Photo courtesy of Elizabeth Forbes.
First thing on Monday morning, I get into the driver’s side of the Land Cruiser, grasping the “holy sh*t” handle to hoist myself up into the seat. My field team clambers into the back; the other front seat is piled high with scientific instruments, carefully arranged in mounds so that nothing jostles around too much. To the team’s benefit, though, the view on our half-hour drive to our field site is far better from the open-air seats in the back. They’re much more likely to get smacked with a wayward acacia branch, but all in all it’s probably worth it for the 360-degree panorama of the Kenyan savanna we’ll be driving through.
I put the keys in the ignition and start her up. The engine rumbles to life and, with it, the dulcet tones of... wait… it can’t be… Backstreet’s Back? (All right!)
I hear peals of laughter from our field manager in the back seat, as it becomes clear I’ve discovered that one of the Land Cruiser’s two resident cassette tapes is already in the tape deck. It’s the Backstreet Boys’ eponymous album from 1997. I crank it up and, with the wind in our hair, we set off through the gates of the Mpala Research Centre to take on another day of ecological field work.
My research interests lie at the intersection of large wildlife loss and ecosystem carbon dynamics. Traditionally, the quantification of how carbon is stored and released from an ecosystem does not incorporate the impacts of large wildlife; it’s determined by incorporating the physical properties of the system (nutrient cycling, etc.) with the carbon drawdown effects of photosynthetic organisms (like grasses and trees) and the carbon release of microbial organisms. So, little organisms are “counted”; big ones are not. However, it is clear that large wildlife loss, especially as pervasive a phenomenon as it is today, causes myriad cascading effects on ecosystem structure and function that go far beyond their simple absence. I’m interested in how their loss impacts the way carbon dynamics operate on a large scale: how much is released from the ecosystem into the atmosphere? How much is sequestered above and belowground as plant biomass? Does that change with the presence or absence of large wildlife, and if so, how?
The team of researchers I’ve been working with and I have started to investigate these questions here in Kenya, where you can find some of the last intact communities of mega-wildlife left on the planet. Not only are there large animals, but they are some of the most charismatic ones you can think of: elephants, zebra, giraffes, kudu, lions and all the other animals that you probably read about growing up. (The first time I saw an elephant as I was driving up to my now-field-site, I hung out of the passenger window from the waist up, snapping photos as fast as I could. Fortunately, now I know that the likelihood of seeing one or many elephants on a drive is high... though that doesn’t stop me from the occasional window-hang.)
So, for today, that means the Backstreet Boys blaring on the way to our site. As whatever-his-name-was (the one with the penchant for ribbed turtlenecks, maybe) launches into a highly questionable rhyme between “where” and “fear” (successful only due to the late-90s trend to sing like you’ve got a straw up your nose), I spy a group of zebra out of the corner of my eye: a mixed herd of the rare Grévy’s zebra and the more common Plains zebra. Every time this happens, I slow down so I can stare as we drive by. Observations like this won’t make it into the “methods” sections of scientific papers I write about my work in the future. Similarly, I’m not sure it’s kosher to mention what 90s heartthrobs’ cassette tapes were listened to in the making of my science. But as another scientist said at breakfast the other day, these days in the field are the ones we spend months writing grants for, planning for, buying equipment for and dreaming of. I would happily listen to nothing but the Backstreet Boys for more chances to come out here, interact with large wildlife, dig into the dirt, and work on piecing together the complex and mysterious puzzle that describes how animals structure their environment.
Acknowledgements:
Photo 2 courtesy of Douglas Branch
Photo 3 courtesy of Elizabeth Forbes
Mpala Research Centre
Kenya Long-term Exclosure Experiment
National Geographic Young Explorers grant
Kenya Wildlife Service
Photos are copyright protected and may not be reproduced without permission. Photos are used with the permission of Elizabeth Forbes.