The duration of pregnancy in these animals is 110 days. Shortly before giving birth, the lioness leaves the pride and hides. She can give birth to 1-4 cubs, the weight of which is a little less than 2 kg. Lion cubs are born blind, and they open their eyes only 7 days after birth. For safety reasons, the mother changes her place of stay several times, carrying the children with her. She is engaged in hunting, and the baby is fed with milk. Cubs learn to hunt at the age of 1.5 months, then the whole family joins the pride. With the start of the hunt, lion cubs eat meat little by little, although the milk feeding period lasts about 6 months.
Reproduction in lions is not tied to the season, but begins with the achievement of maturity. Males are considered sexually mature at the age of 6 years, and females at 4 years. Males tend to fight for females. Sometimes these fights are so brutal that the opponent dies.
In captivity lions often breed every year, but in the wild they usually breed no more than once in two years. Females are receptive to mating for three or four days within a widely variable reproductive cycle. During this time a pair generally mates every 20–30 minutes, with up to 50 copulations per 24 hours.
Vegetation type that grows under hot, seasonally dry climatic conditions and is characterized by an open tree canopy (i.e., scattered trees) above a continuous tall grass understory (the vegetation layer between the forest canopy and the ground). The largest areas of savanna are found in Africa, South America, Australia, India, the Myanmar (Burma)–Thailand region in Asia, and Madagascar.
Savannas arose as rainfall progressively lessened in the edges of the tropics during the Cenozoic Era (66 million years ago to the present)—in particular, during the past 25 million years. Grasses, the dominant plants of savannas, appeared only about 50 million years ago, although it is possible that some savanna-like vegetation lacking grasses occurred earlier. The South American fossil record provides evidence of a well-developed vegetation, rich in grass and thought to be equivalent to modern savanna, being established by the early Miocene Epoch, about 20 million years ago.
Climates across the world became steadily cooler during that period. Lower ocean surface temperatures reduced water evaporation, which slowed the whole hydrologic cycle, with less cloud formation and precipitation. The vegetation of midlatitude regions, lying between the wet equatorial areas and the moist cool temperate zones, was affected substantially.
The main regions in which savannas emerged in response to that long-term climatic change—tropical America, Africa, South Asia, and Australia—were already separated from each other by ocean barriers by that time. Plant migration across those barriers was inhibited, and the details of the emergence of savannas on each continent varied. In each region different plant and animal species evolved to occupy the new seasonally dry habitats.
