Imagining a World Without Lions

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There will never be a time that we will be able to forget lions. Walk ten blocks in most of the world's cities and you'll see a dozen lion statues, small or large, icons of the most symbolic animal on Earth. (See an interactive experience on the Serengeti lion.)

Some of the more famous ones reside in front of the New York Public Library and in Trafalgar Square. On a recent walk around the four-block radius of National Geographic's Washington headquarters, I counted 26.

But will real lions survive in the wild beyond our generation? As someone who has studied the animals for 30 years, I'm not sure. (Read "The Short Happy Life of a Serengeti Lion" in National Geographic magazine.)

In the 1950s, when I was born, the best estimate of the world's lion population was 450,000. Today, studies point to 20,000 to 30,000 lions remaining. We've lost 95 percent of lions in the last 50 years.

The slaughter has a variety of causes: trophy hunting, habitat loss, communities killing lions in retaliation for cattle losses, and poaching, which fuels a bone market in the East built around bogus medicines and special-occasion wine.

The Power of Lions Up Close

Recently, I was kneeling outside my vehicle here—a battered, doorless Land Cruiser—with my camera on the ground, filming a low-angle shot for a National Geographic Channel film about young nomadic male lions. I miscalculated.

Two very large lionesses walked much closer to me than I expected, and at three meters they rippled with power and predatory presence. Massive shoulders moved under tawny skin, ready to grab hold of a passing zebra or buffalo.

Iberian Lynx Doomed by Climate Change?

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The lynx of Southern Europe is in trouble, and those trying to save them are missing the boat, say researchers who predict climate change will finish what the drop in the lynx’s food supply started, unless there’s a new plan.

The lynx, to Americans, is a kind of bobcat. Iberian lynx numbers have been in freefall largely because humans have been over hunting their primary food, which is rabbits.

PHOTOS: Lynx Kittens’ Future Threatened by Warming World

But that might not be what pushes the Iberian lynx to extinction, said Miguel Araújo of the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Madrid, Spain. Climate change could be the death knell for the lynx in the second half of this century. If so, the current conservation efforts will not help them, but only slow their demise.

A new plan is needed to help the rare cats overcome the food scarcity, as well as anticipated climate changes to their habitat in southern Europe, the researchers say.

Araújo and his colleagues used ecological models that included anticipated climate change to investigate the combined effects on prey and conservation efforts for the survival of the Iberian lynx.

10 Signs Climate Change Is Already Happening

“We show that anticipated climate change will rapidly and severely decrease lynx abundance and probably lead to its extinction in the wild within 50 years, even with strong global efforts to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions,” wrote Araújo and his colleagues in the July 21 edition of the journal Nature Climate Change.