Amazing cats: black lions

To date, lions are the second largest cats (after the tigers), but at the same time the most beautiful and majestic, and the black lions are also the most mysterious. Myths are constantly forming about black lions, since no one can give reliable information about whether these beauties exist in nature or not.

Abnormality fascinates

Rumors about how black lions walk around in the backwaters of the planet Earth are mainly due to the fact that such a color is extremely unusual and uncharacteristic for them. Everyone is accustomed to seeing these large, majestic cats of yellow, sand, golden, and sometimes white, but no one has observed them black. There are also no reliable photos or videos that show that black lions live in nature. All found photos of these fictional handsome men are the creation of experienced users of "Photoshop".

Why not?

Why is the presence of such an animal as a black lion in the nature categorically denied by scientists, because in the savannah you can meet lion-albinos with a white-white mane and wool?

In fact, the complete denial of such cats in nature is based on their inability to adapt to the environment. And albino lions are just victims of genetic mutations or they were born after a closely related crossing.

On adaptation

As Clark Tonge, a scientist specializing in mutations among large cats, tells us, in the process of evolution, dark and black lions simply did not survive. Nature herself preferred lighter specimens, which means that, to date, the possibility of their appearance is close to zero. If a lion cub with a black coat was born, then a lot of factors contributed to his death:

• Difficulties with thermoregulation (a lion cub could die literally right after birth from overheating);
• Significantly reduced immunity;
• Difficulties encountered in hunting (if a lion cub could live to the point when it was necessary to go hunting independently, then its color did not allow it to disguise itself well, and accordingly, it could die of hunger).

If you ask biologists if there are black lions, then in response you will hear that even if they are, it is clearly not in the wild, but only bred and grown in captivity.

Not losing hope

Despite the fact that both scientists and biologists are very skeptical about this, some people still believe that in nature one can meet black lions. The opinions of these people are based on reports that once came from Okovango and Persia, which described cases where local residents could see a large black lion with black mane.

Melanism

In nature, you can find a phenomenon such as albinism, when the animal has absolutely no stains and color as a whole, although it is quite rare. Melanism is directly proportional to the opposite of albinism, most believe that black lions have this color precisely because of this phenomenon, but nevertheless this hypothesis is highly questionable.