Drive the Game

Life in Kenya is not a rerun from a dramatic, possibly staged television series on the savannah. Looking out the van window, I would fail to hear a British narrator and urgent instrumentation over the trumpeting of an elephant herd or the galloping of Grant’s gazelles. When six hyenas bombarded a pack of African wild dogs, running off with their mangled carcass, all I heard were the breathy curses of my classmates.

For such a remote wilderness, the fast paced lifestyle is remarkable. Whenever we would receive a radio alert about a rare, endangered, or elusive animal, we would dash to the van and drive. With only thin dust roads showered with pebbles, speeding is safest. Swerving off into the brush after an aardvark or honey badger hardly impacts our ride.

That night, I had just finished a pre-dinner bucket shower, using a friend’s leftover hot water. Upon emerging from the hut, I noticed the van’s headlights on. Afraid I had forgotten about a scheduled game drive, I grabbed my fleece jacket and hurried into the van, with my professor, Dustin Rubenstein, at the wheel. The radio call was for wild dogs, which seemed dull to me. Dogs are not exotic mammals, and it is not surprising that the ones in Kenya would be wild. But I decided to give them a chance, so I zippered up my jacket and climbed up to the crevice between the van’s trunk and the raised safari roof.

Beyond the three electrified fences that contain the campground, Mpala is indistinguishable. Locations and directions require careful consideration, such as “by the stagnant pool where hippos sometimes bathe,” “that place where we saw the lion yesterday” or “near the abandoned air strip”. But animals move. This came as a surprise to me since I had been treating Kenya like a zoo. I travelled to the equator line to observe animals, most of which I could gaze at from behind double paned glass. At a zoo, a desire to observe wild dogs would lead me down a nubby carpet to the wild dog area. Kenya has no wild dog area.

The sunlight fades fast on the equator. Brightness does not linger in the clouds; it shifts from a clear white to muted gold to dusty red to black. As the atmosphere transitioned from gold to red, illuminating the dust particles that will soon adhere to my skin, we began shouting out the window at passing drivers, “Excuse me, have you seen a pack of wild dogs around here?” Some shook their heads, probably too engrossed in their research niche to worry themselves with another species, and others emphatically carved a route with their arm and urged us to hurry.

Dusk turned to night, and we took turns scanning the roadsides with a handheld spotlight. Since this meant that we could only see one side at a time, our paced slowed considerably as we surveyed the ranch. The spotlight danced as the van clambered over pebbles. Sitting on the roof disqualified me from holding the heavy spotlight and I was thankful for the lack of responsibility. The dogs could be on the left with the shaky circle of light on the right and we would keep driving forward.

Luckily this fact was inconsequential because the van’s headlights climbed the body of a wild dog from paw to rounded ear. Too stunned to react, Dr. Rubenstein did not stop the van until the whole pack felt the heat of the glare. A limbless crimson dik dik carcass lay glistening in the road. Six wild dogs, resembling regal German shepards with long, copper fur spotted with black and grey, gnawed on the dik dik torso, while thirty waited behind them eagerly. The motor, purring like a cheetah, did not faze the grazers but the vigilant ones turned their heads away from the fracas.

In that instant, six hyenas ransacked the scene with one, flanked by an entourage, swiftly grabbing the carcass in its jaw and rushing into the nearby bush. The wild dogs, so accustomed to the warm treat, looked at the bush, bewildered. A few nosed the road, coating their bloody snouts in dust. Some ran to the edge of the bush, barking. One snarl from a hidden hyena sent the whole wild dog pack trotting down the road.

The headlights and spotlight soon revealed nothing more than mika-speckled rocks. I heard bones cracking somewhere to the left of the van, but the verdant shrubbery concealed the ugly, snarly faces of the victors. The sound of shattering ribs verified the bandits as hyenas, since their teeth uniquely allow them to pulverize bone. Hyena feces are distinctly white in color as a result of this trait.

Where did the hyenas come from and how long had they been there? It seemed that we were the missing link to their master plan. We made it known to the humans we passed that we were looking for the wild dogs, but how did the hyenas know to distinguish our van from all the other ones? Either they followed our rattling van to the meat or had been waiting lazily for a random distraction.

The wild dogs went hungry due to my curiosity. Human interference makes unknown impacts. We noticed the hyenas because as a group of biologists-in-training, we collectively notice every stick bug and chameleon. But maybe every van interrupts natural behavior. Maybe every ecological experiment disrupts instead of protects. I never knew innocent intentions could be so cruel.

bella horrida bella (wars, frightful wars, Aeneid XI.86)

Ants have been regarded as model organisms due to their small size, short generation time, and the lack of guilt researchers feel in manipulating them. What I did to those four species of acacia ants that I studied in depth with Columbia’s EEEB department (ecology, evolution, and environmental biology) in the Laikipia District of central Kenya would be a moral and legal fiasco with most other organisms.

Unlike honey bee attacks, all ant species that occupy the popular Acacia Drepanobulum trees can bite and bite and spray all the chemicals they store in their small abdomens with reckless abandon. These pungent liquids, pheromones, symbolize heterospecific and conspecific aggressive behaviors, meaning that ants engage in civil war as well as international war when threatened.

I posed an obvious threat to these ants. Roaming through a forest of various acacias, I searched for specific color combinations: red-red-black (Crematogaster mimosae) and black-black-red (Crematogaster nigriceps). From half a petri dish, I created a battle arena and disproportionately placed the same species from different trees as well as different species, timing how long it took them to kill each other.

Before the battle, I had to verify that the enemy was indeed the enemy by sending a sample victim into the “home” colony. A tangle of writhing black substituted for passport identification. But beyond smelling enemy pheromones, do varying defense behaviors exist?

I knew the answer was yes even before I began my vicious permutations. I tapped an acacia branch until the ants left the comfort of their enclosed habitat, bulbous brown swollen thorns, to investigate my attack. Positioning the two sides of a petri dish like hinged jaws, I then proceeded to engulf ten samples. If I counted less than ten, I snapped again.

“Pain is temporary,” I reminded myself as ants escaped my gutless plastic monster, rioting on my forearms. I murdered more than I imprisoned. Maimed ants were flicked away for fear of faulty results. Both species bit with equal ferocity and impressive alacrity. They shimmied up to my neck and squeezed down to my toes.

Though I did not have access to a wet lab, I detected the release of defense pheromones. I could not see them in the battle arena but I could smell them on my own skin—an acrid and moldy stench, like mixing wet leaves with used running socks.

Given their retaliation towards me, I expected similar brutality when faced with an intruder ant, which I shoved into a petri dish of its enemies. But for every kind of enemy—C. mimosae of one colony versus C. mimosae of a second colony, C. mimosae versus C. nigriceps, C. nigriceps versus C. mimosae, C. nigriceps of one colony versus C. nigriceps of a second colony—the ants employed a different war tactic. In what can be dubbed an act of brotherly love, the acacia ants exhibited a faster and more frequent heterospecific response than conspecific response. Ants of different species became nothing more than eraser rubbings rolling around the petri dish. Ants of the same species but different colonies were sometimes killed, sometimes pardoned.

In the aftermath of ant war, there was no blood and no guts. A few shriveled black specks like squashed soda cans did nothing to elicit any emotional response. My emotional response came when, after believing my hypothesis to be correct, I ran statistical chi-squared and wilcoxon tests of my data and found that there was too much variance to have conclusive findings. I could spend another day in the field collecting more samples, I could revise my experimental design by grinding up the different species into a PETA-disaster-paste and covering the ants in enemy pheromones, or I could admit my lack of dedication and stare at the less belligerent drongo birds.

That night, kicking off my brown coated clothing, a few ants skittered off into the corners of my tent. Briefly checking for ticks and sunburn and remembering with surprise to swallow a malaria pill, I immediately fell asleep. The dreams of a researcher sting with the bites of Crematogaster acacia ants.

Best Behavior

In 1920’s Paris, with trails of white smoke curving from dangling cigarettes, artists and writers discussed their work, speculations, and mental blocks. At the Mpala Research Centre in central Kenya, with trails of red dirt curving from the laboratories, biologists and chemists discussed their work, speculations, and experimental design.

A tourist, dressed in khaki adventure shorts and a wide-brimmed sun hat, would likely gasp dramatically at zebras munching on long, green grass and then drive on to more discoveries. As a tropical biologist-in-training, I dressed in quick-dry pants and a long sleeved rashguard, urgently pressing a stopwatch before staring at a Plains zebra (equus burchelli) through binoculars for five-minute trials.

Dominant behavior is most evident among harems with an alpha male and docile, hungry females. Along with eating, watching for predators is necessary for survival. The amount of time females devote to nutrition depends on the size of the group. A bigger herd size should indicate more vigilant animals, increasing the overall time spent feeding. After five minutes of constant staring, images of a glistening hide in brilliant black and white, wet nostrils, swiveling ears, and a tail flicking at flies no longer register awe. Written in the waterproof pages of a researcher’s notebook is Trial 7, with tallies marked in their allotted columns.

Plains zebras, prevalent when I had searched for honey badgers or aardvarks, seemed to have vanished into the thick acacia brush when I really needed them. Impala, Thomson’s gazelles, dik diks, hartebeests, Grant’s gazelles, orynxs, and other ungulates proudly stomped the red dust into billows but the—Oh, are those them? No, Grevy’s zebras. Keep driving.—locations of my research subject could not be found. All the animals in Mpala have their unique hangout spots, but they are not as certain as a zoo enclosement. The Plains zebras have no sign with arrows and exclamations, no address. So many questions to ask the landscape: the mountain ridges fading into increasingly paler shades of blue, the corpulent swollen acacia thorns, the lickerish baboons and dainty klipspringers. But I have chosen to ask the Plains zebras.

The red dirt clung to my sunblock and eyelashes as I gazed out into the lush fields. I envisioned stripes between tree branches or a whishing tail in a low flying drongo bird. I even tried to castrate bachelor male herds with my desperately determined mind so I could include them in my study: the relationship between herd size and the time females spent foraging or vigilant using focal and scan sampling.

Grazing female zebras chew with their heads down, focusing on the blades tickling their black snouts. Vigilant females stare up at me, the menacing intruder clutching a sharp pencil. “Down!” I whispered at the grazing ones. “Up!” at the vigilant ones. As they oscillated between nonchalance and terror at my behavior, I calculated time and begged them not to flee.

After a day of 140 trials, I returned to calculate what turned out to be inconclusive results and eat dinner—green lentils, white rice, and chapattis, a thick fried dough. As I tilted my head down to my plate so the rice wouldn’t fall off my fork and lifted up my head to chew and listen to fragmented conversation, I reasoned through possible error sources: habituation time too short, large variation amongst the trials, observer’s delirium. At that moment, a group of zebra may have been peering at me, balancing binoculars on their muddy hooves. In the cacophony of insect night life, I could almost hear them snorting “up” and “down”.

On the Road...

...to university fame (kidding). The most recent post on this blog, "Market Hunting," was accepted into Surgam, one of Columbia University's literary magazines. An excerpt can be found on the Columbia University Arts blog:

http://cuarts.wordpress.com/