There is only one example of a melanistic lion that we have ever read about. This was a report of a very big Persian lion that was seen by the archaeologist Sir Henry Layard which was described as being "very dark brown in color, in parts almost black." There are, of course, no lions at all left in Persia today...much less big black ones. An albino lion cub was born recently in the Lujan Zoo in Buenos Aires. In his book, "Wild Cats of the World", C.A.W. Guggisberg makes mention of a couple of albino cubs born in Kruger National Park in 1960, and one of these albinos was apparently still alive in 1977, when it was mentioned in the preface to the book "The White Lions of Timbavati"...which brings us to the beginning of our story...
Timbavati is a small game reserve adjacent to Kruger National Park in South Africa. It was formed in 1955 when twenty-eight landowners got together and decided to combine their holdings and dedicate themselves to the preservation of the wildlife thereupon. In 1975, a man named Chris McBride was studying lions there as part of the fieldwork neccesary for his masters degree in wildlife management. In early October of that year, his daughter, Lan, and her son, in for a visit, stopped to watch a lioness along the road. To their amazement, two snow white cubs appeared with the new mother along with one normal, tabby colored one. Lan rushed back to get her father, who returned with her to see the cubs. McBride eventually wrote two books about the life of the cubs..."The White Lions of Timbavati" and "Operation White Lion". Both are out of print now but the first, at least, should be pretty easy to find... Check the local library. The cubs turned out to be a male, who came to be called "Temba" (Zulu for "Hope"), and a female... "Tombi" ("Girl"). The normal colored cub was a litter-mate that the McBrides named "Vela". Later, a third white cub, "Phuma" was found in a different pride, but soon disappeared and is presumed to have died.
Even though the cubs were snow-white... they were not albinos. They had normal yellowish-brown eyes instead of the pink eyes that an albino would have. The white color is caused by a recessive gene, much like the white tigers of India.
In the first book,"The White Lions of Timbavati", McBride tells about the discovery of the cubs, and of the concern he had for the survival of the very special cubs. In "Operation White Lion" he tells of his final decision to capture the cubs and of how he went about it.
Temba, Tombi, and Vela were eventually sent to the National Zoo in Pretoria, South Africa. Vela was sold, unknown where... Tombi died before ever producing... and Temba died in 1996 after producing several offspring. The known surviving animals in the strain are one heterozygous male in Pretoria... two white females and a heterozygous male that are at the Zoological Animal Reproduction Center in Indiana... and two heterozygous males from the Cincinnati zoo that have been moved to a private reserve in Africa. (Heterozygous lions, at least in the present context, are normal-colored animals that carry the recessive gene for the white coloration.)
This was not the only strain of white lions to come from the Timbavati area, however. The predominant strain today comes from a heterozygous male caught by the Johannesburg zoo in 1977. The '77 male came from a different pride than Temba, Tombi, and Vela, but when he was bred to his own daughters he produced white cubs. These cats, and their offspring, are represented in the Philadelphia and Toronto zoos as well as some in Germany, China, and Japan. This is also the strain owned by Siegfried and Roy at The Mirage in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Zoo Dynamics
