees with only minor digging with its front claws. For an aardwolf, a fully belly can mean as many as 300,000 termites! The aardwolf will memorize the locations of termite mounds to save the time and effort of finding new snack spots, and will be careful to leave enough of the population alive so that its food source will be “re-stocked.” At the end of a long night of dining on insects, the aardwolf returns home to an under-ground burrow.
At one point, the aardwolf’s burrow most likely was stolen from another small mammal such as a hare, aardvark, or porcupine. Although able to create a new burrow, it takes much less energy for the aardwolf to use a pre-existing one. The burrow provides a safe-haven in the daylight hours when the nocturnal aardwolf normally sleeps or relaxes.
Aardwolves, while primarily solitary, will coexist in groups of six to a dozen neighbor burrows. They congregate for safety in numbers (and more rarely to help rear young), but more often to find a mate. Males will seek females within their own territories and in those of neighbors, sometimes leading to male-male conflicts which are solved with barks, blunt-teeth gnashing, and musky scent-release from glands (the smell of which has been compared to a skunk).
A mating pair will form during the breeding season (spring or fall) and gestation lasts around 100 days, ending in a litter of three to five cubs. Usually birth occurs during the rainiest months of the year when termites are most available, providing plenty of nutrients for the growing young. The males contribute to the partnership by guarding the nest while the females nurse. Both parents supervise the cubs in their first foraging adventures about 3 months after birth.
Because the aardwolf acts as a control on the termite population, it often lives and scavenges near or on farms. Most farmers detest the termites that may destroy crops or infest homes, so they welcome the service of the aardwolves. Unfortunately, aardwolves are preyed upon by some larger carnivorous mammals such as the jackal. Even humans represent a threat to the species because the aardwolf is hunted for its unique fur.
Upon a closer look, aardwolves have distinctive pointed ears for acute hearing; after all, their prey is very small! The aardwolf’s paw is also distinctive from a hyena because it has five toes instead of four. The aspect you might notice first, however, is the bushy pointed tail that looks as if it has been dipped in a can of black or dark brown paint. In a confrontation, an aardwolf’s furry mane will raise from head to tail making it appear larger in size to (hopefully) persuade the opposition to back down.
See if you can spot one of these night-walkers as they prowl for termites!
Have you spotted a zebra today?
This video is from my first research trip to Serengeti in 2009. I bet you’ve already found some photos of zebras at Snapshot Serengeti. Here’s what they look like moving. (And yes, it was quite windy; sorry for the noise.)
Snapshot Serengeti 