"The Ultimate Guide-Big Cats" "It was late in evolution." "Long after life had moved onto the land." "Long after grasses carpeted the plains and creatures had evolved to eat those grasses that terrifying new creatures appeared." "These were animals that preyed on other living animals." "The carnivores were meat eaters." "And none were more ruthless than the big cats." "The Serengeti Plains of East Africa." "Sharing these prairies with vast migratory herds is the fastest land animal on Earth the cheetah." "And the most elusive of cats, the leopard." "And everyone's favorite, the King of the Jungle." "You can tell who is top of the heap here." "Only lions can afford to laze around the Serengeti in broad daylight." "Lions are enormously powerful, and are the largest of Africa's big cats." "They are the only cats that live in close family groups with intricate social lives." "A Lion pride usually consists of lionesses, often sisters and their young cubs." "Adult males compete for dominance of the family and the right to mate with the lionesses, that is, when they're awake." "The lions have come to dominate the Plains, even the other cats fear them." "And they have a great deal in common with another successful mammal, an upright ape which evolved here and came to dominate the entire planet." "It's no surprise that we have such a close affiinity with lions." "We see in them our own contradictory nature from the intimacy of their close families to the stark brutality of their way of life." "Yet the most obvious feature of the lion remains its biggest mystery." "Uniquely, among the big cats, males and females look different." "So why does the male lion have a mane?" "The mane offers no protection in a fight;" "in fact, it could be a real handicap." "While the lioness melts unobtrusively into the grasslands, her coat, perfectly camouflaged for the hunt, the male carries a hairy ornament around his neck." "A conspicuous warning to every creature on the block." "It's the stealthy females that do the lion's share of the killing." "Lionesses work hard for a living, often hunting together to bring home a meal for the entire family." "The males are freeloaders." "They're not only lazy, they attract unwanted attention to the pride." "So what's the use of the males?" "And is there some hidden advantage in their ostentatious manes?" "The answers may come from a slightly less dangerous beast." "I want this to be something that is going get a real reaction of the lions when they see it." "Color's O.K. Everything O. K?" "Color looks great." "Craig Packer has been studying the lions of the Serengeti for twenty years." "Now, with a little help from toy maker, Anna Caffenberger, he's devising a novel way of exploring the mysteries of the mane." "One." "What do you think about the structure?" "I think it's fantastic." "Yes." "Oh, so here disposition is O. K?" "Yeah." "It is a solidly built lion." "Yeah." "And the face?" "Yeah." "Yeah." "That's good." "That's good." "So, that means that when you like this face, we will make it in proportional in exactly the same shape." "Uh hum." "Here, you have a very rare form of ornamentation in a mammal that defies any easy explanation." "We wondered whether it's something that females might like, whether males might be intimidated by, and we really haven't got a clue." "And until we are able to, to do proper experiments where we can manipulate this physical trait in meaningful ways, we'll never know for sure why the lion has its mane." "So what we want to do is to take these very life-like plush toys and take them out to the Serengeti, plop them down in front of some real lions, give them a choice between males with rather weedy" "little manes versus those with magnificent, bushy manes, and see whether females really get turned on by the bigger mane, or whether males get really quite frightened by the bigger mane." "How does the mane work?" "Well, that is the secret." "O.K." "You see, you can take it out, just like a cap." "Slip into something more comfortable..." "Yes." "...here." "It's a special sort of mitten, a kitten mitten." "After putting the finishing touches to the model lions," "Craig will spend several weeks testing his ideas on the real thing in the Serengeti." "The Serengeti is not only home to the big cats but to a variety of much smaller ones:" "The caracal, golden cats, servals with the most sensitive hearing of all the cats." "Cats have spread to most corners of the world, from the rainforests of the Amazon, home of the onca orjaguar," "to the ubiquitous cougar or puma, found throughout the Americas;" "and the temperate North American forest habitat of the lynx." "The big cats have moved into almost every imaginable niche." "In the mountains of the Himalayas, lives the most secretive big cat of them all, the fabled snow leopard." "And in the valleys below, lives the last of the tigers, perhaps the most feared of all the big cats." "From the stripes of a tiger to the rosettes of a leopard, big cats come in many patterns." "It is now thought that spots, like those of the cheetah, were the original coat pattern, and that others, rosettes and even stripes, evolved from simple spots." "Even lions, with apparently no markings at all, actually evolved from creatures with rosettes, an ancestry betrayed by the ghostly reminders on the coats of every young cub." "Cats come in a remarkable range of sizes, from the huge thirteen foot" "Siberian tiger, weighing in at nine hundred pounds, to the tiny black-footed cat, nineteen inches long and a mere twenty-eight ounces in weight." "But whatever the size or coat pattern they all have one thing in common:" "They are natural born killers." "So what are the features of a feline assassin?" "First of all, there is eyesight." "The lion's eye is three times the size of a human eye, with three times its sensitivity." "A lion's vision is most acute across a horizontal plain, enabling it to pick up the movement of a herd." "The lion actually picks out its target, the weakest, youngest, or slowest, before it moves in for the kill." "But it's at night that cat vision really comes into its own." "Cat's eyes look like headlights because they can utilize every available source of light, even starlight which is bounced off a reflective membrane at the back of the retina known as the tapetum." "This reflection triggers photosensitive cells in front of the tapetum a second time, enhancing night vision." "But it is strength and speed which sets the cats apart, and the cheetah is the most impressive of the feline athletes." "This female cheetah waits patiently for lunch to stray near." "Her claws are never retracted, permanent running spikes." "The pads on her feet have a cross-ply tread for additional grip." "The cheetah's acceleration is staggering." "From a standing start, she can accelerate to sixty miles per hour in about four seconds," "as quick as an Indy racing car." "At her top speed, the cheetah reaches nearly seventy miles per hour." "The arrangement of her vertebrae works like a spring, propelling her forward in leaps and bounds." "Yet her heart is just a third the size of a human heart in proportion to her body, which means the cheetah has little stamina." "She can only maintain this incredible speed for a few moments." "Her huge tail is thought to act like a gyroscope maintaining stability through sharp corners at high speeds." "And many of the cats have highly specialized teeth perfectly suited to their prey animals." "The deadly and often enormous canine teeth are matched to the vertebrae of the prey enabling them to sever the spinal cord with all the precision of a surgeon's scalpel." "Yet for all that, these ultimate killers don't always catch their prey." "For a cheetah, only one chase in six ends in success, and there are some hard lessons to be learned on the long road to becoming an effective hunter." "Lesson number one:" "Don't bite off more than you can chew." "Evolution may have created killing machines, but it has not ignored self defense." "Predator and prey are locked in an eternal struggle, an arm's race, where attack and defense match each other at every turn." "Who runs the fastest?" "Who can turn the tightest corner?" "It's a race that the prey will always take more seriously than the predator." "This is life or death for the gazelle, but only dinner for the cheetah." "It's a dance of death that has evolved over millions of years." "But when did it start?" "What are the origins of these carnivores?" "The first of the cats emerged thirty-seven million years ago, well after the end of the age of dinosaurs." "They were small, forest dwelling creatures, rather like the present day linsang that perfected hunting in the trees." "They were supremely agile, with acute hearing and binocular vision." "Eventually, these creatures left the trees, and for the first time, cats took to the plains." "Within a mere two million years, a whole range of new cat-like species had evolved, including the most famous of all, the so-called saber-toothed tigers." "But this, as it turns out, is a complete misnomer." "In the first place, saber-tooths are, none of them are closely related to tigers and in the second place many of them weren't even cats." "Ah, for example, this saber-toothed that we have here was a marsupial, so it's more related to kangaroos than it is to cats." "But it does have, what we consider to be the typical saber-toothed morphology, that is to say it had long and, in particular, very narrow canine teeth, ah, that represent a very particular way of killing prey." "And within the cat family, ah, there is a wide variety of, of saber-toothed species." "From relatively small ones such as this megatherian, as you can see here, has again the very long and narrow canine." "And even some of the very early ones, such as this machaeroides, which is about ten million years old, ah, were quite large as you can tell from, ah, comparison with this ah, leopard." "Ah, but some of the later saber-tooths such as the Smilodon here really became enormously large, considerably larger than any living felid." "But how did the saber-tooths use their dagger-like canines?" "No one really knows." "There have been many theories about what saber-tooths ate and, ah, some of them have been relatively ludicrous, if you want to put it that way." "Ah, that they were bloodsuckers and, ah, and all sorts of things because people haven't believed that these canines could actually do anything." "You often see pictures of saber-tooths with their sabers lodged deep into the prey animal but that's not possible, because these animals, of course, have lowerjaws as well." "And in order to be able to get the saber into the, very deep into a prey species, it would have to take off its lowerjaw to do that." "Ah, what they did, it was probably to either stab or bite into the prey and then tear back to make a long slashing wound and that, the blood loss, the shock would kill the prey animal." "And then saber-tooths would do what any cat would do." "First, try to get at, get into the, ah, the prey using its front teeth which you can see clearly in, ah, the specimen are very large, quite powerful." "Ah, and then they would bite off pieces of flesh with the carnassial teeth which are these teeth here that form scissor blades." "This is just the same as in any cat." "Cats bite off pieces of flesh with their carnassials and then swallow them." "They don't chew, and contrary to common perception, the canines won't get in the way because the meat will be taken in from the side." "For prey species, the, ah, saber-toothed morphology would, of course, be quite daunting where the last thing that the prey might see is something like this attacking you." "In the LaBrea tar pits of" "Los Angeles are the remains of Smilodon, the largest and fiercest of the saber-toothed cats." "Smilodons survived until a mere ten thousand years ago, after the first humans had migrated into America." "Embedded in the tar, lie the pristine bones of saber-toothed cats, alongside lions, rhinos and mammoths." "This was a place of ambush for the cats trapped their prey in the sticky tar and moved in for the kill." "But why after twenty-five million years did the saber-toothed cats vanish so quickly?" "Was there some fatal flaw in the saber-toothed design?" "Or did the emerging modern-day cats, the so-called pantherinaes simply hunt more effectively?" "Saber-tooths don't disappear the minute that, ah, lions and, and leopards show up, but they do co-exist, ah, for several million years." "But there does seem to be something that, in the end, favored the, the pantherinaes, that is the lions, the tigers, the leopards over these saber-toothed cats." "The thing about the pantherinae cats is that they all seem to be pretty adaptable." "Lions are found in, in closed habitats, that is in forests." "They are found in, in open habitats savannas." "Leopards are found in a variety of regions from, ah, the mountains, ah, down to the lowlands." "And we're not really sure whether saber-tooths had these habitat adaptations as well." "Certainly seems some of the smaller saber-tooths were, ah, much more specialized in their habitats." "Ah, something like Smilodon, however, you know it's big enough, it could have probably gone wherever it wanted to." "But could the disappearance of the saber-toothed cats have had something to do with another creature also emerging onto the" "African plains several million years ago?" "Life would have been dangerous for our early hominid ancestors in a world dominated by at least three species of saber-toothed cats and the pantherinaes." "Fossil skulls of early hominids from Southern Africa showed tooth marks exactly matching the canines of a leopard." "Maybe our ancestors were forced to adapt in order to survive on the African Plains." "In Tanzania's Olduvai Gorge, one of the cradles of humanity," "Rob Blumenschine has made intriguing discoveries about the changing relationship between early hominids and the big cats." "The setting for these fossil localities is usually... ah, in an area around water, either large river basis or, ah, lake basins." "Ah, areas which clearly attracted large numbers of animals, ah, the menagerie that one gets in places like the Serengeti today." "But then with some unusual additions to it." "Ah, creatures which none of us have ever seen in the flesh." "Ah, saber-toothed cats, ah, two varieties at least of saber-toothed cats who were somehow dividing up the big cat niche with, ah, lions." "Ah, we also see stone tools produced by hominids." "Creatures very different from ourselves." "Yes, they walked on two legs and their, ah, yet their brains were half our size, and they had only just started at this time, ah, to encroach upon the larger carnivore guild." "Rob looks for clues as to how animals died." "The big cats were unable to break bones and get at the calorie-rich marrow inside." "He has found the telltale signs of a craftier carnivore, taking advantage of the cat kills." "Coming from about the same level, here's another specimen which, well, this has already come out of the outcrop." "And this is a beautiful specimen." "You can't tell exactly what kind of animal this was." "Yet, what it preserves are fracture patterns which are clearly diagnostic of hominids having taken a stone hammer and, ah, broken this bone open to remove the very fat rich high calorie marrow from this bone." "Simply, give it a few skilled bursts which will nicely fracture the bone." "Sometimes, in fact, you get, ah, sort of marrow on the half shell and, and one can then take a twig or your finger and, ah, slip it into your mouth all in about one minute getting this, ah, extremely rich meal." "The upright apes were beginning to turn the tables on the big cats." "I think our ideas about the relationships between these two million year old hominids and, and big cats, ah, needs to change dramatically." "Ah, we have often seen the cats merely as predators of the hominids, a risk to be avoided." "But the big cats were also providers for early hominids." "From scavengers to effective hunters in their own right the hominids finally beat the big cats at their own game." "So, we may have helped drive the saber-tooths over the edge." "But without the big cats, we may never have evolved into such cooperative and intelligent creatures." "At Nairobi airport, a precious consignment of carnivores awaits a private charter into the bush." "This is Fabio." "Craig Packer loves lions with a passion, and he's amused by myths in films like Walt Disney's The Lion King." "Well, I think Disney spent some effort to see how lions walked and how lions would rub into each other when they greeted." "Beyond that, we're dealing with, with just cute fiction." "Ah, and I think that although obviously no one goes to a Disney film for a biology lesson," "I think there are two really glaring things in that film that are particularly irksome." "I think the one that gets me mostly is the fact that we have the young male Simba who grows up so he can marry the female from that pride." "I mean that just does not happen in the species, at all." "But we also had the conflict between the two males, ah, Mufasa and, ah, Scar, and, in fact, they cannot undermine each other as much as that, because there's always other coalitions out there." "I mean I think the Disney film was sort of viewing these two in isolations, that, that was the only pride in the world." "Well, the whole point of lions is there's lots of prides, and it's us versus them." "Our pride has to get one enough so that we can compete against our neighbors." "That's the, the sort of foundation of our family ties." "And in the case of Disney, those two going after each other, so that one killed the other, that would be suicide." "The survivor would only live for, ah, a short while as the, the lone male in the pride and he'd quickly be ousted by another group." "But is the good guy really likely to wear the fairer mane, like Mufasa?" "Or is this just another Hollywood myth transported to Africa?" "Lions' manes can be fair or dark, short or long." "What do these features really mean in lion society?" "Tonight, we want to look at the feature that's been most intriguing to us over the years, which is why do we have this very black mane, the very conspicuous color?" "So we are going to give the ladies a choice between the two long-haired males, Fabio and Julio, and the only thing that differs is the color of their mane." "I came out here as a biologist but I feel like I'm ending up as a hairdresser." "Craig and his assistants, Peyton and Grant, are careful to conceal the model lions from the real thing until the very last moment." "Are you O. K?" "How's this?" "The two models are placed about ten yards apart, facing three young lionesses a few hundred yards away." "All right." "The speaker looks good." "A loud speaker is placed in front of the two models." "In a moment, this will attract the lionesses." "That, that, that's good." "Just so it's pointing straight at the tree." "It's got to be big." "This is the big day." "Got to be big." "O.K. Fabio, you're on." "Let's be symmetrical." "You could back up the same distance over there that we're gonna be over here." "O.K." "Will that be O. K?" "Sure." "Craig and his team retreat to a safe distance to watch what happens." "Peyton plays a recording over the loud speaker of hyenas feeding at a kill." "This macabre song acts like a magnet for the lionesses." "If hyenas have made a kill nearby, then free dinner is in the offiing." "Lions won't hesitate to chase hyenas away from food." "The sound has an immediate effect." "This female is one of the animals that Craig regularly studies." "She suddenly realizes that a couple of males have arrived." "Her two sisters come to see for themselves." "She sat down." "No." "She's watching." "No." "She's going in a circle." "These lionesses live without resident males and they're clearly interested coming around the back for an investigative sniff." "From the start, this lioness shows more interest in Julio with the longer, darker mane." "She's obviously sexually attracted to him, even if she must be baffled by a big male with no smell, no penis and no reaction." "She just can't leave this guy alone." "She's still sniffling him." "Boy, the score is three to zip here." "She exhibits so-called flemen behavior, sniffling the air, looking for clues to what's going on." "Oh, this is amazing." "Unbelievable!" "The lionesses ignore the other male, Fabio, almost completely." "At one point, one of them goes over to have a sniff at the fair-haired male but she appears to lose interest even before she gets close." "Fabio's the loser." "Julio" "Fabio is clearly no Romeo." "I don't think those ladies will let us have our dummy back." "For Craig, it's an exciting moment." "Even with this very first experiment, things seem to be going the way he anticipated." "Craig believes the length and color of the mane gives the females an outward clue to a good potential mate." "We've had a number of cases over the last thirty odd years of a male with a really nice handsome mane who gets badly attacked." "And once he's mauled, his mane just falls out completely." "And so he looks exactly the same color over his entire body as just a large female." "And so if you see now a male who has a big, long mane, this is a male who has not lost a big fight for a very long period of time." "So, at least the length of the mane indicates this is a winner for some period of time." "But what about the color of the mane?" "One clue may come from the Ngorongoro" "Crater on the edge of the Serengeti, a place renowned for its black maned lions." "Ngorongoro Crater is not only famous for its black-maned males, but it's also famous for the fact that there's a resident population of wildebeests and zebra and also buffalo." "Those lions are really well fed." "Those are spoiled Southern California lions who are living the Life of Riley and it may be that, that easy life then allows them to put more, ah, pigment into the hair they grow on their mane." "So, we have inklings so far that bigger, better fed males who've never lost a fight, will indeed be those with the big, black manes." "This is the only authentic film ever taken of a killing of a man-eater, and I am the only white man who has ever accompanied the Masai unharmed." "The lion's mane has had enormous symbolic meaning for us." "This footage, shot in 1908, shows" "Masai warriors in one of their rites of passage, the killing of an adult male lion." "The one who throws the first spear wears the lion's mane as a prized trophy." "The Masai passed him." "I got within eight yards of him." "And then I heard a growl." "Out he came, roaring for all his worth." "You are now looking on the single, greatest fight you are ever likely to see between the Masai and the man-eating lion." "A sight I shall never forget." "It was as if with our growing strength and confidence we wanted to show that we could even harness their strength to our ends." "In medieval times it was fashionable for kings and emperors to own cheetahs and to use them as domesticated hunters." "In the 16th Century, King Akbar the" "Great, had over one thousand cheetahs in his stables, and amused himself and his guests with their hunting prowess." "The practice continued well into this century when the supply of cheetahs ran out." "We had come a long way since we'd cowered from the big cats." "Right up until the 1920's and '30's, lions, tigers and leopards were seen as vermin to be shot on sight." "In colonial India, it was considered great sport for" "British offiicers to shoot tigers on the weekends." "And tigers were dangerous." "In North India in 1911, Jim Corbett shot the famous man-eater of Kumon which was said to have eaten four hundred and thirty-six people in eight years." "And just as the Masai wear the lion's mane as a talisman, we, too, came to see the coats of the big cats as prestige symbols." "In the early Sixties," "Jackie Kennedy almost single-handedly started a trend for big cat coats, a whimsy of fashion with devastating consequences." "Very unlikely to put a smile on the face of the tiger, a show of fur fashions held in a French zoo." "You might consider it rather bad taste." "Could get your goat, if you've got four legs rather than two." "But animals are pretty resilient sort of creatures." "Good taste to them is invariably a matter of menu." "Throughout the Sixties and Seventies, ten thousand leopard skins were coming out of Africa every year to fuel the fashion trade." "Finally a lion cub to illustrate one thing in common between furry girls and furry animals." "They're both nice and warm." "And it wasn't only the coats we wanted." "In Asia, the tiger's bones are still valued for their supposed strength giving qualities." "It seems we wish to extract every last ounce of big cat potency." "But thanks to organizations like the Worldwide Fund For Nature, tigers continue to exist in remote regions like the Sundarbans of India and Bangladesh, even though they remain a menace to the population." "The woodcutters and honey collectors live in perpetual fear of their lives." "Tigers can move through these forests in total silence." "They always strike from behind." "Today, deaths from tigers have been reduced by a simple idea." "The woodcutters wear face masks in reverse." "A tiger can hardly creep up on you when you have eyes in the back of your head." "Even in North America, big cats continue to pose a threat." "Thinking a dark basement window was a cave or passageway, the cougar smashed through the glass followed by the hounds in hot pursuit." "The woman who lives in the suite was already awake and the tumult was enough to convince her to hide in the closet." "Crash!" "Through this window, right in front of me, like right here." "And, ah, it just, it just ran so fast I didn't have any time to react." "I just knew I had to get out of the way because there were a lot of dogs came right in after it." "So I went in the closet." "The cat is a tom, about three to four years, a hundred and ten to a hundred and fifteen pounds." "A big cougar, but not unusually so." "Cougars are on the increase throughout the North American West, and are even encroaching on suburbia." "There were fifty thousand at the last count." "But what of the other big cats?" "Sadly, most of them are not faring so well." "There are only about fifteen thousand jaguars left in the forests of Central and South America," "and perhaps ten thousand clouded leopards." "There are between five and seven thousand snow leopards." "The Javan and Sumatran tigers teeter on the edge of extinction, and there are only about two thousand tigers left in India." "And there are now fewer than twenty Sinai leopards." "But what about the big cats of Africa?" "Huge parks like the Serengeti have helped save these animals." "But it's still a struggle to keep humanity at bay, and many of the big cats are suffering." "Lions are doing well enough." "There are probably a hundred thousand in Africa, and the number seems stable." "But cheetahs are not in such good shape." "In Kenya's Masai Mara, cheetahs are so harassed by tourists they have trouble finding the anonymity they need to hunt." "Once a safari guide finds a cheetah, others descend like bees to a honey pot." "She may not hunt today." "Many cheetahs can hardly feed their young and are leaving the relative safety of the parks in search of peace and quiet." "Today, there are only about twelve thousand cheetahs left in Africa." "Even when cheetahs are left alone by tourists, they suffer heavy losses from other big cats." "Lions will probably kill three of her five cubs before they reach their first birthday." "But there is a real success story among Africa's big cats." "On an African safari, tourists can find cheetahs and lions within a day or two, but they'd be lucky to see a leopard lurking in the acacias." "Yet there are actually half a million leopards in Africa, nearly five times as many as cheetahs and lions put together." "They are the quintessential cats:" "Smooth, silent and very secretive." "This is a creature of the night." "The leopard has succeeded where all other cats have failed, by avoiding us." "Few people have ever seen a leopard hunt, let alone filmed it." "Yet, we don't seem to warm to leopards the way we do to the lions of Africa." "The lives of lions are compelling natural dramas replete with the jealousies, rivalries and loyalties of family life." "It is no coincidence that we, the dominant apes, identify strongly with these, the dominant cats." "Craig Packer's work will continue for years to come, but he's more convinced than ever that the queen of the beasts is, indeed, choosing males with the longer, darker manes." "The results, so far, is certainly extremely hopeful." "Ah, I don't think we could have asked for more exciting experiments than we've seen in the last couple of days." "There are these two aspects of the mane that we've been really curious about, the color of the mane and the length of the mane." "And I think one of the nice things working for us here is the fact that these lions are, are not hasty." "These are not impulse decisions they're making." "They're coming up very gradually, very carefully, sitting down, looking clearly at each of the two dummies before making, what looks like, quite a determined choice." "And, in several of these, we've seen the choice clearly in the way that we would have expected if the female is playing a role in the evolution of this flamboyant male trait, the big, black mane of the male." "Understanding the role of the lion's mane is just part of Craig Packer's work, but it's a valuable new insight into the life of an animal with which we feel such a strong affiinity." "There are aspects of lions that are quite resonant given the human condition." "I think they cooperate in so many different ways." "They fail in their cooperation sometimes." "They will refuse to cooperate sometimes." "But in the end, in the really big important moment, when we have to fight against our neighbors and we have to defend our offspring against infanticidal males, they pull together." "And I think, that, we can relate to very strongly."