A new report shows West African lion populations have dropped to as low as 250 adults.
The lions are restricted to four groups, only one of which contains over 50 individuals, a Panthera news release reported.
These results were based off a "massive survey effort" that covered 11 countries and took place over six years.
"When we set out in 2006 to survey all the lions of West Africa, the best reports suggested they still survived in 21 protected areas. We surveyed all of them, representing the best remaining lion habitat in West Africa. Our results came as a complete shock; all but a few of the areas we surveyed were basically paper parks, having neither management budgets nor patrol staff, and had lost all their lions and other iconic large mammals," Panthera's Doctor Philipp Henschel said in the news release.
The team found West African lions are only present in five countries including Senegal, Nigeria and "a single trans-frontier population on the shared borders of Benin, Niger and Burkina Faso," the news release reported. This group has been found to be "genetically distinct" from more well-known lions, and may be closer to North African "Barbary Lions" which are now extinct or Asiatic lions that still roam India.
"West African lions have unique genetic sequences not found in any other lions, including in zoos or captivity," Doctor Christine Breitenmoser, the co-chair of the IUCN/SCC Cat Specialist Group, said. "If we lose the lion in West Africa, we will lose a unique, locally adapted population found no-where else. It makes their conservation even more urgent."
These lions have been largely succumbed to habitat loss, prey decline and even being hunted themselves; all at the hands of humans.
"Every survey we do is inaccurate because as soon as you complete it, it is already out of date; the declines are so rapid. It is a terribly sad state of affairs when you can very accurately count the lions in an area because there are so few of them. This is critical work that again confirms that we are underestimating the rate of decline of lion populations and that the situation requires a global emergency intervention," National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence and BCI co-founder Dereck Joubert, said.
Today there are only 35,000 lions across Africa inhabiting only about 25 percent of their original range. In West Africa the local lions are secluded to a range that is one percent of their original region and is smaller than the state of New York.
