SideBar          `                                                                                RONDELL'S LION PAGE

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Male lions cover about 100 square miles of grasslands, scrubs, or open woodlands. Lions are the only cats that live in groups, which are called pride. Prides are family units that includes up to 3 males, a dozen females and their young. Female cubs typically stay with the group they age. Young male lions eventually leave and make their own prides by taking over a group headed by another male. Females are the pride's primary hunters. They often work together.Lions run up to 50 mph and sleep up to 20 hours a day.

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                                                                                              Reproduction 

A lioness has a gestation period of about 110 days, after which she gives birth to about 4 cubs. Usually she gives birth in sheltered areas away from the group and introuduces the new cubs to the pride when they are 8 weeks old. Most of the time the females give birth at the same time and they share duties of protecting and nursing cubs. the cubs stop nursing for about 8 months and they start learning how to hunt with pride. Females take care of their yound until they are 2 when the mother is ready to produce another cub.

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                                                                                                                  Diet

Cooperative hunting lets lions to their prey as large as wildbeests, zebras, buffaloes young elephants, rhinos, hippos, and giraffes any of which that can provide several meals for the pride. Mice, lizards, tortoises, warthogs, antelopes, and even crocodiles is also lion's diet. Because they often take over kills made by hyenas, cheetas, and leopards, scavenged food provides more than 50 percent of their diets in areas like the Serengeti plains. 

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                                                                                                     Population

The lions population in Africa has decreased  by half since the early 1950s. Today, fewer than 21,000 remain in all of Africa. secondly the cheetah population in Africa bottomed out at around or below ten thousand over a decade ago. Somehow the lions and leopards have been ignored in all of the wild African lion population, which is estimated at between 150,000-200,000 in the 1980s, has plummeted in the last two decades in between 18,000 and 25,000 today.