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ambience: Lions growl, roar
Do you remember the movie “The Ghost and the Darkness”? It told the true story of two lions who terrorized a region in East Aftrica. The root causes of the lions’ behavior may be traced to environmental conditions. I’m Jim Metzner, and this is the Pulse of the Planet.
“Just over a hundred years ago, the British were building a railroad across East Africa and when they hit the Tsavo River, they hit a snag in that their workers kept getting picked off by two lions. These two lions killed approximately a hundred and thirty railroad workers before a British colonel was finally able to dispatch the two lions after nights and nights of hunting after them. He finally killed them both and thus allowed the railroad to continue. There have been other man eaters, or groups of man eaters, that have killed more people, but it certainly was one of the worst man eating incidences that modern history has recorded.”
Earthwatch scientist Roland Kays is curator of mammals at the New York State Museum. He’s been conducting research on the lions of the Greator Tsavo ecosystem in southeastern Kenya. He says a number of factors may have influenced the lions’ behavior 100 years ago, including an epidemic which killed many of the creatures that lions typically feed on.
“The potential prey population of the lions was wiped out by the epidemic, so they were hungry and there wasn’t much of their traditional prey around, and then here are all these humans living in skimpy little tents, working all day on the railroad. And so there are a number of different things that could have contributed to this being such a bad incident.”
Today, even in the absence epidemics, some of the lions in the Tsavo ecosystem sometimes turn into mankillers. We’ll find out why in future programs. Pulse of the Planet is made possible by the National Science Foundation. I’m Jim Metzner.
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