Black and white and red
Category: Predators, Uncategorized | Date: Apr 06 2009 | By: savingstripes
I happened upon this cartoon the other day, and it seemed appropriate:
Okay, so zebras might not be the Einsteins of the animal world, but they do know how to run away from lions! The last few weeks we’ve been watching a territorial male Grevy’s whom we often see on our drive home. One day he appeared with a huge gash in his belly (caused by a lion?). He was moving pretty slowly and stiffly. The next time we saw him, the wound was dripping pus. We thought he was a goner, but I’ve seen him more recently and he’s looking a lot better. Sometimes it’s amazing how these animals can survive! See this photo I took last year of a female with an old wound – almost definitely from a big predator:
Others, of course, aren’t so lucky. In fact, one theory is that lions are a major cause of Grevy’s decline. Over the last few decades, lion populations have risen in this region. Ranches used to think of lions as a threat to their cattle so they actively hunted them. Now people tend to want lions on their land, since tourists like to see big cats. (Of course the lions still take the odd cow, and ranchers still take the odd lion…). But does the rise in the lion population spell disaster for Grevy’s? I’ll let Siva comment more on that!
-Corinna
Water!
Category: News, Uncategorized | Date: Apr 04 2009 | By: savingstripes
Hi everybody,
Apologies for the silence – our internet has been down pretty much the whole week because it’s been snowing in Italy. Yep. When the weather is foul in Turin, something goes wrong with the satellite connection, and we here in rural Kenya lose contact with the outer world!
I’ve had a post ready to put up all week – which I’ll post soon – but meantime, some good news: the river started flowing! This is the Nanyuki River, the one that passes by our house. Earlier in the week it rained on Mount Kenya, the source of the Nanyuki River. Since Wednesday we’ve been hearing rumors that it’s flowing upstream; by Thursday it had reached the adjacent ranch; and by yesterday afternoon a healthy stream of clear, cold water was burbling past the house. Ah, the wonderful sound of rushing water!
Now, we are just waiting for rain. Dark clouds on many afternoons, but still no rain. We wait. It’s something you learn to be good at, here.
-Corinna
Dry
Category: Uncategorized | Date: Mar 26 2009 | By: savingstripes
These days it’s DRY. It rained once in January, but otherwise it’s been dry since mid-November. The grass is all yellow and gray, the trees have dropped their leaves and, worst of all, the rivers have stopped flowing. The river that passes by us at Mpala is called the Ewaso Ngiro (“brown river”) and this is the first time in living memory that it has stopped flowing.
To get water, cows and other animals have to walk deep into the river bed to drink from remnant pools:
A different river runs by the house where we live; it’s called the Nanyuki River. The Nanyuki stopped flowing weeks ago, and now even the remaining pools are drying out. The river is our main water supply for bathing, washing, toilets, etc. (everything except drinking – we harvest rainwater for drinking). So naturally, we’re starting to worry… anybody know of a good rain dance?
The rains are supposed to start in late March, but here we are, March 26th, and the skies are clear and blue. We can only hope that the clouds will gather soon…
Meantime, Siva has headed off to the US for six weeks of work there. So it’s just me and the critters. The squirrels are totally free these days, but they still spend most of their time near the house. I put out food for them every day, but now I’m having problems with bigger squirrels stealing the food. I’m not sure how to make sure the babies are getting enough to eat. They are still not fully grown and, like a good surrogate mother, I worry about them! I suppose the big squirrels are also feeling hungry, though, since there isn’t much out there for them to eat.
So we all wait for another dry day to go by – hopefully bringing us one day closer to the start of the rainy season.
-Corinna
Zebrology
Category: Uncategorized | Date: Mar 16 2009 | By: savingstripes
Hi everybody,
I want to use the next few posts to respond to comments some people have made on the blog.
First, a number of you noticed some of the differences between plains zebra and Grevy’s zebra and were interested to know more about zebras in general.
Isn’t it interesting how well-known zebras are in so many cultures – what’s the first thing you think of when you think of black and white stripes? Or the letter “z”? – and yet, how many people know that there are three different species of zebra in the world?
First there’s the plains zebra – the most numerous and most familiar species of zebra. Plains, or Burchell’s zebras, are the ones you usually see on TV documentaries about African wildlife. There are more than a million of them and they’re found in the savannahs of eastern and southern Africa all the way from Kenya through Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia, and down to South Africa. There is some variation in their stripe patterns and the habitats in which they’re found, but it’s the same species throughout this large geographical range. Basically, they are the stocky, bold-striped zebra familiar to most people.
The second species is the mountain zebra. This zebra is endangered and only found in a few reserves in South Africa and Namibia. They look a lot like the plains zebra – with bold, broad stripes – but their bellies are white, they have a grid-iron pattern on their back and rump, and their muzzles are thicker and browner than plans zebras’. In terms of behavior, they are quite similar to plains zebras.
Finally, there is the zebra I care about the most – Grevy’s. It’s the largest and prettiest and most interesting of the zebras (I’m not biased 
). Ancestors to this zebra have been found as widely separated as China, Uzbekistan, and South Africa, so they were once quite a cosmopolitan zebra! It’s thought that they may have evolved separately from the other two species of zebras.
Grevy’s are about 33% larger than plains zebras, with fine stripes and a white belly. They have big, round ears (they’re really cute) and a slightly brownish muzzle. Here’s a photo of several Grevy’s and plains zebras together. The tight group of plains zebras on the right is a harem of females nuzzling each other.
Socially, Grevy’s and plains zebras are quite different. Plains zebras form harems – one male (the stallion) guards and defends a group of females (anywhere from 2 to 12) and their foals. This group stays together, moving as a unit. Sometimes many harems may join together to form large herds, but these herds are usually ephemeral. Males that are unable to gather a harem live in “bachelor” herds – waiting until they have a chance to challenge a stallion for his harem. This type of society is better adapted to plains (and mountan) zebra habitats which tend to be less arid than the areas where Grevy’s live.
Grevy’s, by contrast, have a looser social structure. Females live in groups, but these groups do not always stay the same. The members of these groups may change daily or weekly, or occasionally they last even longer. In the dry lands that Grevy’s live in, females must wander in search of grass and water, sometimes parting ways with their friends. Males who want to mate with females cannot defend any one group – because the group is always changing members! Instead, a male chooses to hold onto a piece of real estate that he knows will attract females. Males will patrol and defend their territories from other males. The picture below shows a typical male posture – head held high, standing guard over his territories (“monarch of all he surveys”?)
Here’s another male standing guard over his territory – battle scarred (see his ears and neck) from fighting off challengers to his land…
By occupying and defending areas with good grass and good access to water, a Grevy’s stallion knows that he has what every girl wants – a safe place to eat and drink and raise her babies!
Finally, an interesting factoid – Equids, the mammal family to which zebras belong, first appeared and thrived in North America millions of years ago. Yet, today all zebra species are found only in Africa! In fact, none of the remaining wild equids are found in North America. Why might that be? And what makes some species – like Grevy’s – more endangered than others?
-Siva
Forensics with feces
Category: Uncategorized | Date: Mar 04 2009 | By: savingstripes
Here’s the problem: we still don’t really know why Grevy’s populations aren’t increasing. Hunting – which almost certainly contributed to their decline – has been banned since the 70s. Yes, the occasional zebra is the casualty of illegal hunting, but that alone can’t explain why the population remains so small.
So why aren’t Grevy’s rebounding? One possibility is disease. Very little is known about this in Grevy’s zebra. What parasites do they carry? How are these parasites affecting the zebras? Are some zebras more likely to suffer the effects of parasites than others?
One new project I’m starting will try to answer some of these questions. But how? Dung! It’s not glamorous, but it works. Here’s what you do: you drive around looking for zebras. When you see a group, you watch them intently until the miracle happens and one decides to defecate. Quickly, you photograph that animal and run out of the car looking for the fresh poop. Scoop it up, and you’ve got your sample. What, I wonder, must the zebras think as they watch us running around and picking up what they’ve just dropped?
This is what I’ve been doing in the field the last few days, along with a colleague, Vanessa. Vanessa is an expert on ungulate parasites and we’ll be working together on this project.
What will the dung tell us? Back at the lab, Vanessa and I are looking at the dung samples under a microscope to count and identify the parasites living inside them. Then we’ll send samples to a lab which can tell us whether the zebra has been eating well or not – how much protein it’s getting, how fat it is, etc. Finally, another colleague of ours will extract DNA from the dung.
With this information, we can start asking some deeper questions – like, do animals living in particular areas suffer from higher parasite loads? Do more inbred animals have higher parasite loads? How do parasite loads affect how fat and healthy the zebra is?
It’s definitely not the most fragrant job I do, but hopefully it’s not just a load of… you know….
-Siva
Life in the menagerie
Category: Uncategorized | Date: Feb 23 2009 | By: savingstripes
As if it’s not enough that we’re surrounded by wildlife in our daily work – we have to have a bit of wildlife inside the home, too!
Siva and I had been married for about a week when we brought home our first puppy. He was one of ten pups born to our landlords’ dog (we rent a house here in Laikipia, about 20 minutes’ drive from the Mpala Research Centre, where our work is based). Now, a year and a half old, Arcas is a bit bigger but still nearly as cute (we think) as he was the day he came home. Here’s a picture of me with him:
Keeping a dog is one thing. Raising wild creatures is another. Living out here, you often wind up the clueless but well-intentioned caretaker of some orphaned creature. A couple of months ago, a friend of ours found two baby hedgehogs. Prickly and tightly coiled in their little hedgehog body-sacs, they looked like small sea urchins at the time. Before long they had doubled in size and were ready to see more of the world:
Now we’ve got our latest project: a pair of baby squirrels. Their mother made a nest in a parked car over the holidays, and when the car’s driver returned, momma squirrel didn’t. Siva and I took in the babies – at the time, 15 grams of shivering skinniness. At first they just slept, but it wasn’t very long before they started jumping around, cheeping, chewing everything, and generally being cute with their big, beady eyes. Even the adults of this species – ocher bush squirrels – are pretty darn cute (they are only about the length of your hand), so you can imagine how adorable the palm-sized version is!
For a while I was getting worried about the squirrels. They had lost interest in the milky formula I had been feeding them (a mix of baby formula, baby cereal, and mayonnaise to add more fat). I tried giving them fruits and nuts, various vegetables, peanut butter, even a ball of Acacia sap. Once, they fought over a piece of mango, then lost interest.
I was starting to despair, when, on a whim, I decided to put a dollop of leftover vegetable biryani in their cage. Within minutes, the rice and vegetable mix was gone! I put out another dollop and they devoured it as if they had never seen food before.
Since then I’ve been giving them our typical assortment of leftovers: rice, lentils, mixed vegetables. Never mind all the Indian spices we usually cook with; the squirrels love it! In the last week they have put on more than 10 grams each (now, at 50 grams, they are slightly more than half grown).
Which just goes to show that even the squirrels know it: when there’s curry, it’s time to scurry.
-Corinna
Getting ready for collaring
Category: Uncategorized | Date: Feb 18 2009 | By: savingstripes
It’s been a busy few weeks for us here, a little too busy, in fact! For the first two weeks of February, Corinna was teaching a field course for undergraduates from Princeton University (where Corinna is a postdoctoral fellow). Teaching was fun – but exhausting. Meantime, Siva was hosting a series of visitors before he had to go to Nairobi for a few days.
Siva’s main reason for going to Nairobi was to apply for permits from the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS). The permits are to put GPS collars on zebras – something Siva hopes to do some time in the next month or two. These collars work by taking a GPS location of the zebra’s whereabouts every 15 minutes. This data is stored inside the collar until you can retrieve it later, either after the collar has fallen off, or via a wireless download while the collar is still on (if you can get close enough to the zebra to do this!).
Here are some pictures of collared Grevy’s and plains zebras. The splash of blue on the plains zebra’s neck is an antibiotic we sprayed on him before taking a blood sample. (What else do you notice is different about Grevy’s, in comparison to plains zebras?)
This will be the second round of zebra collaring for Siva and the Laikipia Grevy’s Zebra Project. In June 2007, we collared seven Grevy’s and two plains zebras. Unfortunately, the collars had some problems and most either died or fell off the zebras within a year. But the information we got from the collars gave us a glimpse of where zebras go and how long they spend in various places. You can even see an animation of their movements at our Action Tracker website:
This time, we plan to collar eight more Grevy’s and seven more plains zebras. With the data we get from the collars, we can start answering some important questions. For example, how much land does a typical zebra use in the space of a year? Are there particular areas or habitats where zebras tend to spend a lot of time? Do zebras avoid areas where there are lots of people and lots of domestic animals? By answering these questions, we’ll be able to start understanding what habitats Grevy’s need and how to prioritize protecting land for them.
Reviving Stripes
Category: Uncategorized | Date: Jan 17 2009 | By: savingstripes
Hello everybody – and thanks to all of you for your enthusiasm about my project. Unfortunately I misjudged the infrastructure I had available to keep the blog up last year, but now I’m back, it’s a new year, I’ve got the technological issues sorted out, and I’m ready to revive this blog!
We’ve got a busy and exciting year ahead here with the Grevy’s zebra team. I’m going to be putting radio collars on some more zebras, while my collaborators who study lions are going to be putting collars on lions in the same area. This way we can track the movements of zebras and lions at the same time in the same lansdscape. This will let us see how zebras move around to avoid being eaten – or how lions move around to try to catch zebras.
Here’s a picture of a zebra we collared in 2007 with her foal (which was born after the mother was collared):
I have lots of data from the first two years of this project and I’ll be sharing some of what I’ve found so far. In addition to all this research, we’re also getting ready to put out a story book about a young Grevy’s called Stripe. The story book will be printed in Swahili and English and will be distributed widely here in northern Kenya, with the hope of publicizing among people here how rare and special Grevy’s are. Here is a sneak peek at a sample:
These days I’m also working a lot with my wife, Corinna, on two projects relating to land management. Zebras and other wildlife need good habitat to survive and thrive; the question is, how do we manage the land to keep the habitat good? In this part of Kenya, as in lots of places in Africa, wildlife have to share the land with livestock. So understanding the impacts of livestock on the land is critical. Corinna and I are working on setting up a big experiment to test two different cattle management strategies and their impacts on the grass and wildlife. We’re also working on putting together a booklet that will instruct people about how to monitor the health of their land. We want this booklet to work for people all across the Horn of Africa, so to do some background research we’re planning a road trip up to northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia later this year.
We’re excited about all our plans for the next year and excited to share our experiences with you. Corinna and I will both be writing about our work and life here in Kenya. We hope you will send us your questions and comments and keep reading!
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Why Stripes Matter!
Category: Uncategorized | Date: Oct 09 2007 | By: admin
Hello everyone, my name is Siva Sundaresan, I study Grevy’s zebra in the Laikipia-Samburu savannahs of Northern Kenya. Grevy’s zebra are the largest, prettiest and rarest of all the zebras – there are three species of zebras in the world.
The Grevy’s are amongst the most endangered of all zebras. They have declined from more than 15,000 is the 1970s to fewer than 2000 today as a result of over hunting in the old days. Kenya banned hunting as a result of its impact on many species. Despite the hunting ban they remain at risk due to changes in their environment, habitats and competition with livestock and disease.
Today this spectacular species is found only in northern Kenya and Ethiopia, their last stronghold is the Laikipia-Samburu ecosystem where there are only 1,500 still remaining. Even here they are really vulnerable, … don’t tell them I said it but they are a little dim witted and are not all that predator savvy.
I work together with other scientists, local communities and land managers to learn more about how Grevy’s zebra interact with livestock, lions and people so that we may better conserve them. We do radio tracking, behavioral research, monitor their health and their parasites, and we from time to time we have to move them.
In this blog I’ll tell you about the zebras, the Laikipia landscape, their nemesis - lions, and the local pastoralists who share the land with them. There’s a lot happening on the ground so stay tuned to this blog if you want to know more about the secret life of my favourite animal.
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