Zoo lions often receive food on regular schedules, but wild lions live with a less predictable food supply.
After a successful hunt, they can eat a large meal and then rest for long periods, while unsuccessful hunts can leave them without food for several days.
Zoo-feeding often looks different because meat may arrive daily or almost daily in prepared portions.
These meals can meet nutritional needs, but they reduce some of the physical work and long pauses between meals that wild lions experience.
An experiment at Monarto Safari Park in South Australia asked what happens when zoo-feeding follows more of that natural timing.
The team tracked behavior across a complete feast-and-fast cycle rather than focusing only on the hours after food arrived.
Wild lions feast then fast
Wild lions generally feed every 1.5 to 2.5 days, although fasting periods of up to eight days have been observed.
Their large body size and stomach capacity allow them to eat substantial meals at once, then rest while digesting them.
“Wild lions don’t eat at the same time every day. They experience natural periods of feasting and fasting depending on hunting success,” said lead author Lesia Hryhorenko of Adelaide University.
“We wanted to understand how African lions in human care respond when feeding routines more closely resemble those natural patterns.”
Carcasses changed feeding routines
The team monitored seven African lions for three months, but only three nine-year old males received the new feeding routine.
Four other lions stayed on their usual schedule, although the groups already differed before the experiment began.
During the eight-week experimental period, the three males received about 440 pounds (200 kilograms) of whole kangaroo or goat carcasses every nine days.
The carcasses stayed available for two to three days, followed by six to seven days without food. Eight infrared cameras recorded 10-second clips every five minutes around the clock.
This let the researchers track daytime and nighttime behavior, rest after meals, and later fasting days instead of only watching shortly after food arrived.
Whole carcasses made lions feed longer
On carcass days, feeding time rose from an average of 25.7 minutes per day during the earlier baseline period, before carcass feeding, to 76.4 minutes.
Feeding bouts also became more frequent, and the span between the first and last feeding observation sometimes reached three hours and 35 minutes.
“Providing whole carcasses changes much more than the nutritional content of the diet,” Hryhorenko said.
“It gives lions the opportunity to engage in behaviors such as tearing, pulling and manipulating food over extended periods, which are important components of their natural feeding ecology.”
Lions rested after big carcass meals
The biggest shift after feeding involved rest. The lions spent much more time lying down during the first three days of the cycle, when carcass access occurred, than they did later in the fasting period.
Lying down accounted for 52.5 percent of observations on days one through three. That fell to 30.4 percent on days four through six and 17.0 percent on days seven through nine.
Movement showed the opposite pattern. Locomotion, meaning ordinary movement from place to place, was lowest just after feeding and increased during the middle and later fasting days.
The pattern resembles the broad rhythm seen in wild lions: heavy feeding followed by rest, then more movement as time passes without another meal.
Still, the experiment only showed a similar pattern in this small zoo group and did not prove that the lions experienced the same physical or mental state as wild animals.
Pacing followed daily routines
The researchers also tracked pacing, a repeated movement along the same route.
In zoos, pacing can sometimes be linked with anticipation, so the team wanted to see whether it steadily increased as the lions went longer without food.
Pacing was higher in the second month of carcass feeding than during the earlier baseline period. However, it did not rise in a clear step-by-step pattern across each nine-day feeding cycle.
Instead, two daily peaks appeared between nine and 10 in the morning and between three and four in the afternoon.
Those times matched routine keeper arrival and enclosure shifting, suggesting that predictable management events may have mattered more than hunger alone.
The team also saw no increase in aggression or social instability around carcasses. The paper cautions that observations were made at the group level, so the cameras could not show how each individual lion responded.
Longer monitoring sees more
“Many zoo studies focus only on what happens immediately after food is provided,” added Associate Professor Alexandra Whittaker.
“Our results show that feeding schedules can influence behavior for days afterwards, making it essential to look at behavioral patterns across the entire feeding cycle rather than a single feeding event.”
That point matters because the cameras captured behavior across every hour of the day for three months.
Short daytime observations could have missed nighttime feeding, long rest after large meals, and changes that appeared several days into fasting.
Behavior changed, but welfare is unproven
The experiment involved only three adult males in the carcass-feeding group.
The four comparison lions differed in age and sex, and the groups already behaved differently at baseline, so the researchers did not use them for direct experimental comparisons.
The feeding change also came with changes in enclosure use, which could have affected pacing and camera visibility.
Researchers scored behavior for the group as a whole rather than identifying each lion, so individual differences could have been missed.
Most importantly, the work measured behavior rather than direct physical measures related to welfare.
Whole carcass feeding changed when the lions ate, rested, moved, and paced, but those behavioral changes alone do not prove that welfare improved.
The results suggest that feeding schedules can shape lion behavior for several days, not just when food arrives.
Future work across more zoos, more social groups, and with physical health measures could show whether similar routines bring broader welfare benefits.
The study is published in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science.
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