Research overview: the 1994 Serengeti lion die-off chronology and population impact

In 1994 a canine distemper epidemic swept the Serengeti, killing roughly a third of its lions and spreading to leopards, hyenas and other carnivores. This overview reconstructs the outbreak timeline: early sightings of seizing, neurologically impaired lions, the rapid spread across prides, the diagnostic effort that confirmed CDV, and the slow demographic recovery in following years. It examines how individually known prides in long-term study areas allowed researchers to quantify mortality precisely and to compare epidemic with non-epidemic CDV exposures. The synthesis highlights why this event became a textbook case of wildlife disease, reshaping thinking about pathogen spillover, reservoir control and the vulnerability of social felids to introduced viruses, and why later work tied its lethality to drought and Babesia co-infection.