A Pair Of Man-Eating Lions Devoured Dozens Of Railway Workers In Kenya In 1898, And New DNA Analysis Has Revealed More Clues About Their Diet
In 1898, a pair of male lions attacked, killed, and devoured dozens of workers constructing a railway bridge over the Tsavo River in Kenya. At least 35 people were killed. After that, the large cats became known as the Tsavo man-eating lions.
They had been stalking the workers for nine months before they were shot later that same year. Since then, their bodies have been housed at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. In a new study, scientists analyzed DNA from clumps of hair found in the predators’ teeth, revealing what they ate when they were alive.
“We found mitochondrial genetic material from giraffe, human, oryx, waterbuck, wildebeest, and zebra as prey, and also identified hair that came from the lions themselves,” said Alida de Flamingh, a study co-author and a biologist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
The research team extracted mitochondrial DNA from four individual strands of hair and three hair clumps.
Then, they compared the genetic profiles to a list of prey species compiled from previous research efforts to identify what animals the lions hunted.
According to de Flamingh, the most surprising discovery was the identification of the wildebeest. The lions would have had to travel 56 miles to reach the closest grazing area of the wildebeest, raising questions about the Tsavo lions’ land range in Kenya back then.
“It suggests that the Tsavo lions may have either traveled farther than previously believed or that wildebeest were present in the Tsavo region during that time,” said de Flamingh.
The Tsavo lions were spotted across the workers’ campsite, which stretched over eight miles of Tsavo National Park, located east of Mount Kilimanjaro.
A lion’s territory can range from 20 to 400 square miles, depending on the availability of food and water. In areas with scarce prey, lions will journey farther out to find more food.
Bob Ransom – stock.adobe.com – illustrative purposes only, not the actual lions
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For several months, the two lions had abandoned the area in between attacks. It is possible that they went somewhere else that was more abundant in prey. Wildebeest may also have been present in the region they traveled to.
The researchers noted that they had expected to detect buffalo DNA. In 2015, previous research had identified a single buffalo hair from one of the lions.
However, in this study, no buffalo hair was found. African buffalo are one of the main food sources for lions in the Tsavo region.
These two Tsavo lions may have preyed on wildebeest because an infectious viral disease called rinderpest spread among buffalo, reducing their population.
When rinderpest was introduced to Africa in the 1890s, approximately 90 percent of cattle were killed. The buffalo experienced similar effects.
The team isn’t sure why the Tsavo lion duo hunted humans. They ate around 35 humans, which made up 35 percent of the diet of one lion and about 13 percent of the second.
One theory is that the lions developed a human-eating habit due to rinderpest reducing the populations of buffalo and cattle.
Another idea is that painful dental injuries in their jaws led to the behavior because it became harder to hunt large animals.
The findings were published in the journal Current Biology.
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