![]() ![]() Her first litter of two cubs had died very young, and so her more recent litter marked her first foray into parenting. At five or six years old, she was a relatively young mother. It is possible, the researchers suggest, that the lioness’ response was prompted by her inexperience. Perhaps she abandoned her baby, who was subsequently adopted by the lioness. One day after the leopard cub was seen with the lioness, a female leopard was sighted at the same location she may have been the cub’s biological mother, though researchers could not say for certain whether she was lactating. The circumstances that led to this unusual animal adoption are not entirely clear. Over the course of a 45-day observation period, however, the researchers saw the leopard cub hanging out with its foster family on 29 different days. A necropsy, in fact, indicated that the cub had been suffering from a congenital femoral hernia, which means it was born with a bulging blood vessel in its groin that ruptured, likely causing his death. In February 2019, his body was found near a watering hole, with no signs of injury suggesting that he had been attacked. The relationship only seems to have come to an end when the leopard baby died. Researchers thought the blended family would last only briefly in 2017, an African lioness in Tanzania was seen nursing a leopard cub, but the association lasted for just one day and was “not considered as a formal adoption,” the study authors write. Lions kill both adult leopards and their cubs, while leopards are prone to attacking unguarded lion cubs.Īnd yet, the mother lion, her lion cubs and her spotted leopard baby, all got along just fine. “They are at perpetual odds,” Stotra Chakrabarti, study co-author and animal behavior researcher at the University of Minnesota, tells Cara Giaimo of the New York Times. ![]() ![]() belonged to mutually competing species.” Lions and leopards, by contrast, compete for the same resources in the wild-and are usually not very fond of one another. But in these cases, according to the researchers, “none of the foster parents and adoptees. More recently, a bottlenose dolphin mother was observed caring for a melon-headed whale calf over the course of more than three years. In 2006, scientists described the adoption of a marmoset by a family of wild capuchin monkeys. But competing animals caring for each other's young? That's virtually unheard of.ĭheeraj Mittal/Deputy Conservator of Forests in Indiaīefore the lioness and her leopard cub pounced onto the scene, there had been just two other documented instances of interspecies adoption. ![]() Female cheetahs, for instance, are known to adopt orphaned male cubs that, once they reach adulthood, form large coalitions with the mother’s own offspring. It’s not unheard of for animals to look after non-biological offspring of the same species, but “such acts directly help in boosting the lifetime reproductive success,” the study authors write. Raising young-nursing them, gathering food for them, making sure they stay safe-requires a lot of time and energy, and is typically done in the interest of propagating one’s own genes. This rare case of interspecies foster care left the researchers entirely befuddled pulished in the journal Ecosphere, they describe the lioness’ behavior as plainly “bizarre.”įrom an evolutionary perspective, caring for the offspring of another animal doesn’t make much sense. The little male cub, who was around two months old, was seen nursing from the lioness, feeding from her kills and playing with her two biological cubs, who were around the same age as the leopard. In December 2018, researchers at the Gir National Park in India stumbled upon a lioness who appeared to have adopted a baby leopard as one of her own. ![]()
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