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Lions have contagious yawns, and they seem to use the open-mouthed behaviour to send signals to each other. The observation provides the first concrete evidence that yawning can synchronise behaviour in an animal species.鈥淟ions share a lot of things, like highly organised hunts and caring for [cubs],鈥� says Elisabetta Palagi at the University of Pisa in Italy. 鈥淪o obviously they need to synchronise movement, and they need to communicate and anticipate the actions of their companions.鈥�

Palagi wasn鈥檛 planning on investigating yawning lions. But when her master鈥檚 students were in South Africa collecting data on spotted hyenas at play, they started sending her videos of lions as well. Watching the clips, Palagi couldn鈥檛 help but notice how the lions kept yawning one after the other and then got up and moved in near synchrony.

She decided to temporarily shift the South African trip鈥檚 focus to the lions鈥� contagious yawning. Her students, Grazia Casetta and Andrea Paolo Nolfo, observed 19 lions living in two social groups at , a research camp within the Greater Makalali Private Game Reserve in Limpopo province, South Africa. They took nearly 5 hours of video per lion, day and night, over a four-month period.

The researchers found that when a single lion yawned and another lion could see it do so, the yawns frequently became contagious 鈥� meaning the second lion started to yawn within 3 minutes of the first. The yawns were so contagious that the likelihood of the second lion yawning within the 3-minute window was 139 times higher than it would have been if the first lion hadn鈥檛 yawned 鈥� and in 75 per cent of cases, the effect was so strong that the second lion yawned within a minute of the first.

The team also realised that the contagious yawns led to coordinated actions, which usually involved getting up and walking away. The felines were 11 times more likely to synchronise their next moves with the first lion (the 鈥渢rigger鈥�) following a spell of contagious yawning.

鈥淎fter they yawned together, if the trigger stood up, then within seconds the second lion did the same,鈥� says Palagi.

Yet unlike some species, like and , the lions didn鈥檛 typically yawn when they were already active or ending a conflict (over food, for example), she says. Instead, the lions almost always yawned while they were resting or transitioning between rest and a period of action.

Despite this new-found understanding of lion yawns, classifying the motive behind any individual yawn is still challenging, says Palagi. 鈥淚t鈥檚 difficult to separate and categorise the different kinds of yawns because they can all be due to a mix of factors.鈥�