8-17
Yesterday the group of us remaining at Mpala went down to Nanyuki to support one of the staff at Mpala who was hosting a business pageant as a fund raiser. It was both interesting and weird, but we had a fun time. We crashed at a friend's place in Nanyuki for the night and then came back today.
For those who don't know, I have extended my time here at Mpala by three months. Since I was awarded the NSF fellowship, I don't need to teach, so there is no reason to head back to school this fall (who wants to go back to Gainesville weather in the summer anyways?) So Todd suggested that I stay at Mpala to get some more experience that will help me out.
Thus, I have joined the Kenya Rangelands Wild Dog and Cheetah Project! The head PI is someone named Rosie Woodroffe. She is from the UK and a huge name in carnivore research and probably the foremost wild dog researcher. Her husband, consequently, is the foremost Elephant conservationist. He heads the WCS (wildlife conservation soceity) elephant conservation and was just awarded a giant (several millions of dollars) grant from Disney to continue with elephant conservation work through Asia and Africa.
Since Rosie is a big deal and carnivore research is big, but expensive, she has hosted some interesting fundraisers with some interesting people including Ussain Bolt. She's currently working on trying to get Ricky Gervais to host one since he loves dogs and conservation. Her main focal species in the UK are badgers (the largest carnivore in the UK, if you can believe that). She is also busy with that right now b/c she is the main witness in a people vs the UK government lawsuit dealing with badgers. Badgers carry (and have always carried) a strain of TB that infects cattle. But the UK government, despite huge (and majority) opposition by the people of the UK (the revere and love the badger in the UK), started a mass killing of the badgers. I'm not entirely sure what the suit is about, but a big part of it is that the gov't went off and started this major cull of badgers despite hard scientific evidence that this would in know way decrease the incidence of TB. The government entirely ignored the research of the scientific community and the advice of the scientific community. Of course that's never wise, and it led to an explosion of TB b/c when the population of badgers was knocked down, it mean the remaining badgers increased their home range sizes and traveled farther. Thus the few that were sick visited many more farms and greatly spread the disease
Here is a website associated with, but larger overall than the whole project.
http://www.cheetahandwilddog.org/
Anyways, Rosie is here for a bit longer before she and her husband and kids head back to the UK for school. Then I will primarily be working with Stef the Wild Dog project managers and Helen who is a PhD student who is just starting her cheetah project here. They are both nice girls and should be fun to work with. Helen is from the UK and worked for 3.5 years on the Serengeti cheetah project, so she has some great stories. Stef is super cool. She was born in Tanzania and from Arusha, though her parents are Swiss born and she went to college at a small liberal arts school in Pennsylvania. She worked for a while on a wolf project in Montana and Idaho (Elisha, she said she made it as far south in Idaho as CDA.). She also worked on a microbial project at Palmer Station in Antarctica. She also worked for a while on a lion project called Rebuilding the Pride in the Southern Rift area, which a friend of mine and Elisha's works a bit for now. Though I knew we would be good friends when she told me that one of her very favorite things in the whole world is Snow.
Yesterday, we went out in search of a certain pack, the Tui pack. Rosie has radio and gps collars on at least a few members of all the packs in the area, so you can track the pack using radio telemetry. The day before Rosie had darted one of the pups of the back and given it antibiotics on its shoulder b/c it had a very bad cut. We went to look for the pack so that we could see how the pup was doing. We were able to find the pack, about 24 individuals lying in the shade of a big acacia tree. The pup appeared to be doing better. Wild Dogs are pretty cool because they are curious, not too afraid, and like to play around.
Wild dogs are a highly endangered species that had been on the brink of extinction before major conservation initiatives were started. Wild Dogs were extirpated from the Laikipia area in the 80's but have made a comeback in large part due to Rosie's work. Wild Dog populations had declined so much b/c of poisoning/trapping by humans, loss of range and prey, and catching deadly diseases from domestic dogs.
One of the main things that I'll be helping with is spoor surveys. Spoor is basically signs that animals leave behind, so in this case, we'll be using paw prints. We will be using spoor surveys to estimate population density and occupancy. We will then compare what we find using the spoor surveys to the more actual data that Rosie knows because she has the packs collared with GPS collars. If the spoor surveys ends up giving accurate results, then it may be used in the future as a way to determine wild dog population densities and occupancy instead of more expensive and invasive methods such as collaring.
Yesterday the group of us remaining at Mpala went down to Nanyuki to support one of the staff at Mpala who was hosting a business pageant as a fund raiser. It was both interesting and weird, but we had a fun time. We crashed at a friend's place in Nanyuki for the night and then came back today.
For those who don't know, I have extended my time here at Mpala by three months. Since I was awarded the NSF fellowship, I don't need to teach, so there is no reason to head back to school this fall (who wants to go back to Gainesville weather in the summer anyways?) So Todd suggested that I stay at Mpala to get some more experience that will help me out.
Thus, I have joined the Kenya Rangelands Wild Dog and Cheetah Project! The head PI is someone named Rosie Woodroffe. She is from the UK and a huge name in carnivore research and probably the foremost wild dog researcher. Her husband, consequently, is the foremost Elephant conservationist. He heads the WCS (wildlife conservation soceity) elephant conservation and was just awarded a giant (several millions of dollars) grant from Disney to continue with elephant conservation work through Asia and Africa.
Since Rosie is a big deal and carnivore research is big, but expensive, she has hosted some interesting fundraisers with some interesting people including Ussain Bolt. She's currently working on trying to get Ricky Gervais to host one since he loves dogs and conservation. Her main focal species in the UK are badgers (the largest carnivore in the UK, if you can believe that). She is also busy with that right now b/c she is the main witness in a people vs the UK government lawsuit dealing with badgers. Badgers carry (and have always carried) a strain of TB that infects cattle. But the UK government, despite huge (and majority) opposition by the people of the UK (the revere and love the badger in the UK), started a mass killing of the badgers. I'm not entirely sure what the suit is about, but a big part of it is that the gov't went off and started this major cull of badgers despite hard scientific evidence that this would in know way decrease the incidence of TB. The government entirely ignored the research of the scientific community and the advice of the scientific community. Of course that's never wise, and it led to an explosion of TB b/c when the population of badgers was knocked down, it mean the remaining badgers increased their home range sizes and traveled farther. Thus the few that were sick visited many more farms and greatly spread the disease
Here is a website associated with, but larger overall than the whole project.
http://www.cheetahandwilddog.org/
Anyways, Rosie is here for a bit longer before she and her husband and kids head back to the UK for school. Then I will primarily be working with Stef the Wild Dog project managers and Helen who is a PhD student who is just starting her cheetah project here. They are both nice girls and should be fun to work with. Helen is from the UK and worked for 3.5 years on the Serengeti cheetah project, so she has some great stories. Stef is super cool. She was born in Tanzania and from Arusha, though her parents are Swiss born and she went to college at a small liberal arts school in Pennsylvania. She worked for a while on a wolf project in Montana and Idaho (Elisha, she said she made it as far south in Idaho as CDA.). She also worked on a microbial project at Palmer Station in Antarctica. She also worked for a while on a lion project called Rebuilding the Pride in the Southern Rift area, which a friend of mine and Elisha's works a bit for now. Though I knew we would be good friends when she told me that one of her very favorite things in the whole world is Snow.
Yesterday, we went out in search of a certain pack, the Tui pack. Rosie has radio and gps collars on at least a few members of all the packs in the area, so you can track the pack using radio telemetry. The day before Rosie had darted one of the pups of the back and given it antibiotics on its shoulder b/c it had a very bad cut. We went to look for the pack so that we could see how the pup was doing. We were able to find the pack, about 24 individuals lying in the shade of a big acacia tree. The pup appeared to be doing better. Wild Dogs are pretty cool because they are curious, not too afraid, and like to play around.
Wild dogs are a highly endangered species that had been on the brink of extinction before major conservation initiatives were started. Wild Dogs were extirpated from the Laikipia area in the 80's but have made a comeback in large part due to Rosie's work. Wild Dog populations had declined so much b/c of poisoning/trapping by humans, loss of range and prey, and catching deadly diseases from domestic dogs.
One of the main things that I'll be helping with is spoor surveys. Spoor is basically signs that animals leave behind, so in this case, we'll be using paw prints. We will be using spoor surveys to estimate population density and occupancy. We will then compare what we find using the spoor surveys to the more actual data that Rosie knows because she has the packs collared with GPS collars. If the spoor surveys ends up giving accurate results, then it may be used in the future as a way to determine wild dog population densities and occupancy instead of more expensive and invasive methods such as collaring.
1 comment:
I'm so happy for you that you got on a project like this. It worked out so perfectly.
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