Luke Hunter, president and chief conservation officer of the global wild cat organization Panthera, received an email last week from one of his group’s partners in Tanzania. When he opened the attached photos, Hunter recalled, “my jaw just dropped.”
The images show a lioness lounging on a flat, dry spot in the Serengeti. Attached to her is a nursing cub — and the cub is a tiny, spotted leopard.
This is the sort of sighting that is pretty much mind-blowing to lion experts like Hunter. Interspecies suckling has been documented among captive animals, and on very rare occasions wild carnivores such as leopards and pumas have been known to adopt an orphaned cub of their own kind, usually one that is related. But never before has interspecies suckling among large carnivores been recorded, Hunter said.
“It’s unprecedented,” he said, almost gushing. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime event.”
The photos were taken July 11 by a guest at the Ndutu Lodge in the Ngorogoro Conservation Area, where KopeLion, which Panthera supports, works on quelling conflicts between lions and local farmers whose livestock sometimes become lion lunch. KopeLion monitors the area lions, which is why the nursing mom in the photos is wearing a GPS collar.
The lioness is known as Nosikitok, and, importantly, she is known to have given birth to three cubs of her own in late June. That means “she is absolutely awash with maternal hormones and that instinct to take care of her own babies,” Hunter said. “This simply wouldn’t have happened if she wasn’t suckling her own babies.”
Typically, he elaborated, a lioness would kill a baby leopard. That’s because the baby, while very small and terribly adorable, is just another meat-eating competitor in a wild, sometimes severe world.
But Nosikitok’s hormones hardly explain everything about this peaceful encounter, Hunter said. For one, it’s unclear where the leopard cub’s mother was or whether she is alive. Also unknown is whether Nosikitok’s own cubs were safe in their den, or whether she’s already lost them to predators, starvation or other common lion cub killers.
This story, however, isn’t likely to have a happy ending for the wee leopard. Lionesses break away from their prides to give birth, then usually introduce new cubs to the family when they’re about 8 weeks old. On the very off-chance Nosikitok decided to adopt the spotted babe and managed to keep it alive long enough to take it home, her crew probably would not be so welcoming.
