Hakuna Matata

I'm never quite sure how to answer when people ask me just what it is I study, or, as they have in my last 24 hours of relentless travel, ask me why I'm headed to Tanzania. I often feel like my research is kind of like a real-world investigation of the Disney's Lion King that defined childhood movies for my generation. (I guarantee you that I can sing along word-for-word with every single song on that soundtrack - including the second, extended version of "Can you feel the love tonight.")

As much as I hate to admit it, a little part of me kinda sorta likes it that the general public thinks that lions are kind of a sexy thing to study. I've discovered that my answers depend on my mood and how cute the person is that's asking me. Sometimes I want to play the question-driven scientist who's in it for the thrill of scientific discovery - then "I'm an ecologist, studying competition and coexistence." Other times, especially when I feel like my recent relinquishment of nomadism has rendered me boring and mundane, I play the field biologist in search of adventure - "Oh, [said ever so nonchalantly] I chase lions in the Serengeti." When people push me further, I really do say, "It's kinda like the Lion King."

Now that I'm actually in Tanzania, though, I am almost reluctant to admit that I, some white chick from the American Dream suburbs, raised on lattes and cul-de-sac kickball, think that I might be able to say something insightful about lion-hyena-cheetah interactions. For the last year, I’ve been eating, sleeping, and dreaming lions, hyenas, cheetahs and leopards – trying to teach myself sophisticated statistics, GIS, and theoretical ecological modeling. In typical fashion, I want to say something big about what environmental and biological mechanisms mediate coexistence between these large, charismatic species. In so many systems, the dominant carnivore can drive subordinate carnivores to lower densities or even complete localized exclusion – and it’s not that there isn’t enough food to go around. Such competitive exclusion can derive solely from interference competition in the form of direct killing (such as lions killing cheetah cubs like a little kid pops the bubbles on packing wrap) or in kleptoparasitism (like stealing candy from a baby…or a zebra carcass from African wild dogs). In fact, lions and hyenas can and do drive down cheetahs and wild dogs. Why then, since lions can incur similar costs to hyenas, do lions and hyenas show positively correlated densities across Africa? Furthermore, why do the same assemblages of species have different dynamics in different landscapes?? My research is centered on the idea that fine-scale landscape complexity and fine-scale spatial partitioning hold the key to coexistence. I’d argue that spatial complexity as a mechanism of coexistence is sort of a hot menu item at the moment, although most of the theory has been applied to plants or petri dishes. I want to do it with big fuzzy things. I want to be able to predict how species distribute themselves locally with respect to competitors, whether this distribution is because of niche specialization or because of competition, whether there is a reproductive impact of high densities of their competitors, and predict how different landscape features will impact these interactions. Yes, I want to do all of this, all at once. Don’t laugh.

But as I’m talking to a Netherlands-educated Kenyan on my flight into Nairobe, I feel plain silly talking about fine-scale partitioning and behaviors in animals I’ve never even seen. His eyes twinkle. “Lions and hyenas?” I can’t tell if that’s a smirk or a genuine smile. Who the hell am I? Hm, well, right now I’m a grad student that hasn’t showered or changed or slept in 2 days, embarking on my epic East African adventure. I have a return ticket and a place to stay, which is nice for a change, and it makes me better prepared than normal, and I can say “No! That’s too much!” to the taxi driver in Swahili. In the end, I don’t know if I really have any right to talk about lions and hyenas and the mechanisms of coexistence in Serengeti, but I do know all the words to “Hakuna Matata,” and that has to count for something.