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Legge, S.
Cooperative lions excape the prisoner's dilemma
1996 Tree (11): 2-3
Lions (Panthera leo) are an emblem of cooperation for many people: males united in protecting their pride, females defending their cubs and their territory in exemplary solidarity. This image persists despite empirical work over the past 15 years demonstrating that lion cooperation is more complex, subtle and context-dependent than the distorted representation of the "Lion King". The most recent work to emerge from the Serengeti lion population in Tanzania, East Africa, reveals the most disturbing truth yet: lionesses "cheat" on their pride mates when defending the pride territory against intruding females. This is the latest finding in a productive series of studies using playbacks of recorded lion roars to simulate different levels and types of territorial intrusions. Two new papers examine the mechanisms of cooperation in group-territorial lionesses and in coalitions of male lions. They illustrate the difficulty of matching empirical work to existing theoretical models for cooperation.
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