Information Report: Fahim - Lions

Lions are mammals because they are vertebrates, they breathe air, they have fur, they communicate and they drink their mother’s milk when they are cubs.The golden mane thats belongs to the male lion makes it looks beautiful but also very fierce. 

Belonging to the cat family, lions share many features of others cats including having 4 legs, a tough body and whiskers . The Barbary lion is the biggest type of lion. Lions have sharp claws on their paws that help them to kill their prey. Male lions weigh around 190 kg and grow as high as 1.2 m. 

Lions are known as carnivores as they eat meat. They eat other mammals like goats, wild cats, kite (bird) and other animals. At night time is the time when lions hunt their prey because they have better eyesight. 90 kilograms of meat is eaten by a lion in a single sitting. The lion has no predators because it is the top of its food chain and mostly  they are the predators to other mammals, however they are hunted by humans. 

Africa and Asia are the countries home to lions. Open woodlands or grass lands are their natural habitat. Other countries they used to be found in were the Middle East and Greece. The temperature they live in is not cold because they don’t have enough fur to keep warm from the cold. 

In the wild adult lions live for 10-14 years but some can live up to 20 years. They don’t die in those years because they don’t have predators. The gestation period for the lioness (female) is 110 days. 1-4 cubs is how many lions a mother gives birth to at a time. Cubs stay with their parents for 2 years. When the cubs come out they don’t come out of eggs they come out alive. 

Lions are on the list of endangered species because they are squeezed out of their natural habitat by humans, but there are still 32,000 lions left. Dangerous animals like lions should be kept in zoos because if are not, they would be killing people and eating animals and it could go crazy. Some things they would need to survive happily in a zoo are water, food, entertainment but mostly they need each other because the lioness do the hunting and the lion do the leading. Entertainment that they would need would be making prey animals using cardboard for the lion to destroy. Another way to entertain them is to put food in ice so the lion can break it open to get the food.