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Asiatic Lion Group Observation

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Our study started off very differently to how it ended up. Originally from the first visit to Paignton Zoo, conducted the couple of weeks before the main study, we observed interesting behaviour involving the Asiatic Lion group. The group consisted of a male, two females and two cubs. The male was being protective towards the cubs and the mother but spending most his time near the other female in the group. At this time we did not know the background of the group. From this we all agreed on the hypothesis of “The male lion would show defensive behaviours towards the female without cubs, to defend his offspring and therefore his own direct fitness.” With our hypothesis we then started creating an ethogram of behaviours from what we were observing. …show more content…

This ruined the idea that the male was separating the female from the cubs. As a group we decided to think of other ideas where we could still use our data sheets and ethogram. The lions continued to look like they weren’t going to move, so instead of just having very basic uninteresting data we took a walk to the tigers. They were a lot more active as we noticed playing behaviour between the cub and mother. Due to this we thought about how we can compare the two. We thought about the different housed grouping they are in which then led us onto looking up their natural social grouping, due to Asiatic lions being social (Meena, 2009) and Tigers being solitary (Linkie et al., 2003) we decided to look how this changes their behaviour. We agreed to do the same time periods and intervals as we would have done for just the lions so split into two groups so both species could be studied at the same time. There were no issues with this and everyone worked well. Too keep everyone happy and it more interesting after midday the two groups swapped species. When we finished there was a little bit of issues regarding the event behaviour confusion on what exactly was meant to be recorded between the two groups meant that the event behaviour couldn’t really be used in the

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