Female counterstrategies to infanticide in lions

When new males take over a pride they often kill dependent cubs to bring females back into estrus, and this study analysed how females resist. Lionesses defend cubs collectively, sometimes at injury risk, abandon doomed litters to conceive sooner, and may form coalitions that influence which males win tenure. Synchronous breeding produces creches that are harder for incoming males to raid. The paper laid out the reproductive arithmetic of infanticide and the female responses that blunt it, becoming a foundational reference for sexual conflict in mammals and for understanding why pride takeovers are such violent demographic bottlenecks.