After nearly four months under the careful watch of zookeepers, the Hono­lulu Zoo’s three lion cubs are ready to meet the public and receive their names Saturday. That’s when the Hono­­lulu Zoo Society will announce the winners of a haiku contest that invited children to submit lion-inspired poetry for the chance to win naming rights.

The names will be chosen from a list provided by zookeepers.

The cubs — two rambunctious females and one mama’s boy — will be on display at 9 a.m. that day. Seeing them is otherwise a hit-or-miss occurrence because the prince and princesses of the jungle have the luxury of snoozing up to 20 hours a day, just as they would in the wild, when they wake only to hunt and feed.

When awake, the cubs romp on grass and tree limbs on a hillside habitat that will be their home for the next 18 months. As they run, launch surprise attacks on one another and get tongue cleanings from Mom, their every antic is caught on the cameras and cellphones of zoo patrons who squeal over this cute puppylike stage, before the cubs become more recognizable as carnivores to be feared.

Honolulu Zoo’s mammal curator Robert Porec, who has had an affinity for animals since growing up in the Los Angeles area with a personal menagerie that included snakes and caymans, said lions — and tigers — behave more like dogs than typical house cats.

"They’re social animals, they travel with a pride and will actually come up to greet you, whereas house cats are solitary, more like leopards or mountain lions," he said.

The cubs were born Dec. 15 to Moxy, a 4-year-old lioness, and 5-year-old Ekundu, who both arrived in Hono­lulu in 2010 from the Bronx Zoo and San Diego Wildlife Park, respectively.

Although lions breed well in captivity, Porec said the last time the Hono­lulu Zoo had lion cubs was in the 1970s.

Moxy gave birth to a stillborn cub last May but showed signs of being a good mother, grooming and nudging her cub to help it stand even though "it never took a breath," Porec said.

Zookeepers kept handling of the new cubs to a minimum during the first two critical weeks after birth, when stressing the mother could have led to her killing the babies. Keepers went into the enclosure only to give the infants their necessary shots, because lions are susceptible to diseases carried by stray cats and mongooses, such as feline distemper, parvovirus and rabies.

The cubs weighed in at about 7 to 8 pounds at birth, with the male — the second born — the heaviest. They are now up to nearly 40 pounds each, about the weight of a beagle, having been fattened mostly on their mother’s milk.

"Moxy has done most of the work," Porec said. "They’re being weaned on a processed zoo diet. We started giving them a little bit at eight weeks, just for a taste." When grown, their diet will comprise a blend of beef and horse meat with added vitamins and minerals to approximate their meals in the wild.

Moxy and her cubs have been separated from Ekundo, although he is visible to them and the cubs have had the opportunity to greet their dad. "In the wild the female would wander away from the pride to give birth and live alone until her cubs are 4 months old," Porec said. "Then she’ll bring them back to the pride and introduce them to the other females and males, with the backing of the other females.

The lions are Transvaal lions, also known as Southeast African lions, one of eight subspecies of lions found on the continent. Although zoos have come under fire in the past for taking animals out of the wild, they are turning out to be the last safe refuge for animals that are either being hunted to extinction or whose habitat is being rapidly lost due to the activities of humans.

"For years, everyone has been hearing that tigers are endangered, whereas lions were thought to be plentiful," Porec said. "Of course we think the best place for wild animals is in the wild, but the lion population is down 50 percent from what it was 30 years ago because of habitat loss, hunting, poaching and introduced diseases like canine distemper."

Only 21,000 to 35,000 remain in all of Africa, and they now are listed as a vulnerable species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources.

Both the zoo and zoo society aim to raise awareness of the animals’ plight with the ultimate goal of bringing up the next generation of animal lovers.

When the Hono­lulu Zoo cubs are grown, they will be sent to other zoos or breeding programs to keep their numbers up. "It would be an injustice to keep them here, because we have no other lions (for breeding)," Porec said.

The zoo follows the Association of Zoos & Aquariums’ Species Survival Program guidelines, keeping careful track of bloodlines to prevent breeding of related lions, toward a goal of maintaining 97.5 percent genetic diversity among captive animals.

"We don’t want to breed too many and flood the market with animals and not have enough places for them," Porec said. "We also don’t want to get into another situation like what happened with the fennec fox, the smallest fox in the world. When DNA samples were taken, we found they were all related."

In another two months, zookeepers will start searching for a new home for the cubs, although they’ll remain in Hawaii for 18 months. At that point the young lionesses will start going into heat, and Porec said the father would either drive the young male out of the pride or the young male would try to usurp his father and take over, "and we don’t want that to happen."