Published On: Mon, Sep 7th, 2015
Science | By Deborah Grace
Hatton says, “if you double the prey, you should double the predators; and we found that this was not the case.”
He also says, “Lion numbers have increased, but the challenge is their safety. About 40% of the total lion population now lives outside the forest area. Open wells and live wires on farms, poachers and passing trains and trucks have turned this region into a death field for the Asiatic lion.”
According to founding Director of the University of Oxford’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, Professor David Macdonald, adds, “This has obviously caused an enormous stir internationally with millions of people concerned about it. In west Africa, lions have been disappearing at a catastrophic rate. In central and eastern Africa they appear to be declining fast.”
He also says, “Lion numbers have increased, but the challenge is their safety. About 40% of the total lion population now lives outside the forest area. Open wells and live wires on farms, poachers and passing trains and trucks have turned this region into a death field for the Asiatic lion.”
According to founding Director of the University of Oxford’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, Professor David Macdonald, adds, “This has obviously caused an enormous stir internationally with millions of people concerned about it. In west Africa, lions have been disappearing at a catastrophic rate. In central and eastern Africa they appear to be declining fast.”
A brand new study out of McGill University has revealed that the crowded settings in captivity have led to fewer offspring in the lion population.
Indeed, student Ian Hatton conducted the study by visiting dozens of parks in East and Southern Africa to examine how the prey species like zebras and antelopes and predator species like hyenas and, of course, lions, are on the decline, instead of on the incline like they had expected.
The study authors tell that the growth patterns in these ecosystems—where an alarming amount of prey are producing less—are similar to the growth patterns in human beings.
Finally, study co-author Michel Loreau comments, “The discovery of ecosystem-level scaling laws is particularly exciting, adding that their most intriguing aspect is that they recur across levels of organization, from individuals to ecosystems, and yet ecosystem-level scaling laws cannot be explained by their individual-level counterparts”.
http://www.piercepioneer.com/study-identifies-prey-predator-ratio-disrupted-in-africa/46066
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