Blond Lions Don’t Have More Fun, Study Finds

On the Serengeti plain, the lady lion prefers a swain with a black mane.

That’s the finding of a study analyzing how the dense collar of hair about the neck of male lions affects the love life of Africa’s biggest cat.

Peyton M. West, a researcher at the University of Minnesota, said it’s the mane color, not the length, that matters most to the female lions of Tanzania.

“We were completely surprised by this,” said West, first author of the study appearing last week in the journal Science.

West said the female lions may instinctively be drawn to the black manes because males with darker manes seem superior in a number of ways.

“A dark mane is apparently a marker the female uses to evaluate the fitness of a male,” she said, suggesting that lions’ manes evolved over time through sexual selection.

Dark-maned male lions generally have a higher level of testosterone, “which means they are more aggressive fighters,” West said. This can be key to raising cubs successfully.

An aggressive male is better able to chase away invading bachelors who try to take over the pride, West said. This is important because if there is a change in male leadership of a pride, the new dominant male routinely kills all the young cubs sired by the deposed male. Thus, by choosing to mate dark-maned, aggressive males, a female lion gives her young a better chance of surviving.

West said that records collected for decades by scientists observing lions in Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park show that male lions with dark manes are more likely to recover from wounds. Why this is so remains a mystery.

She noted that dark manes seem to intimidate other male lions, which means a lion with a black collar of hair has to fight less often and therefore has fewer injuries.

West and her co-author, Craig Packer of the University of Minnesota, investigated the effects of mane color by setting up life-sized models of lions near where the animals lived in the Serengeti.

She said they found that female lions, when given a choice, would try to seduce the models that had the darker mane, ignoring those with blond hair.

Male lions, West said, were more likely to attack the lion models with short manes or with light-colored manes, while avoiding the models with black manes.

West said that most prides have a surplus of female adults and that during mating season the female lions will try to lure the males into fathering cubs. She said the researchers discovered that females gave most of their attention to the males with the dark manes.