Panthera leo melanochaita

''Panthera leo melanochaita'' is a lion subspecies in Southern and East Africa. In this part of Africa, lion populations are regionally extinct in Lesotho, Djibouti and Eritrea, and are threatened by loss of habitat and prey base, killing by local people in retaliation for loss of livestock, and in several countries also by trophy hunting. Since the turn of the 21st century, lion populations in intensively managed protected areas in Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe have increased, but declined in East African range countries. In 2005, a Lion Conservation Strategy was developed for East and Southern Africa.

Results of a phylogeographic study indicate that lion populations in southern and eastern Africa are forming a major clade distinct from lion populations in West Africa, Central Africa and Asia. In 2017, the Cat Classification Task Force of the IUCN Cat Specialist Group subsumed lion populations according to the major clades into two subspecies, namely '' P. l. leo'' and ''P. l. melanochaita''. Within ''P. l. melanochaita'' three subclades are clearly distinguishable. One from northeastern Africa, another one from southwestern Africa and a third one from southeastern Africa.

The type specimen for ''P. l. melanochaita'' was a black-maned lion from the Cape of Good Hope, known as the Cape lion. Phylogeographic analysis of lion samples from Gabon and the Republic of the Congo indicate their close genetic relation to ''P. l. melanochaita'' samples from Namibia and Botswana. It has been referred to as the Southern lion, Southern African lion and the 'southern subspecies'.

Taxonomy

''Felis (Leo) melanochaitus'' was the scientific name proposed by Charles Hamilton Smith in 1842 who described a lion specimen from South Africa's Cape Province. In the 19th and 20th centuries, several naturalists described zoological specimens from Southern and East Africa and proposed the following subspecies:
*''Felis leo somaliensis'' (Noack 1891), based on two lion specimens from Somalia
*''Felis leo massaicus'' (Neumann 1900), based on two lions killed near Kibaya and the Gurui River in Kenya
*''Felis leo sabakiensis'' ( Lönnberg 1910), based on two male lions from the environs of Mount Kilimanjaro
*''Felis leo roosevelti'' ( Heller 1913), a lion from the Ethiopian Highlands presented to Theodore Roosevelt
*''Felis leo nyanzae'' (Heller 1913), a lion skin from Kampala, Uganda
*''Felis leo bleyenberghi'' (Lönnberg 1914), a male lion from the Katanga Province of Belgian Congo
*''Leo leo hollisteri'' ( Joel Asaph Allen 1924), a male lion from the area of Lime Springs, Sotik on the eastern shore of Lake Victoria
*''Leo leo krugeri'' (Austin Roberts 1929), an adult male lion from the Sabi Sand Game Reserve named in honour of Paul Kruger
*''Leo leo vernayi'' (Roberts 1948), a male lion from the Kalahari collected by the Vernay-Lang Kalahari Expedition
*''Panthera leo webbensies'' Ludwig Zukowsky 1964, two lions from Somalia, one in the Natural History Museum, Vienna that originated in Webi Shabeelle, the other kept in a German zoo that had been imported from the hinterland of Mogadishu.

Dispute over the validity of these purported subspecies continued among naturalists and curators of natural history museums until the early 21st century.
In the 20th century, some authors supported the view of the Cape lion being a distinct subspecies. In 1939, the American zoo