Inside a lion: hundreds of microbes nobody had ever catalogued

A lion's gut is a world science had never mapped — until a master's student from Wits University collected droppings across Namibia's Etosha National Park and read the DNA inside. Carl Belger and colleagues reconstructed 318 bacterial and 102 viral genomes from 20 lions, and most of them matched nothing in the world's reference databases: they appear to be species new to science, finely tuned to a diet of almost pure meat, with near-complete chemical pathways for breaking down the purines in flesh. Adding the lion genomes to the global database cut the share of unreadable DNA in the samples from 24.5% to 4.5%. Published in Animal Microbiome, the work is a baseline, not a cure — but every future check on a wild lion's health now has something to compare against, and conservation vets have a first atlas of the invisible ecosystem a lion carries.

SDG 15 · Life on land — Mechanism: tech innovation