Hello everybody welcome to our Asiatic lion enclosure! My name is Barry and we've been joined today by resident expert Helen!

Tell us a little bit about our lions at Edinburgh Zoo?

In this enclosure we have five lions at the moment. We've got our adult male Jayendra (or Jay as we call him), and our adult female Roberta. They are a breeding pair and in 2019 they successfully bred three cubs. We've got two male cubs and one female cub - Mitaali, Kushanu and Keshari. 

Tell us a little bit more about the personalities of the lions that we have here?

Roberta is a very nervous animal, she does not like people at all and when she first arrived it took us a long time to try and build up her confidence around us and in their house, but Jay has been an absolute star and he's a really good confidence boost for her. As a pair they both get on really brilliantly! So he's really confident and he really helps to to calm her down. 

The cubs are starting to develop their personalities now as well. So Mitaali is the greedy one, whenever there's food around she's usually the first one to to appear! Keshari is definitely a very bold confident, bolshy boy. Then Kushanu is a bit quieter but he does like to to join in. He just follows the other two and does whatever they're doing, he's much more of a follower and than the other two.

Now of course when visitors come to the zoo they expect quite often the lions to be quite active, especially because wildlife documentaries show you all the action bits, whereas in reality lions are very energy efficient so tell us a little bit about the kind of daily behaviour you would expect?

What behaviour do you expect to see from our lions?

Lions, and all big cats actually, spend most of their days sleeping or as Barry said being energy efficient, so they they eat big feeds like big carcasses of animals, and then they'll spend the next several hours or even a couple of days just digesting that and sleeping that off. It's quite an energy-intensive process digesting all the raw protein that they eat, so they do spend a lot of time apparently doing nothing but they're being very energy efficient and digesting a lot.

As with all the species we have at the zoo they're here for conservation purposes, here to save the species. The Asiatic lion population has gone down historically and it's on the way back up now thanks to all the conservation work. 

What makes Asiatic lions so important as a species to have in their environment, and why should we save them?

They are important because they are top predators, so they're responsible for keeping all their prey animals under control. If we didn't have our top predators, these prey animals' numbers would just go out of control and they would be eating far too much of the young shoots and all the young saplings in the forest, and not allowing the vegetation to regrow. 

Historically Asiatic lions would be found around Turkey through Asia into Eastern India, and they were hunted almost to the point of extinction. Their numbers have been increasing gradually since about 2010, but unfortunately due to Coronavirus and the the official census wasn't able to go ahead last year, but estimated numbers are around 650 at the moment, which is quite good. 

The problem is that they're unable to migrate out of the area they're in because they're surrounded by coast on one side and villages and towns on the other side,  so that it's a big problem for them that they're not able to to migrate out of the area so that the numbers are getting a bit a little bit congested in the area at the moment.