Nature Is Metal
Pick Up The Blitz
📽 by @mhgoeswild
Lions and zebras know each other very well. Their ancestors have coexisted on the African continent for over 20 million years, and the modern day versions of both have 2 to 3 million years of experience dealing with the ins and outs of survival on the same field of battle.
The stripes know that the young one is a target. If a chase ensues, the lions will be looking to pick off the slowest, most inexperienced member of the group, and the baby zebra is the odd one out. If not for the heroics of what I assume to be the mother zebra, the youngster
would be lunch meat.
She put her body on the line to box out the predatory advances of the lion, and thwarted her plan for an easy meal. This isn’t always the case, which is what makes this video even cooler.
Had the math been different, like facing multiple lions instead of just one, the mother might have had to leave her foal to fend for itself. Evolution forces this harsh choice because her survival ensures future offspring. With a single lion, she can risk defending her young, but against a pride, fleeing maximizes her chance to reproduce again.
While this might seem heartless, it is a strategy honed over millions of years of predator-prey conflict. Lucky for the foal, mom didn’t have to make that decision.
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