https://www.nytimes.

com/2020/02/27/science
/leopard-lion-adoption.html

TRILOBITES

The Leopard Cub With the Lioness

Mom
Scientists documented a rare and very cute interspecies adoption in
a national park in India.
By Cara Giaimo

Feb. 27, 2020

The lions and leopards of Gir National Park, in Gujarat, India,

normally do not get along.

“They compete with each other” for space and food, said Stotra
Chakrabarti, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of
Minnesota who studies animal behavior. “They are at perpetual
odds.”

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wonders of nature, the cosmos and the human body.

But about a year ago, a young lioness in the park put this enmity
aside. She adopted a baby leopard.

The 2-month-old cub — all fuzzy ears and blue eyes — was
adorable, and the lioness spent weeks nursing, feeding and caring
for him until he died. She treated him as if one of her own two sons,
who were about the same age. This was a rare case of cross-species
adoption in the wild, and the only documented example involving
animals that are normally strong competitors, Dr. Chakrabarti said.
He and others detailed the case last week in the ecology journal
Ecosphere.

The paper’s authors, who also included a conservation officer and a

park ranger, first spotted the motley crew in late December 2018,
hanging out near a freshly killed nilgai antelope.
Initially, they thought the association would be brief; a lioness in
Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Conservation Area had once been observed
nursing a leopard cub, but only for a day before the two separated.

“But this went on,” Dr. Chakrabarti said.

Researchers observed the baby leopard living with the lions for a month and
a half. Dheeraj Mittal

For a month and a half, the team watched the mother lion, her two
cubs and the leopard roam Gir National Park. “The lioness took
care of him like one of her own,” nursing him and sharing meat that
she hunted, Dr. Chakrabarti said.

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His new siblings, too, were welcoming, playing with their spotty
new pal and occasionally following him up trees. In one photo, the
leopard pounces on the head of one of his adoptive brothers, who is
almost twice his size and clearly a good sport. “It looked like two
big cubs and one tiny runt of the litter,” Dr. Chakrabarti said.

He has been studying the park’s lions for nearly seven years. This
unlikely association “was surely the most ‘wow’ moment I’ve come
across,” Dr. Chakrabarti said. His fellow researchers with an Asiatic
lion conservation project in India, some who have been watching
the big cats for decades, had “also not seen anything like this,” he
said.

Unlike their counterparts in Africa, Asiatic lions live in small, sex-

segregated groups. After they give birth, lionesses often separate
from the rest of the pride for a few months to raise their offspring
on their own. If the makeshift family had interacted more with
other adult lions, the leopard may have been identified as an
impostor, Dr. Chakrabarti said.

But they were never tested in this way. After about 45 days, the
research team found the leopard cub’s body near a watering hole. A
field necropsy revealed that he had most likely died because of a
femoral hernia he had since birth.

“It would have been fantastic to see, when the leopard cub grew up,
how things would be,” Dr. Chakrabarti said. “But it didn’t happen.”

The case is among three documented instances of interspecies adoption in

 the wild. Dheeraj Mittal

The tale of the leopard cub joined two other documented instances
of interspecies adoption in the wild — each one sweet enough for a
children’s book, yet strange enough to captivate scientists. In 2004,
a group of capuchin monkeys took in an infant marmoset. And in
2014, a family of bottlenose dolphins fostered a baby melon-headed
whale, who learned to surf and jump like his new peers.

In all three cases, a lactating mother brought the new baby into the
fold, said Patrícia Izar, an associate professor at the University of
São Paulo in Brazil and a member of the team that studied the
capuchin-marmoset adoption. It’s possible that the hormonal
changes associated with motherhood “might facilitate bonding with
an extraneous infant,” said Dr. Izar, who was not involved in the
new research.

As puzzling as this adoption was, it also underscores the

similarities between cubs of different feline species, Dr. Chakrabarti
said. Until they reach young adulthood, when social differences
emerge, lions and leopards play, meow and beg for milk in similar
ways.

For this mother lioness, these commonalities may have overridden

the cub’s more leopardlike features — his smell, size and speckled
appearance.

“He just blended in,” Dr. Chakrabarti said.