Today, lions are the second largest cats (after tigers), but at the same time the most beautiful and majestic, and 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 mesmerizes
Rumors about how somewhere in the back streets of planet Earth black lions walk around, arise mainly due to the fact that such a color is extremely unusual and uncharacteristic for them. Everyone is used to seeing these large majestic cats yellow, sand, golden, and sometimes white, but no one has observed them black. There are also no reliable photos or videos showing that black lions live in nature. All the photos found of these fictional beauties are the work of experienced users of Photoshop.
Why not?
Why is the presence of such an animal as a black lion categorically denied by scientists in nature, because in the savannah you can find albino lions with a snow-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 simply victims of genetic mutations, or they were born after closely related crosses.
About adaptation
According to Clark Tonj, a scientist specializing in mutations among large cats, the dark and black lions simply did not survive the evolution process. Nature itself preferred lighter individuals, which means that today the possibility of their appearance is close to zero. If a flock with a black coat was still born in the pack, then many factors contributed to its death:
- difficulties with thermoregulation (a lion cub could die literally immediately after birth from overheating);
- significantly reduced immunity;
- difficulties encountered during the hunt (if a lion cub could survive until the moment when it was necessary to go hunting on its own, its color did not allow it to disguise itself well, and accordingly, it could die of starvation).
If you ask biologists if there are black lions, then in response you will hear that even if they do, it’s clearly not in the wild, but only bred and raised in captivity.
Not losing hope
Despite the fact that both scientists and biologists are extremely skeptical about this, someone still believes that in nature you can find black lions. The opinions of these people are based on messages that once came from Okovango and Persia, which described cases where local residents had seen a large black lion with a black mane.
Melanism
In nature, one can encounter such a phenomenon as albinism, when the animal has absolutely no spots and color in general, although it is quite rare. Melanism is directly proportional to albinism, most believe that black lions have such a coloring precisely because of this phenomenon, but nevertheless this hypothesis is extremely doubtful.
