As the world mourns the loss of Cecil the lion, BBC Earth celebrates the species
Matt Walker
Lions are big. Lions are impressive. Lions are also threatened by hunters and habitat loss. So here are seven reasons why we should celebrate their existence.
We still don’t know why they roar
Only certain species of cats roar, the ‘great’ cats, such as lions, tigers and jaguars, which have a specialised structure in their throats. Lions are thought to roar to communicate, especially over longer distances. But we still don’t know why they roar so deeply.
In 2010, Dr Gustav Peters and Dr Marcell Peters at the Alexander Koenig Zoological Research Museum in Bonn, Germany analysed the average frequencies of long-distance calls made by 27 different species of cat. They confirmed that cat species living in more open types of habitat, such as lions and sand cats, have deeper calls, whereas cats living in denser, forested habitats, such as wildcats, clouded leopards and the little known marbled cat, communicate at a higher pitch.
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