This is the Scientific Americans 60 Second Science. I'm Jason Goldman. Got a minute?

The giraffe is an icon of the African savanna. The lion is the top predator of the ecosystem. Both animals face uncertain futures and both are the subjects of intense ongoing conservation work.

Now a study suggests that saving one might mean bad news for the other.

When I was out in the field, I heard anecdotes from people that in one of my study sites

there were very few juvenile giraffes because apparently the

lions in the area had developed a preference for taking young giraffes.

University of Bristol biologist Zoe Mueller. Working in Kenya's great rift valley, she focused her attention on two neighboring sites, a national park with lots of lions, and a privately owned conservancy with no lions, lions. In a lion-free conservancy, 26% of the giraffes were less than one-year-old.

But in a lion-filled park, juvenile giraffes made up only 5% of the species population.

So I was able to show really that actually in the presence of lions, the number of juveniles is severely reduced by actually by 83% which was a lot higher

than I thought it would be and quite shocking actually.

Draft populations have declined by some 40% in the last 30 years, with fewer than 98,000 individuals

left in the wild.

In recognition of those figures, they've recently been classified as vulnerable, that is likely to become endangered.

The ongoing loss of juveniles could lead to a situation where the population crashes, since population growth and stability, both rely on having enough

calves survive to sexual maturity, so they too can breed and produce offspring of their own.

The study compares only two sites in East Africa, but it highlights

the extreme complexity of wildlife management in Africa, where the recovery of one species

could potentially come at the cost of another.

Unfortunately in East Africa, most of the conservation areas these days are fenced and enclosed.

And so this is going to become an increasingly more common problem where we find that predators

are being enclosed in specific areas.

Allowing for the conservation of both species in the same areas is thus a tricky proposition.

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