If You Want to See a Cheetah Hunt...

As manager of Dr. Kay Holekamp’s laboratory in Michigan, the Mara is not normally where you find me. Our research assistants (or “RAs”) are the ones in the field and the usual contributors on the blog. Logging hundreds of hours with our hyenas, they collect data that later finds its way to my desk in Michigan. Having never been an RA, it’s been a priority for me to see how ours live and work day-to-day by visiting the Maasai Mara myself – and I was fortunate enough to be offered the opportunity to do just that!

“The field” (a catch-all term for anywhere biologists gather their data) doesn't have to be across the world. Depending on the project, a field site might even be the bird feeder in a scientist’s backyard. At the Mara Hyena Project, we’re lucky enough to call the sprawling, scenic grasslands of the Maasai Mara our study site – a place easy to imagine as packed with nonstop action. After all, TV depicts the Mara as a place of constant, thrilling hunts, shot from every angle and in great lighting.

While everyone here has to eat, actually witnessing a hunt isn’t easy as television might make it seem. It’s tough to be a predator, and some of the most popular – cats, like lions and leopards – miss their catch far more often than they succeed. To see a hunt in action, even an unsuccessful one, you have to be in the right place at exactly the right time.

But it’s not all serendipity. There’s a price that every observer, from film crew to researcher, has to pay: Watching gorgeous animals, who could wow you with any number of exciting behaviors, do absolutely nothing but sleep. A lot.


By now you know that we don't study cheetahs, but they do share the Mara with our spotted hyenas. And who passes up the chance to see a cheetah?

The scene is this: We’re on a morning drive, watching a few hyenas at the den. Sacked out in the grass, moms are suckling their cubs. One of our RAs, Jana, is quizzing me on hyena IDs. She takes photos, passes them to me, and I practice recognizing individuals by their spots. It’s shaping up to be a pleasant but routine morning.

We drive on and come across a group of tourist trucks, clustered around something tucked in the grass. It’s a cheetah. There’s no space to squeeze in for a good look, and then an “alien” male – a hyena who isn’t part of our study clans – wanders into view. It’s back to work and we take off after him, following until he’s gone beyond the boundaries of our study groups.

By the time we get back, the cheetah is alone and asleep. Her audience has moved on, searching for a more exciting way to spend their vacation time. We break for a few minutes and hope she’ll do something.


It doesn't look promising. 

We whisper hopeful instructions, encouraging her to notice the nearby antelope or call for a pair of (imaginary) cubs. She gets up and wanders along the roadside, pausing on a mound of dirt. It’s the perfect place to survey the landscape for prey. Is that what she’s doing?


Nope. After this photo she lays back down.

I’m someone who could watch a cheetah sleep all day. When it comes to wildlife viewing, patience is part of the deal – if we wait, who knows what might happen? But we have other work to do. There are no hyenas here now, and we're stalling. A cheetah is still a cat, and she could spend hours napping, relaxing, or just deciding which direction to walk in.

Just a few more minutes, we decide.

Then, there’s the rapid drum of footsteps. I look toward Jana’s window. Outside it, everything is happening at once.

 
The cheetah swings around the back of the car, kicking up dust across the dirt road. She and her target come into full view. 

An African hare!

I swivel the lens and keep shooting. A sprinting cheetah is so fast, you will miss it if you blink.

It all takes just a few seconds. The cheetah gives up the chase, and the hare disappears into the grass. What might have been a brief moment with a sleeping cheetah turned out to be action-packed after all – especially for the hare.
 
Authored by Sabrina S. Salome
Photos © Sabrina S. Salome

From the Mara to Michigan: How our field observations turn into computerized data

A year ago from the day I sat down to write this post, I was in Kenya sitting in front of a den full of rambunctious little hyena cubs. Now, my love of the hyena project and the lifelong friends I made in the Mara has brought me to Michigan to help out on the data side of our research.

As a research assistant out in the field, I honed my skills at taking field observations and translating them into a consistent code of behaviors so that I could write them up in my notes and send them back to MSU. However, I had little to no idea what actually happened to the notes after that.

My job in the lab right now is to “session” the field notes from Fig Tree. Sessioning involves taking parts of the written notes and entering them into a computer database that graduate students and other researchers can use to do larger calculations. Sessioning is the backbone for data analysis in the hyena lab; it gives a reference number for every observed event that researchers record. Using this foundation, we can calculate (for example) demographics of the various clans, how the location of the clans changes over time, observation rates in the field, and when we add in other behaviors to the sessioned notes, we can also calculate things like rate of aggressions or other social behaviors. In this way, sessioned notes become a powerful research tool.

In many ways, this transition from the page to the computer feels similar to the transition from real life hyenas to observational notes in the field. It all involves translating data from one form to another with the ultimate goal of taking the complexity and unpredictability of a natural system and turning it into patterns that we can analyze and use to understand more about behavior, ecology, and evolution in the world around us.

To get a sense of how this process works all the way from the field to the database, I thought I’d illustrate the different steps of the process.

Here’s a video from one day when Hadley, Dave, and I went on observations and saw natal female Crimson and immigrant male Juba acting strangely. This was one of Hadley’s first transcriptions, and Dave walked both of us through what was happening. Crimson was a subadult female in the clan who was approaching the age at which many hyenas start to have cubs, and Juba was clearly interested in courting her, hyena-style:

However, part of our job as RAs in the field was to take these observations and turn them into notes that someone who wasn’t there would still understand. Hadley’s transcription of the event looked like this:

She listed the time and location that the events occurred at, and then any behaviors that we observed, noting extra details or when we might have missed anything. So when Crimson (recorded as CRMS in the notes) was attacking Juba, these behaviors get translated into abbreviations like lk (look) or snap, indicating an angry glare or an attempted bite, with the t-level indicating how serious the aggression was.

Finally, at MSU, we can take these notes and session them so that the database includes which hyenas were present, where they were, and a general category of what they were doing. Other graduate students and their undergraduate student assistants will pull out the specific behaviors that they need from the notes and enter them into different tables. All of the notes get printed out and put into binders in the lab like this:

Here is how we mark up the written records to be entered into the computer:

Each hyena gets circled, and the entire interaction, or session, is given a number and a code to indicate whether it was at a den, a carcass, etc. In this case, the situation is just “o” for “other” but we could still make a note that they might have been mating.

And here is what it finally looks like in the database:

The locations, hyenas, time, date, and session number are all included.

Now this session is part of the giant hyena lab database of approximately 83861 sessions in Talek, and that doesn’t even include the other clans! As it becomes part of such a long history of data it enables us to learn more about these amazing animals.