By: Jessie Sha

It’s dark, with almost no sounds except the sounds of two lions running. They stop unexpectedly in front of a wide channel. Large hippos roam the bottom freely. Crocodiles up to 16-feet-long lurk just below the surface. What will these two brave lions do? Swim with deadly animals? Or get killed by their own kind?

One night in February 2024, two lions, Jacob and Tibu, were running from female lionesses. Jacob had already lost a leg before the battle making it much harder to survive. They had recently been defeated in a territorial struggle, clashing multiple times with the resident lions/lionesses. Weighing their options, the two brothers decided to swim across the Kazinga Channel in Queen Elizabeth National Park.

Alexander Braczkowski, a biologist working with Griffith University and Northern Arizona University in Australia, described it to Gizmodo as “(Walking into) established territory of several other male coalitions” in search of lionesses, but simply “got the hell kicked out of them.” That was one of the reasons they left. They needed to get to the other side to mate because their life spans aren’t long. When Craig Packer, Director of the Serengeti Lion Project, was interviewed by The New York Times, he said, “If there’s nobody to mate with, what are you doing? 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.” This explains why the lions would attempt this crazy task… for reproduction.

Although lions have been recording swimming long and treacherous distances before, this is a new record. The channel is almost one mile long (0.93 miles) and lions generally only swim 150 feet at a time. In comparison, the lions swam around 4,910 feet that night. The lions failed twice before successfully crossing the water. Dr. Braczkowski and his team spotted them multiple times during the spectacle, but they never got the evidence of them swimming the whole length until now.

This courageous act in search of love drove these lions to do things we have never seen before. These two brothers will take their chances to the other side in hopes of mating with females.