If Disney’s Mufasa had lived until Simba was 2, he would have run his own son out of the pride. Then Simba would have roamed the savanna for a year or two until he joined a new pride around the age of 5.

In the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area, or Kaza, a giant network of parks across five African countries, researchers rarely see male lions return to their maternal pride once they leave. So no matter why Simba left, or regardless of whether the conspiracy theorists who say that Simba and Nala are related are right, it is unlikely that he would have ended up back in the pride with his childhood love interest.

“Male dispersal is an evolutionary mechanism to ensure that genetic diversity remains among lions,” said Dr. Kim Young-Overton, the Kaza director for Panthera, a global wild cat conservation organization.

In the wild, males may easily wander up to 100 miles from their maternal pride to find a new home. If food and water are scarce, they may search even farther, Young-Overton said.

Lion habitats, though, are becoming fragmented. The species is now limited to just 8 percent of its historical range, which once included almost the entire African continent. Where lions once lived, humans are developing land for agriculture and mining. And, in some areas, livestock has begun to replace lions’ natural prey, which has led to human-lion conflict; lions have been killed in retaliation for eating valuable cattle. Poaching and trophy hunting have also depleted the population.

There are now fewer than 20,000 lions in Africa, and they are listed as vulnerable to extinction by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, which determines the conservation status of species. Lions are already extinct, or possibly extinct, in 29 African countries.