Alie Ward

Amanda Lask, Sarah Egy, Kim, Justin Maples, and Zena wanted to ask a vocalization question I should have thought of earlier.

Do they meow?

Do any of the big cats meow?

Okay.

They don't necessarily need to be communicating with a lot of other people around them to say, where's my snacks?

Yes.

That makes tons of sense.

Daniel Johnson and Willow, as well as Wynn and Michelle Ring, wanted to know about lions, female lions.

Willow wanted to know, why do lions have a mane?

And then Wynn and Michelle wanted to know, what's the deal with female lions that grow manes or do male behavior?

Wynn says, icons.

So what is going on with manes and sexual dimorphism in lions?

So you want to get yourself a look at the 2016 paper, Rare Observation of the Existence and Masculine Behavior of Maned Lioness in the Okavango Delta, Botswana, in the African Journal of Ecology, which notes that potential factors driving mane development in male lions are thought to include genetics, temperature, nutritional status, hormones, and vegetation thickness.

And then you can follow that paper up with Discover Magazine's 2022 piece titled, It's Rare, But a Lioness Can Grow a Mane, which dished that Avis, a 16-year-old male lion at the Topeka Zoo, passed away due to old age.

And a few months later, his geriatric 18-year-old female counterpart, Zuri, began growing a mane.

And it's most likely due to raised testosterone after Avis's death.

Now, Shanna Simpson is a curator at the zoo and told Discover Magazine that, yes, this can happen in a scarcity of male lions because it's the male's responsibility to act as security for the pride while the female's duties are to hunt and take care of the young.

So, yeah, a trad lioness can be gender fluid when the conditions are right for her.

I had no clue.

And I do find them to be icons.