This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Scientists know a great deal about how lions hunt, breed and survive, but the microscopic communities living inside them have remained largely unexplored. Now, a study of wild lions in Namibia is beginning to change that, while revealing how much biology is still missing from the world's genomic databases.
African lions are among the continent's most closely watched animals. Yet when Wits researchers began looking at the microorganisms living inside the guts of wild lions, they entered surprisingly unfamiliar territory. A study published in Animal Microbiome has provided the first comprehensive, genome-resolved analysis of the gut microbiome of free-living African lions.
Researchers analyzed 23 fresh fecal samples from 20 lions in Namibia's Etosha National Park and reconstructed 318 bacterial and 102 viral genomes from the DNA they found. Most were sufficiently different from genomes already held in international reference databases to indicate largely novel species. For lead author Carl Belger, who conducted the work for his master's degree at Wits, that lack of knowledge was precisely what made the project interesting.
"Very few papers had sequenced the gut microbiome of lions before," he says. "The question was really: What does the gut microbiome of lions look like?" The microbiome study formed part of broader ecological research on Etosha's lions. When animals were immobilized by veterinarians, different research teams worked together to collect blood, hair and other samples and fit tracking collars, allowing as much information as possible to be gathered from a single immobilization.
Belger was responsible for collecting the fresh fecal samples. "I was at the back end of the lion—at the 'business end,' should I say," he says. On one occasion, the researchers were working on a young lion around sunset while members of its pride stood beyond the vehicles, watching.
Belger says one of the things that impressed him most about the fieldwork was the collaboration: researchers from different countries and disciplines converging on the same animals to collect different kinds of data, rather than repeatedly disturbing them. A microbiome is the community of microorganisms, including bacteria and viruses, living in a particular environment. They contribute to processes such as digestion and metabolism and can be linked to an animal's diet, environment and health.
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