It’s been almost a week since the 2016 MU Life Sciences and Society Program Symposium, “Confronting Climate Change” wrapped up. If you missed the event, check out our Flickr gallery to see a little bit of the excitement.
We also had the chance to chat a few minutes with most of the LSSP speakers who graciously shared their insight on climate change in our lives. Check out these conversations on our YouTube page from the link at the top of the page.
Last but not least, we put together a radio piece for KBIA giving some speaker highlights. Visit our SoundCloud to see more.
Naomi Oreskes is a professor of the history of science at Harvard University and a geologist by training.
At a time when global warming was framed by the media as a debate, her 2004 paper in the journal Science showed that climate change was a settled fact among climate scientists. Of the 928 papers she sampled in her literature search, not a single author denied the reality of climate change. Digging further, Oreskes explored in her book, Merchants of Doubt, co-authored with Eric Conway, the people, organizations, and motivations behind climate science misinformation. From cigarettes and acid rain to global warming and the ozone hole, Oreskes and Conway uncovered how industries such as Big Tobacco and Big Oil employed a core group of ideologically-motivated scientists to fabricate doubt and stymie government regulations.
Naomi Oreskes speaks on Saturday,3:30 pm as part of the LSSP Symposium, “Combatting Climate Change,” held at the Bond Life Sciences Center.
What has been the response of people who, through reading Merchants of Doubt or watching the documentary, have changed their minds about climate change?
Many people have written to me and Erik Conway to thank us for writing the book. I’d say the most common response was that the book helped them to understand why there was so much opposition to accepting the scientific evidence. I can’t say that I know for sure that thousands of people changed their minds after reading the book, but I do know that among those who did, the link to the tobacco industry was most compelling. Our research showed that the opposition was not rooted in problems with or deficiencies in the science.
You said in an interview with Mongabay, “In our society, knowledge resides in one place, and for the most part, power resides somewhere else.” How can we hold accountable oil and gas companies which have quietly known since the early 1980s that burning fossil fuels contributes to global warming, but used their power to impede actions that would combat climate change?
I’m not a lawyer, so I cannot answer the legal aspects of this question, but state attorneys around the country are now looking into that question. As a citizen and a consumer, I can say this: One way we can hold companies accountable by not investing in them, and this is why I support the divestment movement. We can also boycott their products. In the current world, that is very difficult to do, but we can make a start. I installed an 8-watt solar PV system in my house, and we are now just about net-zero for electricity.
Is it possible to make up for 30 years of squandered time?
No of course not. Lost time is lost time. But knowing how much time has been lost, we should have a sense of urgency now, try not to lose any more.
Which strategies are being proposed for immediate climate action? Are environmental scientists and economists in agreement over which courses of action make the most sense?
Yes I think so. Nearly everyone who has studied the issue agrees that the most effective immediate action that is available to us is to put a price on carbon. This will immediately make renewables and energy efficiency more economically attractive, and it will send a signal to investors that fossil fuels will no longer be given a free pass for their external costs. This means that future returns will be greater in the non-carbon based energy sector. Anyone interested in this should read Nicolas Stern’s very informative book, Why are we Waiting?
How might the nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court and the results of the 2016 presidential elections affect the role that the US will play in combating climate change? Best case and worse case scenarios.
Best case: Republicans in Congress come to their senses, and listen to fellow Republicans like Bob Inglis, Hank Paulson, and George Schultz who have made the conservative case for putting a price on carbon. They can do this pretty much any way they want— through a tax, thru tradeable permits, or whatever. it’s clear Democrats would support either, and we know from experience that either approach can work, so long as the price is real (i.e., not just symbolic.) Right now Alberta is talking about $20—that is probably a bit low. BC is at $30
Of all the important issues out there, what motivates you to devote your time and energy to fighting climate change?
Oh that’s a good question. I didn’t decide to work on climate change, I fell into it when Erik Conway and I tripped over the merchants of Doubt story. Then, as I learned more and more about the issue, I came to appreciate scientists’ sense of urgency about it.
The 12th annual Life Sciences & Society Program symposium — with events from March 17 to 19 — will tackle one of the most pressing issues facing the world today. Titled “Combating Climate Change,” speakers will address topics such as using technology to help curb global warming, how rising temperatures and more extreme weather will impact human health, the role of government in taking action to combat man-made climate change, and how to effectively communicate climate change.
Marcia McNutt–editor-in-chief of the leading journal, Science, and a geophysicist by training—will talk about the “promise and peril” of climate interventions such as carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and albedo modification, a process that involves spraying particles into the atmosphere to reflect more sunlight back into space to cool the earth.
There has been “significant advancement” in technologies such as carbon capture and storage, McNutt wrote by email, but these technologies have not moved beyond the research stages for economic reasons.
She pointed out that most climate interventions act slowly and take time to implement.
Albedo modification is the exception, McNutt said, but while quite a bit of work has been done to model its effects, the risks are high.
Few scientists believe we know enough about albedo modification to seriously consider it, she said.
“There is no silver bullet that is a magical antidote to climate change,” McNutt said.
The full line-up of speakers for this year’s symposium includes:
Andrew Revkin, environmental journalist and author, who proposed the term “anthrocene” to describe “a geological age of our own making” in his 1992 book, Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast. (Paul Crutzen, an atmospheric chemist who won a Nobel prize for studying ozone layer depletion , popularized the more familiar term, ”Anthropocene,” in 2000.)
Wes Jackson, founder and president of The Land Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated to sustainable agriculture
Marshall Shepherd, professor of geography and director of the atmospheric science program at the University of Georgia
George Luber, an epidemiologist at the Center for Disease Control and the associate director for climate change in the division of environmental hazards and health effects
Naomi Oreskes, professor of the history of science at Harvard University. Her book co-written with Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt, showed how rich and powerful industries retained a core group of scientists who used their expertise to create doubt and protect industry interests
To see the schedule of this week’s events and register for the symposium, visit the MU LSSP website.
You can imagine it’s hard to distinguish yourself from the crowd when it comes to scientific papers.
But, publishing quality work in a well-known journal adds value to the whole scientific world by assisting others and inspiring new science. Three Bond LSC researchers recently were recognized for doing just that.
Bond Life Sciences Center scientists Chris Pires, Shuqun Zhang and Yidong Liu are among five University of Missouri System researchers named in the 2015 Thomson Reuters’ Highly Cited Researchers list.
This list spotlights the top 1 percent of papers published from nearly 9 million scientists and scholars. The Highly Cited Researchers 2015 list represents the world’s most influential scientific minds from 21 scientific fields. The rankings are based on how often scientific papers published in the last decade get cited in newly published research, according to Essential Science Indicators (ESI), a component of the Web of Science.
Chris Pires, associate professor of Biological Sciences, studies the evolution of plants by looking at changes in their genetics over millions of years. Pires published work in 2015 looking at how plant defenses evolved in tandem with the defenses of caterpillars that feed on them.
Shuqun Zhang is a Distinguished Researcher from the MU College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources and a professor of Biochemistry. His research seeks to improve plants’ response to adverse environmental conditions. By identifying molecular targets that aid in protecting crops from disease, his research aims to help create healthier, more productive agricultural products. In particular, he focuses on a family of enzymes called mitogen-activated protein kinases (MAPKs) that are involved in plant cell-to-cell communication and plant interaction with its environment.
Yidong Liu is a senior research specialist from MU’s Department of Biochemistry that manages Shuqun Zhang’s lab. She also works on MAPKs and their role in plant defense responses such as pathogen-induced ethylene biosynthesis and phytoalexin induction.
The Bond Life Sciences Center is an interdisciplinary research center at the University of Missouri exploring problems in human and animal health, the environment and agriculture since 2004. Learn more about our research by visiting bondlsc.missouri.edu.
“You’ve probably never really seen a fat plant before, right?” said Salie, a fourth year MU graduate student in biochemistry. “Humans, we make plenty of extra fat and store that as energy. But plants don’t really need to do that — they make just as much as they need, and that’s about it.”
Salie studies plant metabolism with Bond LSC researcher Jay Thelen, an associate professor of biochemistry. He’s one of 25 winners honored for research presented during Missouri Life Sciences Week 2015.
The Thelen lab looks for ways to increase the amount of vegetable oil that crops such as corn and soybean can produce. Salie focused on an enzyme that is the first step in the pathway to producing fatty acid in plants.
The idea was that if he could reduce metabolic limits at the beginning of the process, then the downstream production of oil would increase.
“I found these new proteins that no one has ever really studied before,” Salie said. “As I started to look into them over the last year or two, it turns out that they actually seem to incorporate themselves into the enzyme and slow down it’s activity.”
Four separate proteins normally combine to form the functional enzyme, but the new proteins Salie identified mimic those components and can take their place, like a cuckoo bird replacing another species’ eggs with its own. The more mimics that replace proteins, the fewer functional enzymes the plant produces, which means less oil.
It’s a simple, nuanced way for the plant to fine-tune the production of fatty acids.
“Instead of being an on-off switch, it’s more like a thermostat,” Salie said. And if he can adjust that thermostat in a plant, it should start packing on the pounds.
Although Salies work was only recently submitted for publication, it’s already receiving recognition. His poster, “The BADC proteins — a novel paradigm for regulation of de novo fatty acid synthesis in plants,” won first place in the Molecular and Cellular Biology category during the Life Sciences Week poster competition in April.
Salie relished the opportunity to share his findings with researchers and non-scientists alike.
“It’s a great experience, because it helps you realize what’s really important about the work that your doing,” he said. “It also really encourages you to work harder. It’s like, ‘Wow, this is actually meaningful stuff!’ which can be hard to see when you’re working 60 or 70 hour weeks at the lab, just sitting there by yourself.”
Salie was among more than 300 students who presented their research during the 31st annual Life Sciences Week poster sessions.
The winners in each of the five categories are:
Molecular and Cellular Biology
Matthew Salie, Matthew Muller, Stephanie Bowers
Organismal Biology
Miqdad Dhariwala, Ryan Sheldon, Carine Collins
Genetics, Evolution and Environment
Julianna Jenkins, Nathan Harness, and a tie for third between Sharon Kuo and Susheel Bhanu Busi
Life Science and Biomedical Engineering Technologies and Informatics
Jamie Hibbard, Hang Xu, Brittany Hagenhoff
Social and Behavioral Sciences
Vaness Cox and Ian George tied for first place
Undergraduate winners are Vincent Farinella, James Mrkvicka, Anette van Swaay, Romanus Hutchins, Dallas Pineda, Kelsey Boschert, Anthony Onuzuruike, Clare Diester, Adam Kidwell and Sean Rogers.
Honorable mention:
Social and Behavioral Sciences
Undergrad Honorable Mention – Kelsey Clark
Undergrad Honorable Mention – Louie Markovits
Genetics, Evolution, and Environment
Grad Honorable Mentions: Megan Murphy (Schul) and Amanda Smolinsky (Holliday)
Undergrad Honorable mention: Anthony Spates (Holliday)
Organismal Biology
Grad Honorable Mention: Kathleen Pennington
Grad Honorable Mention: Kasun Kodippili
Grad Honorable Mention: Christopher Tracy
Undergrad Honorable mention: Chelsie Todd
Undergrad Honorable mention: Holly Doerr
Undergrad Honorable mention: Zeina Zeida
Molecular and Cellular Biology
Grad Honorable mention, Khalid Alam [Burke lab]
Grad Honorable mention, Zhe Li [Sarafianos lab]
Undergrad Honorable mention: Vincent Markovitz [Guo lab]
Additional prizes were awarded for communication prowess and poster design chops.
For photos of some of this year’s winner, check out this Flickr album
A simple virtue lies at the heart of Xuemin (Sam) Wang’s research: thrift.
“A good way to think of it is how to increase output without demanding more inputs,” Wang said.
Wang, the E. Desmond Lee and Family Fund endowed professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and a principal investigator at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, studies plant membrane lipids. His lab is focused on understanding the relationship between oil production and plant stresses such as drought and nutrient deficiency.
Wang will speak during the 31st annual Missouri Life Sciences Week, a yearly celebration of MU’s research and an exploration of public policy, entrepreneurship and science outreach.
Wang’s lab uses Arabidopsis, the lab mouse of the plant world, as a discovery tool but also works with crops such as soybean and the Camelina species. Camelina was widely grown in Europe before it was supplanted by canola, but Wang and others are working to develop Camelina as a productive oil crop.
The lab studies how lipids — the fatty acids that make up cell membranes — help regulate cell function. For example, they’re trying to figure out how a cell senses water and nutrients and then “determines whether it should grow faster or store more lipid or carbohydrates,” Wang said.
By understanding those processes, future research might develop plants that do more with less. That could mean less water and chemical fertilizer needed for the same or greater yield. Wang pointed to reliance on fertilizers as a major problem.
“Not only does it drive up agriculture production costs, but there can be major environmental consequences.”
Ultimately, Wang’s research could improve plant oil and biomass production while decreasing our dependence on fertilizers and abundant water.
Wang’s presentation on “Lipids as Molecular Switches in plant stress signaling and metabolic integration” constitutes this year’s Charles W. Gehrke distinguished lecture. Gehrke, a MU professor of Biochemistry who died in 2009, was instrumental in advancing the field of chromatography and helped analyze rock samples retrieved from the moon during the Apollo 11 mission. Gehrke grew up in poverty during the great depression and worked in melon fields during his youth before studying at Ohio State University.
Missouri Life Sciences Week is an annual event. In addition to Wang’s talk, this year’s line-up will also focus on HIV and emerging diseases and highlight more than 300 undergraduate and graduate research projects at its poster sessions.
Epigenetics involves changes in how your genes work.
In classical genetics, traits pass from generation to generation in DNA, the strands of genetic material that encode your genes. Scientists thought alterations to the DNA itself was the only way changes could pass on to subsequent generations.
So say you lost a thumb to a angry snapping turtle: Because your DNA hasn’t changed, your children won’t be born with smaller thumbs. Classic.
Things get way more complicated with epigenetics. It turns out that some inherited changes pass on even though they are not caused by direct changes to your DNA. When cells divide, epigenetic changes can show up in the new cells.
Getting nibbled on by an irate turtle isn’t likely to epigenetic changes, but other factors such as exposure to chemicals and an unhealthy diet, could cause generation-spanning epigenetic changes.
How does it work?
The main players in epigenetics are histones and methyl groups.
Imagine your genes are like pages in a really long book. Prior to the mid-1800s, books came with uncut edges, so in order to read the book, you’d have to slice apart the uncut pages. That’s sort of what a histone does to DNA: They are proteins that wrap DNA around themselves like thread on a spool. They keep the DNA organized and help regulate genes.
Methyl groups (variations on CH3) attach to the histones and tell them what to do. These molecules are like notes in a book’s margin that say, “These next few pages are boring, so don’t bother cutting them open.” As you read the book, you’ll save time and effort by skipping some sections even though those sections still exist. Or maybe the note will say, “This next section is awesome; you’ll want to read it twice.”
That’s epigenetics. Higher level cues that tell you whether or not to read a gene.
And when a scribe makes a copy of the book, they’ll not only copy all the words in the novel, but all the other stuff, too: the stuck-together pages and the margin notes.
What about my health?
Many areas of health — including cancer, autoimmune disease, mental illness and diabetes — connect with epigenetic change.
For example, scientists link epigenetic changes to neurons to depression, drug addiction and schizophrenia. And environmental toxins — such as some metals and pesticides — can cause multigenerational epigenetic effects, according to research. Once scientists and doctors decipher those processes work, they will be better equipped to treat the sick and be able to take preventative measures to help insure our health and the health of our kids.
Is it epigenetics or epigenomics?
Confusing, I know.
As we learned from the first question, epigenetics is “the study of heritable changes in gene function that do not involve changes in the DNA sequence,” according to my trusty Merriam-Webster.
Epigenomics is the study and analysis of such changes to many genes in a whole cell or organism. It’s comparable to the difference between genetics (dealing with particular pieces of DNA, usually a gene) and genomics (involving the whole genetic shebang).
Where can I learn more?
Start at this year’s Life Sciences and Society Program Symposium, “The Epigenetics Revolution: Nature, Nurture and What Lies Ahead,” on March 13-15, 2015. Speakers from all over the country will delve into the puzzles and possibilities of epigenetics.
For more background, Nature magazine also created this supplement on epigenetics.
To introduce our 11th Annual Life Sciences and Society Program, The Epigenetics Revolution: Nature, Nurture and What Lies Ahead that runs at the University of Missouri March 13-15, we figured it would be nice to define the term epigenetics. Spoiler: It’s amazing and it could change everything.
According to Merriam-Webster Dictionary, epigenetics is “the study of heritable changes in gene function that do not involve changes in the DNA sequence.”
Let’s break that down.
We can inherit something that changes what our genes do, but don’t actually change the code of our DNA.
So what sort of things do genes do?
It might be easier to think about it like this: Genes are like ingredients that make up a recipe which concocts a specific function. Each individual ingredient adds to the bigger picture. Say the recipe is our height. There are many, many genes involved in myself standing at 5 feet 6 inches and my sister towering over me at 5 feet 10 inches.
Though it’s not epigenetics that makes my sister taller than me, epigenetics could help help explain why identical twins exposed to different conditions over their lifetimes, may eventually produce offspring with extreme differences in height, as just one example.
Yesterday, Jack C. Schultz, director of the Christopher S. Bond Life Sciences Center, explained epigenetics to me this way:
“We are not simply the sum of the genes we have, but rather which ones are on or off,” Schultz said. “Those differences in gene activity explain why even identical twins are not totally identical.”
Mary Shenk, the director of this year’s LSSP symposium, said epigenetics is a revolutionary area of research that changes the way we think about genetic effects. Epigenetics research makes it clear that many aspects of the environment—including the social environment—can affect how genes are expressed, she said.
“We have always known that some traits—height, for instance—were strongly influenced by the environment through diet,” Shenk said. “But new research makes it clear just how many ‘genetic’ traits are subject to either environmental influences and/or other influences such as the sex of the parent a gene is inherited from.”
“This is a real game-changer in terms of how we see the world of genes, and makes notions of simple genetic determinism of complex traits increasingly unrealistic,” Shenk added.
The key to understanding epigenetics, is to consider the capabilities of the environment to “switch on or off” the expression of our genes.
Let’s reflect on something you may have (or haven’t) heard about: “Hogerwinter,” more well known as the Dutch Hunger Winter. The historic famine from the winter of 1944 to the spring of 1945, has been the focal point in some of the most infamous epigenetic research.
Investigators wanted to know if prolonged famine conditions could have an effect on the offspring of pregnant mothers during that time.
“The Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology Is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease, and Inheritance,” by Nessa Carey published by Columbia University Press in 2012, makes a compelling argument about the famine effect on gene expression in subsequent generations.
The research looked at children who were in the second trimester of their mother’s pregnancy during the winter of 1944-1945, and they found an increased incidence of schizophrenia in those children.
Carey’s research suggests epigenetics could explain effects of famine, on the expression of certain genes of the offspring of mothers pregnant during that time.
Illustration by Paige Blankenbuehler/Bond Life Sciences Center
Epigenetics are the nucleus of the 11th Annual Life Sciences and Society Program held at the University of Missouri next weekend, March 13-15. The field has the potential to unlock some of our longest standing questions about who we are and why we are this way, scientists say. The event is a great opportunity to learn more about “The Epigenetics Revolution.”
Schultz says the field of epigenetics is exploding, and it’s important to us for three big reasons.
One: Epigenetics helps us understand how we – or any organism – can cope with changing conditions even though we can’t change our genetic makeup.
Two: Epigenetics explains how traits can be passed from parent to offspring without changing genetic makeup.
Three: Many human diseases, including cancer, seem to involve epigenetic activity. Experiences of the parents, or of developing embryos in the womb could be responsible for difficult-to-understand problems in the offspring, such as cognitive disorders including autism spectrum disorders.
“Discovering how epigenetics works is like discovering an entirely new language,” Schultz said. “That language links our experiences – even emotional ones – to the way we are and the way our offspring look and behave.”
Schultz said exploring those links can help us understand how our environment shapes us and our societies.
According to Shenk, director of the Life Sciences and Society Program, the nine speakers coming to the MU campus all bring their own expertise to epigenetics. As far as picking a speaker, Shenk said it’s hard to choose just one.
Nonetheless, here are a few to keep on your radar, according to Shenk:
“I am especially looking forward to hearing Annie Murphy Paul talk about her experiences writing about maternal effects for a general audience.
“Tracy Bale and Oliver Rando discuss their work on paternal effects in mice (most recent focuses on mothers instead of fathers so this is especially interesting).
“I am also excited to hear Ted Koditschek from Mizzou discuss the history of the classic Lamarckian idea of the “inheritance of acquired characteristics” and how it relates to findings from modern epigenetics,” Shenk said.
Schedule of events
The location of all speakers and affiliated events will be announced at lssp.missouri.edu or on the Life Sciences and Society Program — University of Missouri Facebook page.
Friday
6:30 p.m. — Topic of the talk: Sharing epigenetic research with the public. Speaker: Annie Murphy Paul, science writer and author of Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives.
Saturday
9 a.m. — Topic of the talk: Stress Parents: Maternal and paternal epigenetic programming of the developing brain. Speaker: Tracy Bale, professor of neuroscience and animal biology at the University of Pennsylvania.
10:30 a.m. — Topic of the talk: You are what your father ate. Speaker: Oliver Rando, professor of biochemistry and molecular pharmacology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.
11:30 a.m. — Topic of the talk: Epigenetic inheritance and evolutionary theory: the resurgence of natural philosophy. Speaker: Massimo Pigliucci, professor of philosophy at the City University of New York.
2:15 p.m. — Topic of the talk: Environment and Autism: Past evidence, current research and future quandaries. Speaker: Irva Hetz-Picciotto, professor of public health sciences at UC Davis.
3:15 p.m. — Topic of the talk: Prenatal stress modifies the impact of phthalates on boys’ reproductive tract development. Speaker: Shanna Swan, professor of preventative medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine.
4:30 p.m. — Panel Session with all Saturday speakers.
Sunday
9 a.m. — Topic of the talk: DOHaD, epigenetics and cancer. Speaker: Suh-mei Ho, director of the University of Cincinnati Cancer Center, and chair of the department of environmental health.
10:30 a.m. — Topic of the talk: The epigenetics of pediatric cancers. Speaker: Joya Chandra, associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.
11:30 a.m. — Topic of the talk: Before epigenetics: Early ideas about the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Speaker: Ted Koditschek, professor of history at the University of Missouri.
Affiliated events:
Exhibit running March 5-30 at the Ellis Library Collonnade. Exhibit: Generations: Reproduction, heredity and epigenetics.
1 p.m. March 9, at the Ellis Library Government Documents Section. Topic of the talk: Genes, culture and evolution. Speaker: Karthik Panchanathan, department of anthropology, University of Missouri.
3:30 o.m. March 17, at Jesse Wrench Auditorium. Topic of the talk: Profound global institutional deprivation: the example of the English and Romanian adoptee study. Speaker: Sir Michael Rutter, professor of developmental psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College in London.
Faculty and students crowded the hallways at Bond Life Sciences Center for an interdisciplinary poster session on Saturday. About 40 prospective graduate students listened to faculty and current graduate students from the biochemistry, interdisciplinary plant group, plant sciences, molecular pathogenesis and therapeutics (MPT), genetics area program and the life sciences fellowship program discuss their work.
The poster session was part of the 2015 Graduate Life Sciences Joint Recruitment Weekend, an event aimed at helping prospective graduate students determine if MU is the right place for them to continue their education. About 175 people participated, including current graduate students and faculty.
MU biochemistry senior Flore N’guessan said she applied to the MPT program because of her interest in virology.
“I’ve always wanted to do research,” she said.
N’guessan is currently a researcher in the Burke lab, which works on testing potential antiviral therapeutics on HIV. N’guessan has applied to other graduate programs but said that the interdisciplinary and collaborative nature of MU’s life sciences program appeals to her because it allows her to gain skills from other labs.
“It’s a collaborative and interdisciplinary university,” Dr. Jay Thelen, an associate professor of biochemistry, said. “That’s what this weekend highlights.”
Thelen emphasized that the benefit of events like the interdisciplinary poster session allows prospective students to see the diversity of science studied at Bond LSC and in labs throughout MU. And, he said, “It’s exciting to see how many students there are.”
In a second travel log from Bond LSC researcher Cheryl Rosenfeld, learn about the wildlife she encountered in Tanzania this summer. Through the North American Veterinary Community (NAVC), Rosenfeld furthered her veterinary education while encountering wildlife in their natural habitat. See more about the first leg of her trip to Rwanda here.
By Cheryl Rosenfeld
In the early morning hours, our group flew from Kigali, Rwanda to the Serengeti in Tanzania. As we began the descent to the dirt runway, we glimpsed our first sight of wildebeest and the awe-inspiring Serengeti plains and I soon boarded “tano,” Swahili for the fifth 4×4 in our convoy. “Tano” soon came to have special meaning, as there are many groupings of five to see in Tanzania: “The Big Five, The Ugly Five, etc.” Emanuel, whose life-long ambition was to attend college to be a guide, led us to see all of these groups of five and then some.
Cheryl Rosenfeld
From the time we pulled away from the meeting spot, I started photographing animals on one side of the vehicle, but it seemed even more intriguing ones would appear on the other side of the road.
When the NAVC and our veterinary guide, Dr. Carol Walton, organized this trip, it was anticipated that the wildebeest would be in the Western corridor of the Serengeti but she was wrong. It’s no longer the case that the location of the wildebeest migrations can be projected with accuracy. Our lecture the first evening in Tanzania discussed how the wildebeest know to migrate and why past modeling of their migratory pattern is no longer accurate. Theories for the migratory nature of these animals include their ability to smell rain and/or changes in calcium concentrations in the soil. Wildebeest rely heavily on calcium to produce sufficient milk to nurse their calves that expend considerable energy keeping up with the herd.
In the past, the rains, like the wildebeest migration, would occur in similar sites and times throughout the year. Climate change has likely contributed to the rainfall in these sites being less reliable and correspondingly, compromised forecasting where the wildebeest will be located throughout the year. This year the wildebeest decided instead to migrate to the central Serengeti region. Thus, the next day we set off on an over-three-hour journey to this region.
While driving to find wildebeest we came upon new animals and birds including Coke’s Hartbeest, several Masai giraffe, and topis, which seemed to be splattered with oil. Finally, the wildebeest herds starting increasing in size until it reached a crescendo. As far as one could look in all directions there were wildebeest: males, females, and an abundance of baby calves. Eating alongside them were many zebras and their babies, with brown fuzzy fur along their back-end. It was the most amazing spectacle any of us had witnessed.
After seeing the vast wildebeest herds, we then came upon the elephants and lions, along with their babies. In the safety of the vehicle, we watched them engage in their natural behaviors for which no zoo experience can replicate. Both species were incredibly affectionate to the offspring and each other. In the case of the lionesses, each time the females, who were likely related, caught up with another that they had not seen in a short while would lead to emotional bouts of jumping on each other, caressing and licking. It was hardly the acts of a deadly predator. Yet, their existence rests on the wildebeest and other prey. With the wildebeest in this area, it seemed all life was flourishing at this time. A true paradise.
However, even paradise is subject to outside threats. One such threat is the massive poaching of elephants in Tanzania and surrounding African countries with 40,000 being killed last year alone. Prior to 2013, Tanzania had a “shoot to kill” policy for those caught poaching elephants or other endangered species. However, this rule has since been relaxed with the elephant numbers now in severe decline. At this unsustainable rate of poaching, the African elephant may go extinct in the wild in the next few decades.
While we did see some groups of elephants, the size of each matriarch-led group seemed less than those depicted in Sir David Attenborough and National Geographic documentaries. Moreover, one elephant that we came across, which I affectionately referred to as “Stumpy,” bore sad evidence of this brutal practice: He lost part of his trunk in a poacher’s snare. Without a full trunk, this elephant exhibited great difficulty grasping various plant items to place in his mouth.
Our subsequent travel took us to the famous “Olduvai (which should actually be Oldupai) Gorge,” one of the most famous paleoanthropological sites, including the Leakeys’ famous discovery. From there we traveled to the Ngorongoro Crater, a gigantic fracture of the earth’s crust that provides habitat for some 30,000 animals, including the most endangered black rhinoceros that only has 20 to 30 left in this area. The difference between the black and white rhino lies not in their coat color but a structural difference in their lips with black rhino possessing pointed and prehensile upper lip to browse on twigs and leaves. In contrast, white rhino possess a square upper lip to graze on the grasses below.
When Dr. Walton convinced us to set off at first light, around 6 a.m., our goal was to find one of these amazing creatures. Once again, with Emmanuel’s assistance and eagle eyes, what started out as a black dot far off in the horizon began to morph into a recognizable rhinoceros. In utter delight, we strained our necks and photographed as this beautiful animal continued to move along and forage in the distance. It would be inhumane to allow this animal to go extinct. In the case of the rhino, many Asian countries believe that its horn increases male libido, which has never been proved to be the case. This mistaken notion possibly originated from the fact that male rhinos copulate with females for several hours duration. This behavior is, however, not transferrable to men who consume any part of a rhino.
The list of species we saw in Tanzania continued to grow while we drove around the crater with black-backed and common jackals following alongside our vehicle, eland and grants gazelles grazing in the plains, flocks of greater and lesser flamingoes observed in the distance, and more lion prides and spotted hyenas.
The next day, we had our final farewell lunch at the famous Arusha Coffee Lodge, where US presidents have dined. We then set off on our long journey back to the US.
All of us were impacted by the creatures and sites we saw. One male veterinarian, who seemed gruff and quiet for most of the expedition, put it best the night before we left. He unexpectedly stood up after our last lecture and proclaimed that he signed up for the expedition more as an escape from the daily grind of being a veterinarian. However, the trip made such as impression on him to the point that he realized that part of the veterinarian oath on “relieving animal suffering” should include standing up and advocating on their behalf to prevent their brutal murder, as previously occurred in the case of the gorillas and is ongoing for elephants and rhinos. All of us were moved by his emotional comments and the tears welling up in his eyes. Our group was indeed fortunate to see these majestic animals, while they still exist, in their natural environments. I hope there is a wake-up call for nations to come together to prevent their extinction.
Chris Pires
Yidong Liu is a senior research specialist from MU’s Department of Biochemistry that manages Shuqun Zhang’s lab. She also works on MAPKs and their role in plant defense responses such as pathogen-induced ethylene biosynthesis and phytoalexin induction.
