Lion Takes Down Wildebeest

For the wildebeest, the grass is life, but it’s also cover for the enemy. This lion, hidden in the grass, senses an opportunity. A mother and calf have strayed from the heard. When she goes, a lion’s acceleration can cover 50 feet in less than two seconds. But in this moment, something surprising occurs. The lioness turns away from the calf, the easier kill, and makes an attempt for the larger adult. Why she does has everything to do with where these rivals were just seconds before. Having penetrated so far inside the wildebeest’s escape zone, perhaps the lioness feels she now has a chance at running down the bigger meal. And unlike the wildebeest’s long and lean lower limbs, the lion’s are short and heavily muscled. It’s like a matchup between a marathon runner built for endurance and a sprinter with a weightlifter’s strength. The lion’s charge zeroes in on the wildebeest’s vulnerable flanks. Then there’s the leap. Cats can rotate their wrists, wrap their paws around prey, and unleash jackknife-like claws to hold on. Though the wildebeest outweighs the lioness, it isn’t designed for side to side stability. A lion’s powerful shoulders and momentum can knock it over. Once it’s down, the lion’s toolbox of teeth go to work. To seize the throat or to clamp over a muscle, long canines bite like daggers, killing by suffocation. Later on, upper and lower carnassial teeth work like scissors to slice meat. Even the surface of the tongue has sharp, pointed bumps for rasping flesh from the kill. In the moment, one wildebeest, one lion. But in the bigger picture, it’s the grassland’s quintessential balancing act. Small bands of hunters picking their opportunities within the migrating herds. Any moment of impact turns on split-second timing, luck, and millions of years of physiological adaptation.