Selfish partners: resource partitioning in male coalitions of Asiatic lions

For a male lion, teamwork pays off but only to an extent. Using behavioral observations, we show that male Asiatic lions team-up to harness resources effectively, but form hierarchies unlike their egalitarian African cousins. Team members prosper better than loners in gaining and retaining access to females. However, teams of 2 males are optimum as low-ranking members of larger teams fare as poorly as loners. A hitherto unknown behavioral variation in lions highlights the flexibility of group living within species.

• Publication year

  2017

• Venue

  Behavioral Ecology

• Publication date

  2017-09-25

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1093/beheco/arx118PMID 29622932PMCID 5873260
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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