By: Benjamin  He

What do you think of when I tell you that “Jacob and Tibu swam the Kazinga Channel”? Most likely you’ll think of two humans with a truckload of supplies preparing to set a world record. Actually, chances are that you don’t even know where or what the Kazinga is (For the record, the Kazinga channel is a 20 miles long body of water in Uganda), but that’s besides the point.

Anyway, what you probably don’t think of are two lions accomplishing a record-breaking swim across a huge body of water. Allow me to set the scene…

Jacob, having lost one of his four legs in a poacher’s trap four years ago, and his brother, dubbed Tibu, stood at the edge of the Kazinga Channel in Queen Elizabeth National Park in Uganda. About 12 hours earlier, the two lions had lost a territorial battle. The other side of the channel was significantly safer than the other side, so going to the other side seemed like a good call.

There were a few problems with that, however. First, the river was roughly a mile wide. That’s 4 minutes on a paddleboat. Which means that it’ll be significantly harder for two cats to cross. Second, the river already had some other happy residents, such as 16-foot-long crocodiles and hippos, some of the most aggressive and dangerous animals known to man.

Jacob and Tibu figured that swimming was still their best choice, going on to perform the longest swim taken on by lions.

Their first attempt failed, the lions bailing. During the second attempt, the drone that scientists were using to track the lions found a heat signature that may have been a hungry crocodile or hippo, causing the lions to split into a Y formation and aborting the mission.

Third time’s the charm for the lions, and the pair finally managed to cross.

“It was pretty dramatic,” said Alexander Braczkowski, a conservation biologist working with Griffith University in Australia and Northern Arizona University who has been studying the lions since 2017. “It looks like two tiny little heat signatures crossing an ocean.”

Before this swim, lions had already been observed swimming in Okavango Delta in Botswana, but rarely farther than 150 feet. In 2012, a lion swam around 330 feet across the Zambezi River, from Zimbabwe to Zambia. In November 2023, a young male swam across the Rufiji River in southern Tanzania, crossing as much as 985 feet of water.
But Jacob and Tibu managed to cross an entire mile’s worth of water. But for what? What need is so great that they would swim over 5000 feet of the human equivalent of liquefied seaweed?

There is a very specific, instinctual reason: Breeding.

Gross by human means? I suppose so, but if you think about it, besides staying alive, that’s sort of what all animals were born to do.

“If there’s nobody to mate with, what are you doing?” said Craig Packer, who ran the Serengeti Lion Project for 35 years and wasn’t involved in the study. “You’re a male lion. You don’t have a very long life span, so you have to get on with it, especially if you’re wounded.”