Abstract
The lions of North Africa were unique in ecological terms as well as from a human cultural perspective and were the definitive lions of Roman and Medieval Europe. Labelled “Barbary” lions, they were once numerous in North Africa but were exterminated by the mid-20th century. Despite subsequent degeneration of the Atlas Mountain ecosystem through human pressures, the feasibility of lion reintroduction has been debated since the 1970s. Research on the long-established captive lion collection traditionally kept by the sultans and kings of Morocco has enabled selective breeding coordinated across Moroccan and European zoos involving a significant number of animals. Molecular genetic research has recently provided insights into lion phylogeny which, despite previous suggestions that all lions share recent common ancestry, now indicates clear distinctions between lions in North, West, and Central Africa, the Middle East, and India versus those in Southern and Eastern Africa. A review of the evolutionary relevance of North African lions highlights the important challenges and opportunities in understanding relationships between Moroccan lions, extinct North African lions, and extant lion populations in India and West and Central Africa and the potential role for lions in ecosystem recovery in those regions.
Highlights
Lions (Panthera leo) formerly ranged throughout Africa, the Middle East, and southwestern Asia [1,2,3,4]
South African Cape populations were extinct by the mid-19th century and North African lions had disappeared by the mid-20th century [2, 8, 9]
The evolutionary importance of finding representatives who could form the basis of a recovered North African population is significant, since the only other representatives of the “northern” lion clade are either the few hundred Asiatic lions living wild in Gujarat or those captive in Asiatic lion studbook programmes or the few hundred wild animals dispersed at low densities across West and Central Africa
Summary
Lions (Panthera leo) formerly ranged throughout Africa, the Middle East, and southwestern Asia [1,2,3,4]. West and Central African lion populations survive in small isolated groups and have declined significantly in recent decades [3]. The North African Maghreb is the region isolated from the rest of nonarid Africa by the Sahara and forms the southern extent of the Mediterranean biodiversity hotspot [17] This is a region of high species endemism as well as an unusual mix of African and Eurasian species; lions have not existed in the wild in North Africa since the late 1950s [2, 8]. The loss of lions from North Africa repeats a similar pattern of anthropogenic decline observed in Europe in ancient historical times (including across the Caucasus and areas around the Caspian Sea) and later through the countries of the eastern Mediterranean and across the Middle East since medieval times [2, 6]. An examination of the significance of North Africa’s “Barbary” lion, its relevance to global lion conservation, and potential place in contemporary conservation of North Africa and the wider continent is overdue
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