Analytical DNA fingerprinting in lions: parentage, genetic diversity, and kinship

This study applied multilocus DNA fingerprinting to wild Serengeti and Ngorongoro lions to resolve parentage and quantify relatedness within prides and male coalitions. By matching cubs to candidate sires, the authors directly measured how males in a coalition share paternity and confirmed close kinship among co-resident females. The genetic data validated and refined earlier behavioral inferences about reproductive skew and cooperative breeding. The work also compared genetic diversity between an outbred Serengeti population and the small, bottlenecked Ngorongoro Crater population, linking reduced variation to compromised sperm quality. It was an early demonstration of how molecular tools can test hypotheses about mating systems, kin selection, and inbreeding in a wild social carnivore.