![]() And in 2014, a family of bottlenose dolphins fostered a baby melon-headed whale, who learned to surf and jump like his new peers. In 2004, a group of capuchin monkeys took in an infant marmoset. The tale of the leopard cub joined two other documented instances of interspecies adoption in the wild - each one sweet enough for a children’s book, yet strange enough to captivate scientists. The paper’s authors, who also included a conservation officer and a park ranger, first spotted the motley crew in late December 2018, hanging out near a freshly killed nilgai antelope. He and others detailed the case last week in the ecology journal Ecosphere. This was a rare case of cross-species adoption in the wild, and the only documented example involving animals that are normally strong competitors, Dr. She treated him as if one of her own two sons, who were about the same age. The 2-month-old cub - all fuzzy ears and blue eyes - was adorable, and the lioness spent weeks nursing, feeding and caring for him until he died. ![]() “They are at perpetual odds.”īut about a year ago, a young lioness in the park put this enmity aside. “They compete with each other” for space and food, said Stotra Chakrabarti, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Minnesota who studies animal behavior. The lions and leopards of Gir National Park, in Gujarat, India, normally do not get along.
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