>>131630221/2
The thing to remember with males of any species is that they are not producing offspring. Males are directly competing with females for resources and yet their reproductive production is zero. This is part of what makes sexual reproduction so interesting, because the females are incurring a huge cost by having half the species not producing offspring, and yet meiosis is still hugely successful. Ideally, the species "wants" the benefits of genetic interchange, and also "wants" to minimize the resource sink which is the male of the species. The cost is subsidized and we see this in all the fascinating dimorphisms across the animal kingdom.
To speculate on lions, I believe this resource sinking to be the biggest factor. I'm guessing a male adult lion could eat somewhere close to twice the meat of one female. This would always be applying pressure to keep the number of males low.
Lions are an apex predator, and in most cases are never in danger from predation. Yet they do face occasional dangers. We've all likely scene the lion hyena warfare on youtube. If most cases if a male shows up to the fight, the fight is over. Only with overwhelming numbers and unfortunate circumstance are the lions in real danger when they have a male present in these exchanges. I'd assume it is rare when a fight would require two male lions. I'm also not sure how often these exchange occur and how much pressure they place on lions. It would be expected that if such competition were particularly fierce, lion prides would begin to favor configurations with greater numbers of males.
