One On One, Part II; No. 3; Adventure on the Serengeti Plain with Dr. Patricia Moehlman

This program is made possible by Sigma Xi, the scientific research society. I'm Faith Middleton and this is one-on-one. If you watched Meryl Streep and Robert Redford in the movie Out of Africa, then you know just how mesmerizing the country can be. While Africa also has a hold on Patricia Melman, she makes the long journey to the vast Serengeti plane where she pitches a tent and spends weeks alone watching and listening to the jackal. Dr. Melman is a behavioral ecologist who teaches part of the year at Yale University in Connecticut. In Africa, she rises early and stays up late to watch the jackals at work and at play. It can be lonely, but as she describes it, you get lonely at home too. It's part of being human. Our assumptions about life in Africa were correct in one way. Lions do wander into Patricia Melman's campsite and sleep by the tent until she shows

them away. But the jackals are another story. They are far more beautiful than we ever knew and far more interesting than we suspected. What fascinates us is that in all the years of intimate contact with the African jackals, Patricia Melman has never permitted herself to touch one. You'll find out why in a little while. To get us in the mood, I asked her to transport us to the place she stays on the Serengeti. Well, if I'm sitting out in front of my tent, I'm on the top of a hill that looks out over Lake and Dutu and looks to the north towards Nabi Hill, which is the northern landmark and one can see for 50 miles. It's constantly changing, so I can't tell you what it's like in a specific sense because every day it's different. And it depends on whether it's rainy season, in which case it's a very lush green and in fact it can go from being dry and a bit dusty and maybe a bit deserty, but not really, but it's because it's grassland, going from a dusty environment where you're inhaling

volcanic ash soil, so it's quite fine dust. You can go from that one day to the next day being concerned about getting stuck in the mud. And within three days' time, the grass will spring up from its roots and it will go from being dry and sort of yellow to being lush green. And within that three-day interval, maybe four days, you will go from having a few grants gazelle and Warthog and maybe some Oryx to having thousands upon thousands of will-to-piece Thompson gazelle and Zebra, all making noise and all making noise. Now one of you could take with you when you go. Most of the things I need are there, stored, so I have a tent stored, I have my car up on blocks, most of my equipment is there, stored the small computer keyboard for taking data, the tape recorder for taking data, the film and still equipment for recording that

kind of data, all of that I just keep there and food. Food I buy locally, I take in cocoa sometimes to make fudge because in years past, chocolate's been a short supply, so if you're a chocolate theme like I am, it's a good idea to take some cocoa along. Do you go by yourself? Yeah. And you drive a Land Rover? I drive a short wheel-based Land Rover, a venerable distinction, it is now 18 years old. TDU 789, very excellent vehicle. So that sounds like very simple living there, it is, very simple, very basic. You go there to see the jackals, and what do they look like? Perhaps the easiest starting point is the golden jackal looks very much if not exactly like the coyote. So picture and animal that weighs about 20, 25 pounds, a nice, slightly woofish face and a golden coat, sometimes more brown, sometimes more gray, but basically a golden, tawny

sort of color. You know, when I look at it, it looks like a cross between a fox and a fawn to me. Well that's looking at the silverback jackal, which I would say is a fair description, a nice, long-legged dog type animal with rusted red body, except for the silvery black and white hair on the back, and a foxy face with large ears, very fine muzzle and very long legs and great leapers. They're more beautiful than I expected. They're more beautiful than just about everybody expects. Most people, when I say I study jackals, they're mental images of hyenas. I think it probably has to do with a sort of bad public image that jackals have. Ergo people think that like their human personifications, not only are they ill-behaved,

but they're unpleasant to look at. And of course, that's not even fair to hyenas, because hyenas are quite handsome animals, too. Now how did that begin? Where did they get the bad reputation do you think? A misinterpretation of Egyptian mythology and religion to a certain extent. The jackal was a noobus, the jackal headed god, conveyor of the souls of the dead, would weigh the soul of the dead in a balance with a feather to decide whether they went to whatever version of heaven or hell was available, and they were a deity with the Egyptians. But you can look in some books that are examining the role of a noobus and why it was important and they'll say they were scavengers near the graveyards, and ergo they needed to be convinced and persuaded not to interfere with the dead.

And I think maybe that's more of a latter day interpretation in a way. I think it's a combination of things like that, plus usually when people see hyenas or jackals, they're seeing them scavenging at a kill. That's not to say that scavenging is any more than a small part of their feeding behavior, but it's the easiest way to see them. And people tend to label animals according to what they have seen, even if it is a small part of their repertoire, just like people, just like people. So I think it arises from things like that. I think once people really watch jackals, it's hard not to admire their beauty, and once you know more about how they live, their style of living is admirable too. Is it? Yeah. Why? I think any, well, that has to do really with human biases in a way. I think we're, we tend to appreciate parental care, both males and females investing in

offspring, taking good care of them, being affectionate, sharing food, taking care of ill or injured animals, even if they aren't infants, playing, having at least to most human eyes, a joyful way of doing things. If you've watched your dog ever very much and watched it playing, jackals do the same thing. Males form long-term parabonds and take care of the puppies in a very solicitous way. They feed them. They defend them. They defend them from predators like hyenas, which are five times their size. And then some of the puppies stay and help take care of their younger brothers and sisters, feeding them, grooming them, playing with them, defending them from hyenas, trying to drive off lions on occasion, feeding them other while she's nursing the pups, all these sorts

of, on the face of an altruistic behavior, which I think most human beings find admirable. Why did you pick them? Why did I pick jackals? That's the serendipity of life. In 1967, I went out to work for Jane Goodall, studying chimps, and did that for six months as a research assistant, at which time Jane and Hugo were starting to do a book called Innocent Killers on jackals, hyenas, and wild dogs. And they needed somebody to work as a research assistant, watching jackals to provide them with some data. And so in early 1968, I spent several months watching a family of golden jackals and working with Jane and Hugo. Were you hooked right away? It's hard to really define that. I liked them very much.

I would say I was hooked right away, but then it was an interval of, um, golly, 68 to 75, before I went back. Seven years later is when I went back to start my own study on jackals. And in the intervening years, I went back to the States, got a PhD, studied wild asses, finished all that up, and then went back to Tanzania. Is it the kind of thing that if you spend a long time watching, you are just taken in? I think anybody who's at all interested in animals that watches any kind of animal, be it a spider or a jackal or something, but on the face of things would be more attractive like lions or elephants can't help, but be interested. I think for the most part, can't help but care about what happens to those animals. So I think it's like most things.

Anything you spend any sort of time on learning about, you gain a different appreciation of. Do they always surprise you? I learned something new every day, if that's what you mean, from the jackals, and from everything else that's there. I mean, I study jackals and I'm focused on jackals, but essentially everything that goes on in a way as a part of this study too. The focus is on jackals, but it takes place in a very natural ecosystem and everything in pinches. My limitations are my ability to appreciate what's going on and sifted. My receptors are not too good. I can't hear everything jackals here. I can't see everything jackals and I certainly can't smell everything that jackals smell. So I'm limited by the kind of animal I am as to what I can learn.

But with time, I keep learning more. I sit in the car, my moving blind, and watch from there. Do you follow them in the Land Rover? Right. One of the nice things about studying almost any animal in a place like the Serengetia is you really can watch most of what they do. I don't see what they're doing when they're in a den or if they're under the car. But otherwise, I can see virtually everything. Why don't they run away from you? They don't have a history of harassment by people unlike the coyote in this country. I don't know of a situation in which I could begin to watch coyotes like I watch jackals. I show people films are stills of the jackals. And if they're not people that are working in Africa, it's usually a combination of appreciation and the infrastructure. Because I have friends who study red foxes in England. They radio track them.

They maybe see them once a week briefly at best. And people who study coyotes, the best situation I know of, was sitting on a butte with a spotting scope watching them a half mile away. I sit 30 feet from them. It's a big difference. So they come around and trust you in a way? They tolerate me. I hope they don't trust me. I'd rather they didn't trust people in cars, but they do tolerate me. Most of them, not all of them, some of them don't like the car. And I have to be very careful because if I'm trying to study how much mothers and fathers and helpers are feeding the pups during say a 12-hour period, I can do that with some families, all members of which tolerate my presence. But with other families, the mother will never come in to feed the pups if I'm there. So I can't do that with them because one, the data is skewed because of my presence.

I've had an impact on what's going on, which I do to certain extent anyway and it's a matter of keeping it at a minimum. But I've also messed up the jackal stay. Don't want to do that because it's not real good to keep mom or dad or the helpers away from the puppies for a long period of time. So I just go in and check how many puppies do they have at intervals. So you face the same kinds of questions anthropologists face that are coming into communities and how much am I impacting what's going on? That's why people often ask me, well, do you play with them? Do you touch them? Do you? No. I've never touched a jackal so far. So do you have a longing to do that? Not really because the implications of it are not very good for the jackals. It'd be fun for me but not good for them, I don't think. When jackals are in trouble, it's hard.

When the pups are sick and not doing very well, then it's very hard to just sit and watch. But I don't think it's right to interfere. I think it would be self-indulgent to interfere. I mean, that's all aside from the scientific aspects of it, but it would be self-indulgent, I think in a philosophical sense to interfere. This is true love we have here. I guess you could call it that. It's love and appreciation tempered with respect. I think. I respect them for what they are. Well, a conflict I face in that regard is a next step to do in the research is to look at dispersal. Meaning, what happens to the pups or their older brothers and sisters who have helped for a year once they leave home? Because I don't stay there. You've got the parental pair that stays on the territory.

Having pups once a year, sometimes with older offspring helping to raise the pups. And a big scientific question for me, and it has to do with evolutionary theory is why do some of the individuals stay in help? They gain benefits by helping their close kin in an evolutionary reproductive fitness sense, but they delay their own reproduction by sticking around home for an extra year. So what happens to young jackals that leave at one year of age versus those that help and then leave closer to two years of age? So why does some stay? Why does some go? And why does some go? And it's going to be an interplay of things. It's going to be, what are the opportunities out there in the big world? Is their room to set up a territory? That may be very tough. Is there a mate to be had? And would it be possible to raise puppies? Because one thing that's come out from the research so far, which is probably the most important set of data in terms of what people are interested in, is that families that

have these older offspring helping, more food goes to the pups. There's better protection and more pups survive. So by staying and helping an older brother and sister is helping close relatives. In fact, there's closely related to the brothers and sisters as they would be to their own pups. What's your theory about this? I think it has to do with environmental circumstances. I think if it's real tough out there to get established, get a job, in other words, stay at home. Get a little more maturity, get a little more experience, explore while you're staying at home. Check out the situation a little bit more, and then disperse. But to really understand what those choices are and what's going on out there, the only way to do it is to stay with the individuals that leave home, and there's only one way that we know of right now to do that, and that's to put radio collars on them. And for me, that's a dilemma, because that's why.

You've got to catch the animals, you put the radio collars on, we don't know how much impact radio collars will have on their survival. There's now information coming out on mooping cranes to show that animals that are banded have a higher mortality than unbanded, and animals that have radio collars on are not radio collars, but radio receivers, radio cenders, they aren't. They haven't even higher mortality, and it's very significant. Now why is that happening, do you think? Well, if you put a collar on a dog, especially one that's got sort of a maybe a quarter pound weight here, there's the potential for it to affect its running ability. Maybe not much, but maybe some. Might interfere with its fighting ability if it's going to get into a fight with another individual and females fight females and males fight males. If they're in a brush woodland type environment, there's the potential for that collar getting caught in something. And you are interfering, so I'm still searching for other ways to do it, and maybe something

like a subcutaneous radio might be a better way to go, because less interference with the animal once it's on them, an implant, an implant, but haven't done any of this stuff yet, thinking about it, looking into it, but moving cautiously. If you've just joined us, we're talking with Patricia Melman, who is a behavioral ecologist and teaches ecology at Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. What's your hope with all this? Hope to understand jackal behavior and ecology, you mean the relationships? The relationships, not only in a behavioral sense, but the behavior with regard to the ecology of the situation, because these animals, for instance, golden jackals range all the way from where I am in northern Tanzania to Burma, silverback jackals range all the

way from Kenya down to South Africa, side stripe jackals range all the way from where I am to West Africa. So they're going to be living in different environments, and the environments are going to have impact on how their social organization operates. Sort of two important developments to my way of thinking in terms of thinking about mating systems and behavior and social organization with animals. One is the appreciation that is the ecology changes. In particular, as the food resources change, you may see some real changes in spacing systems and mating systems. For instance, where I study jackals, they are long-term pair bonded, they're monogamous. Very rare feature for mammals, and an initial question is, why are they monogamous? And I think a major aspect is the investment from the father is absolutely critical to the survival of the pups. So that sort of thing, looking at social organization, is very important.

It's sort of looking at the economics of it. Why do you care about that? Because I want to understand why the behavior is there. It's not fixed. It's very flexible. It's very plastic, and I'm interested in why it changes. What are the leverage points? Understanding why animals behave the way they do based on where they live. I think that's what I'm trying to understand, and it's variable, but I think there may be some patterns. And so there's been quite a change in terms of how one looks at animal behavior. It's no longer good enough to know how old they are and what sex they are. You need to know who they are and how they're related to the individuals in their social group. When you think about down the road, where do you want all this to go for you? It's hard to say, I don't project very far in the future. That's why I say that if somebody told me that it's been 12 years on jackals, it's

been a year by year sort of thing. I think I want to keep studying animals in natural settings where I can watch them, where I can see as much detail as possible of what's going on. I could never make it doing radio tracking. It wouldn't be enough feedback to me. I want to watch the animals, and I want to watch them in a natural setting. I need to spend a lot of time outdoors working. I think that's part of why I've gotten into this. I also find evolutionary theory very, very exciting as it's central core to why all of this is going on trying to understand it. I think for now I'm going to keep on doing what I do. I may switch animals, I may switch habitats, but in many respects I'll keep on doing very similar things. The work that you're doing is catching on.

I think a lot of it is more of an interest in the natural world. I think that's pervasive throughout radio, television, books, and in a lot of ways started with people like Jane Goodall and Robert Audrey with a sort of books he wrote, opening who stoves stuff, all the BBC series, opening the door and allowing people to have better access to what's going on out there, because people can't go out and watch Jackals the way I do. But if films can be made about it and made available, it makes a difference. The whole environment, movement, the whole concern with the natural world. I think it's all part and parcel of that. What you're concerned about what human impact is on the world, and that it's not an infinite situation. And do you think it's also because we haven't lived in a time where there is a frontier around us?

I guess in a way I don't see it as exploring new land. I see it more as getting touched back in touch with who we are, what we are and where we live. I think I see it more as it's really getting back in touch and trying to understand the kind of world we ourselves evolved in, and have removed ourselves to sort of a disjunct habitat to a certain extent, because we haven't lived in cities for very long. And we haven't been removed from our food sources for very long. We haven't been removed from really being in tune with the phases of the moon for very long. And so perhaps it's a certain amount of need to get back to that, I don't know. But I think it's also an appreciation that we do live in a finite world, and we also need to understand it better so that we have it.

Dr. Patricia Milman, a behavioral ecologist who studies jackals in Africa. One-on-one is a production of Connecticut Public Radio. The series is made possible by a grant from Sigma's Eye, the Scientific Research Society. For a cassette copy of the conversation you just heard, call 203-527-0905, or this member station of the Public Radio Network. The engineer of one-on-one is J. McDermott, Michelle Press and I co-produced the show. I'm Faith Middleton. Thanks for listening.