Fear
I have successfully survived the trials and tribulations of my first semester of graduate school! Huzzah! That being said, a student’s work is never done – you can still find me sitting in my office, plugging away at data and up to my eyeballs in pdfs and textbooks. Although it certainly helps when I know that, in a few short weeks, I’ll be showing off my preliminary data on a nice warm beach in California. Well, the Gordon Research Conference that Ali and I will both be attending will probably not be held directly ON the beach, but it’s a nice fantasy to have when your fingers are freezing off in Minnesota.
The theme of the conference is predator-prey interactions, but approached from a very interdisciplinary standpoint. Topics range from genes and the causes of childhood anxiety up through ecosystems, evolution, and Craig’s presentation on man-eating lions. It’s been over a year since I last attended a conference, and it’s going to be intimidating and inspiring to meet the Who’s Who in our field. All the papers piled up around my desk, underlined and annotated and thoroughly mulled over? Hopefully I’ll have a chance to chat with their authors in person and get these scientists’ input on the direction of my current research ideas.
My particular focus, predator intimidation (“fear”), is delightfully billed in the conference descriptions as “the persistent threat of immediate violent death.” The blurb continues on to state that “most wild animals are in peril every moment of every day of being torn limb from limb by any number of predators.” Language far more colorful that I can get away with in most of my proposals, but certainly right on point! There will be talks on fear’s impacts on evolutionary ecology and population- and ecosystem-level processes as well as about the effect of predators as stressors that I’m am particularly keen to attend.
As excited as I am, I’m honestly a bit frantic trying to synthesize our Snapshot data to produce distribution graphs and other basic preliminary results. A few months ago, I couldn’t have programmed my own name into “R” – the bread and butter statistical program of beloved (well, it’s a bittersweet relationship) by biologists. With long evenings in front of the computer and by the generous grace and goodwill of Ali, I’ve been making progress. Ideally, I would like to show up to this conference with not only an outline of my research to be picked apart by the aforementioned greatest minds in the field, but also with maps of the monthly distributions of several herbivore species in relation the changing vegetative landscape and predator movements. No breakthroughs so far; I foresee a great deal of coffee in my future between now and January…
P.S. Congrats to Margaret for defending her PhD!!!
White Lions of the Timbavati
When I was working in South Africa two years ago, I had the chance to meet a very unusual subspecies of big cat. Following up on a lead from one of my Afrikaner coworkers, I managed to get an up-close and personal encounter with the “white lion”, a rare color mutant of the subspecies Panthera leo krugeri which is found only a few wildlife reserves and parks in southern Africa. This lions used to occur naturally throughout the Timbavati region until they were completely extirpated from the wild through selective trophy hunting. There are now estimated to be less than 300 of these individuals world-wide.
At a reserve where a pride of these lions is maintained, I helped a local veterinarian examine one of these magnificent animals who was suffering from a gastrointestinal aliment. As you can see, the lions are not pure white – they are not albino, but rather leucistic, and this coloration is the result of a recessive gene known as the Chincilla or color inhibitor gene. There is a mutation in an enzyme (tyrosinase) that results in decreased melanin production and inhibits its deposition along the hair shaft. Pigmentation is only found in the very tips. “Whiter” lions are the result of less pigment in the hair shaft, and even the manes and tail tips of the males are pale instead of the typical golden or black. They maintain pigment in their eyes, paws, and lips.
Interestingly enough, this pale coloration does not seem to inhibit their fitness in the wild. The White Lion Trust has been reintroducing prides of white lions back into their endemic habitat with much success. The goal of the organization has been to conserve this rare phenotype and increase the biodiversity in the Timbavati region. According to their reports, the white lions do not exhibit decreased hunting success and breed successful, producing several cubs over the last few years. Increasing genetic diversity in dwindling wild populations is important for the preservation of the subspecies as a whole. Good luck to the white lion! It was amazing to have a chance to interact with these magnificent animals.
George Schaller and the Serengeti Lion
To bring myself up to speed with the fundamentals of lion research in the Serengeti, I have spent the last week or so reading through the classic work The Serengeti Lion: A Study of Predator-Prey Relations, by the reputable George B. Schaller. For a collection of field notes, the book it quite a page-turner. The work covers everything remotely relating to lion biology, from social systems to predation patterns, and manages to capture both the drama of the dynamic Serengeti system and the dusty, hot, sweaty reality of watching big cats sleep for 18 hours a day.
Although the focus of the book is the life of lions, the life of George B. Schaller himself turns out to be just as intriguing. Digging a little into his background, I discovered that Schaller, dubbed the “Megafauna Man” by National Geographic, has undertaken a 50-year career in field biology studying some of the most iconic systems in the world.
Schaller had moved to the Serengeti with his wife and two sons for two years in 1966 to uncover the intricacies of the lives of big cats and their prey. This, however, was not the start of his field career. Back in 1959, when he was a mere 26 years old, Schaller packed up and headed off to Central Africa to study the mountain gorilla. For two years, amidst dodging poachers and eluding Watusi invaders, he uncovered facts about these great apes which helped to dispel common notions about their brutishness and revealed them to be gentle and intelligent animals. His work paved the way for other naturalists, including the well-known Dian Fossey, and led to the creation of Virunga National Park.
In the ‘70s, Schaller worked in both South Asia and South America, studying large mammals including the blue sheep and snow leopards of Nepal and the jaguars, capybaras, and caimans of Brazil. The American novelist and naturalist Peter Matthiessen accompanied Schaller to Nepal and wrote a travelogue on their exploits (The Snow Leopard) that went on to win the 1979 National Book Award. Matthiessen describes Schaller as “one of the finest field biologists of our time. He pioneered the practice of turning regions of field research into wildlife parks and preserves,” a epithet that held true yet again when five years later, the Nepalese government used Schaller’s research to form Shey-Phoksundo National Park.
Following these adventures, Schaller and his wife were given the distinction of being the first westerners invited by China to enter the remote southwest Asian wilderness and research the Giant Panda in its native habitat. As part of this work, Schaller focused on understanding threats to the diminishing panda population and discovered that the primary culprits in their demise were poaching and logging. In his book, The Last Panda, Schaller writes “The panda has no history, only a past. It has come to us in a fragile moment from another time, its obscure life illuminated through the years we tracked it in the forests.” Despite this foreboding prophesy, since Schaller’s work on panda biology, the number of panda in the wild has increased by 45%.
In the 1990s, Schaller worked in Laos, Vietnam, and Tibet studying antelope and in the process discovering and rediscovering several species of mammals including a bovine, a pig, and a type of deer. More recently, he has been collaborating with agencies in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and China to develop a 20,000-square mile “Peace Park” for the protection of the world’s largest wild sheep species, the Marco Polo sheep.
Over the span of his career, Schaller has made profound contributions to our knowledge about large mammals, both their biology and ecology, and has greatly furthered species conservation in the creation of over 20 parks and preserves throughout the globe. I can highly recommend his writings on the Serengeti Lion, and if you want to delve further into his life and career, his other authored books (there are over 30) include The Year of the Gorilla, The Last Panda, Tibet Wild, and A Naturalist and Other Beasts.
A Young Grad Student’s Project…
Three weeks into graduate school and I’d have to say that it’s been an overwhelming and exciting time thus far. The coursework is intense, the lectures intriguing, and it’s certainly been interesting getting to know the diverse array of people who populate the Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior department. Accomplishment of the week, however, would have to be rounding up some IT guys to fix the lab printer so that I can finally make copies of all the papers I need to be reading! Score.
Even though I’ve just begun at UMN, I had been developing potential research project to do in the Lion Lab over the last several months. While Ali focuses on interactions between different predator species, I will be diving into the interspecies interactions that compose the Serengeti’s predator-prey dynamics. Specifically, I want to look into how physical predation along with the fear of potential predation influence how and where herbivores move throughout the day. Snapshot Serengeti is essential to my research because the camera traps are collecting data on where herbivores are congregating 24/7. Most other studies have been limited to looking at large-scale distributions during the day, whereas we can pick apart fine-scale distribution patterns even during the hours of darkness.
Now the Serengeti and the creatures in it are not static, but move around and prioritize different activities throughout the day. Herbivores are active during the day (diurnal), whereas the major savanna predators are most active in the twilights (crepuscular) and evenings (nocturnal). To avoid predators and maximize resource intake, herbivores could be strategizing about what they do and when they do it. I want to look at where the prey herbivores are during different times of the day and see if and how this changes throughout the 24-hour cycle in. If it does, we can then move into examining different hypotheses and motivating factors for these particular movement patterns.
One thing I would like to do is use lion behavioral data from the Serengeti Lion Project to construct a map of predator “attack risk” – a diagram showing the areas which include landscape features that are known to increase predator attack success. Another kind of map I can construct is one highlighting areas of prime resources based off of information on different herbivore species’ primary diets. This would reveal where herbivores should be going if they were focused solely on resource acquisition. The camera traps provide yet another layer by showing us where the herbivores ARE actually spending their time, and we can compare this (actual) distribution to those predicted by the two mentioned models.
Studies like this would not be possible without the novel type of information being generated by the camera traps. Being able to pull information from the pictures and add in additional data from the lion behavior projects, I have a good chance of being able to reveal something interesting about the dynamic interactions being hashed out in the Serengeti.
Introducing Meredith
Please welcome Meredith Palmer, a new graduate student with us here in the Lion Lab at the University of Minnesota. Meredith is joining our Snapshot Serengeti science team, so you’ll be hearing more from her as she gets settled in. In her first blog post here, she gives us a glimpse into the work she’s been doing the past several years. — Margaret
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I hear the “ragged jean” look is still cool with young people these days, but when I slip into my black hoodie with the ripped up sleeve, it’s not to make a fashion statement. Rather, it serves to remind me of a time several years ago when I was last in Africa. This particular jacket once fell afoul of a rambunctious pair of orphaned lion cubs, and I must admit that I’m looking forward to the time when I once again will be sacrificing perfectly good clothing during the call of field duty.
Joining the Lion Lab is my opportunity to work with the giant accumulation of behavioral and camera trap data, supplemented by my own work in the Serengeti, which will enable me to elucidate some of the mechanisms involved in savanna predator-prey dynamics. I’m a first-year grad student, freshly back in school after spending the last several years working on science projects in various corners of the globe. I’ve had the good fortune to have spent time in Africa, Central and South America, the Caribbean, and even a brief stint on the island of Borneo! I’ve come straight to the University of Minnesota from the South Pacific, and the disparity between the warm tropical air I’m used to and the cool Twin Cities mornings is almost (almost!) makes me wish that I had a jacket that wasn’t full of holes…
My previous work in Africa has for the most part taken place in the southern portion of the continent. I stepped foot into Namibia five years ago to work for the Cheetah Conservation Fund (CCF). Cheetahs were having a particularly bad time, as they were considered – unjustly, in almost all cases – by local farmers to be a substantial source of livestock losses and were persecuted accordingly. We did a substantial amount of work on education and outreach with the people in the surrounding communities, but I would be lying if I didn’t say the exciting part for me was the work we did out in the bush. Shivering in the cold during 24hr water-hole watches, spitting out dust as we sped along in the back of a Toyota conducting large herbivore surveys, and of course, interacting the with the population of injured and rehabilitating cheetahs maintained on the reserve were the highlights of my experience.
I returned to Africa after I graduated college and helped to manage large herbivore populations at a safari reserve in the Limpopo region of South Africa. This area is right outside of the famous Kruger National Park and abounds with much of the same wildlife. It was here that I drove my first stick-shift, ate my first warthog, and spent many an evening sitting on top of a kopje drinking sundowners and watching the stars come out over the African plains. I had the opportunity to camp out in the Kruger Park and met characters involved in African conservation at all levels. I later migrated to the other side of the country to take a job in the Succulent Karoo. This was a desert landscape, loomed over by weirdly rounded hills and covered, during the springtime, in the most gorgeous blanket of wildflowers that I have ever encountered.
That being said, I simply can’t articulate how much I am looking forward to working again in the savanna ecosystem and getting a chance to glean some good data out of Snapshot Serengeti!
Snapshot Serengeti 