Why am I here anyway?

I’ve had several people request an explanation of why I am actually in South Africa living in a tent. I probably should have explained this long ago, but better late than never. (For those of you that know why I’m here…talk amongst yourselves…I’ll give you a topic…Barbara Streisand…discuss.)

So my research revolves around how feeding by herbivores (plant eaters) affects the plants that grow in an area (how many, what kind, how big, etc.). But, I’m not just interested in herbivores in general, but how different sized herbivores affect the plant differently. So to test how the different sized herbivores have different effects, I’ve built a ton of fenced in areas that selectively let in herbivores depending on how tall they are. So there are fences that don’t allow in any herbivores (full exclosures), fences that only exclude the largest herbivores such as elephant and giraffe but let in rhino, wildebeest, zebra, impala, warthog, etc, and fences that exclude large and medium sized herbivores such as elephant, rhino, wildebeest, and zebra but let in the smaller herbivores such as impala, warthog, and smaller antelopes.

The reason behind identifying what different sized herbivores do to the plant communities is that when humans start to encroach on natural areas it is usually the biggest animals that are driven (or killed) out of areas first leaving progressively smaller herbivores behind as the human impact increases. What I am trying to learn is how this loss of consumers trickles down to affect the plant communities which can have a large feedback on the health of the ecosystem.

Right now I am spending lots of time counting the plants that are inside the different fences to see if the different sized herbivores are starting to have different effects on the plant communities. It’s hot, muggy, sometimes boring work, but it’s necessary to answer the questions I want to answer. Actually a lot of science is like that - short bursts of fun, exciting work interspersed with long bouts of tedious data collection. That is the nature of the beast however – the price to pay for getting to come to Africa and play around in the wilderness.