Even on the soft, cream-coloredcarpet of her sparsely decorat-ed house in Connecticut, Patri-

cia D. Moehlman camps out. She takesoff her running shoes, sits cross-leggedon the floor and hunches over the small,white board on which she is projectingslides in the bright light of a fall after-noon. As she wends her way pictoriallythrough decades of research on the so-cial lives of jackals, work on the plightof wild asses in the war-torn Horn ofAfrica and her educational projects inTanzania, Moehlman’s joy about beingout in the field is palpable. She seems todelight in every face—canine, equid orhuman—and in every landscape she hasphotographed.

Although she is showing “very few”slides this particular day, they are stillvery many. Moehlman has been in Af-rica for more than 25 years, and shehas documented a great deal. Famousfor her observations that jackals hardlydeserve their ill repute as skulking, slip-pery scavengers, Moehlman is also re-nowned for conducting biological sur-veys in Ngorongoro and the UdzungwaMountains and for her conservationwork in general.

Moehlman is especially outspokenabout ensuring that Tanzanian scientistsplay the major role in studying Tanza-nian wildlife and resources—not alwaysa popular position among foreign re-searchers. But when Moehlman laughs,a very deep, almost gritty, unyieldingstrength is revealed—the sound suggeststhe Tanzanians have an unflappable ally.

The daughter of academics, Moehl-man grew up first on a farm in Iowa andthen in the countryside near Austin, Tex.,and was always outdoors. After major-ing in biology at Wellesley College, shehad just returned to graduate school inTexas—where she studied rodent specieson Mustang Island in the Gulf of Mexi-co—when she heard that Jane Goodallneeded assistants. Moehlman, whosefather had avidly read Theodore Roose-velt’s African adventures, says living inAfrica had been a dream since she wasyoung.

So Moehlman abandoned her rodentson their island and, in 1967, moved to

East Africa to work with Goodall andher then husband, Hugo van Lawick.During her stay, the couple turned theirattention away from chimpanzees for awhile to conduct research for a book—

Innocent Killers—about hyenas, jackalsand wild dogs. So, for several months,Moehlman closely watched golden jack-als in Ngorongoro Crater.

She returned to the U.S., moved on tothe University of Wisconsin to do doc-toral work, then settled down in DeathValley National Monument in Califor-nia to observe feral asses. Moehlman

camped alone there for nearly two years,trailing the descendants of the donkeysthat the Spanish brought with them inthe 1500s—descendants, in turn, of thewild asses found in northeast Africa.(These feral asses continue to be a flashpoint for controversy because they areconsidered nonnative and ecologicallydestructive. Moehlman thinks of themslightly differently: she points out thatthe mother genus, Equus, evolved inNorth America—so the burros of DeathValley may have simply come home.)

Moehlman ultimately determined thathabitat and resource availability dictat-ed the social structure of these wildequids. In arid areas, the stable groupwould consist of a female and her foal,whereas in regions with lusher vegeta-tion, the stable group was a harem of

many females guarded by one or twomales. Moehlman argues that large so-cial groups form more easily when oneindividual’s foraging does not adverselyaffect another’s. When food is limited,however, social organization is reducedto a basic unit: mother and offspring.

Moehlman returned to the wild plainsof Africa in 1974 and began studyinggolden and silverbacked jackals on herown—becoming the first woman to getpermission to do biological research inthe Serengeti. Her years as “jackal wom-an” had begun. “Out in the field, it was

good,” she recalls. “It is a great gift towatch animals so intimately.”

Jackals are unusual in that they aremonogamous—only 3 percent of mam-mals pair-bond—and the male and fe-male participate equally in raising pups.At the very beginning of her fieldwork,Moehlman noticed something else un-usual about jackal families: they use aupairs. These helpers, as Moehlman cameto call them, come from the previousyear’s litter. They stick around for thenext season, helping their parents feedand guard the new pups while continu-ing to act submissively. This arrange-ment allows helpers to become moreexperienced, making success more like-ly once they set out on their own. Ac-cording to kin selection theory, whichtries to explain animal behavior in

News and Analysis30 Scientific American February 1997

PROFILE: PATRICIA D. MOEHLMAN

Into the Wildsof Africa

ALE

X W

EBB

Mag

num

Copyright 1997 Scientific American, Inc.

terms of relatedness, the helpers are onaverage as related to their siblings asthey would be to their offspring; there-fore, investment in the survival of theiryounger sisters and brothers makesgood genetic sense. Helpers clearly makea choice about whether to stay or go. Ifthey do stay, they must delay their ownreproduction—which may not be a badidea, because it may not be easy to finda mate or a territory in a given year.

Moehlman’s jackal discoveries werebased on careful identification of indi-viduals: a torn ear, a scar above the muz-zle, a dark patch on the tail. She explainsthat radio-collaring may interfere withsurvival; further, there is only one spot,about one inch in diameter on the rump,where it is safe to shoot a tranquilizerdart into the small animal. Otherwise,the impact will break bones or damageorgans. “I have my gut-level response. Idon’t want to hurt animals. In addition,it is bad science to intervene with ani-mals in ways that affect their behaviorand survival,” Moehlman explains. Shegoes on to say that after years of follow-ing research in the Serengeti, she hascome to believe that handling animalsmay interfere in those ways—a beliefthat is not widely embraced, Moehlmanadmits: “I am slowly figuring out that ifyou have opinions you want to express,and they are not part of the general con-sensus, there is a price to be paid.”

Moehlman has particular views aboutother forms of interference as well, in-cluding certain approaches to experi-mentation. “I would rather take moretime and let natural experiments occurand try to understand the componentsof what is going on,” she maintains. Shenotes that some scientists advised her toremove a helper from a jackal family todetermine what its role was. Moehlmancounters that if she had removed a help-

er from, say, a golden jackal family andthe pups had died, she might have con-cluded that helpers consistently ensuredpup survival.

Her fieldwork presents a more com-plex picture. In the first place, some help-ers are more peripheral to the family anddo not contribute as much. In the second,a parent with a helper may hunt less—

and the pups would get the same amountof food as they would have if there wereno helper—or the parent may hunt justas much, which means pups would getmore food, and so more may survive.Because all individuals in the family aredifferent and change their behavior toreflect varying circumstances, one needsto spend long hours watching the detailsof behavior to understand the dynamicsof cooperative breeding.

After nearly a decade in the Serengetiand Ngorongoro—punctuated by sor-ties to teach and write at Yale and Cam-bridge universities and to study feralasses in the Galápagos Islands—Moehl-man had fallen in love with Tanzania.And she had become very aware thatthere were few Tanzanians studyingwildlife resources. “Let the Tanzaniansbe the folks for the long term. They careabout Tanzania,” she states emphatical-ly. “I care about Tanzania, I care aboutTanzanians. But I am not a Tanzanian.I won’t stay there forever. And it needsto be in the hands of the nationals.”

So Moehlman set about raising fundsfor students at the University of Dar esSalaam. “Fifteen hundred dollars meantthe difference between someone com-pleting a master’s and not. Eight hun-dred dollars meant the difference be-tween a whole class going out and do-ing a field trip and not. They are not bigsums of money.” She also establishedrelations with expert biologists aroundthe world, and, so far, about 10 Tanza-nians have been able to do graduatework in Tanzania and abroad. Moehl-man herself has taught students to con-duct biological surveys. “It is the build-

ing block for understanding the ecologyof the area,” Moehlman says. “It alsolets the undergraduates know all the pos-sibilities of what you can do out there.”

Her most recent scientific efforts alsoinvolve working with and training na-tionals, this time in the Horn of Africa.There, in the harsh deserts of Eritrea,Somalia and Ethiopia, the world’s mostendangered equid, the African wild ass,is barely surviving. Although her surveyswere interrupted by civil war, Moehlmanhas made several visits since 1989, try-ing to count animals, to interview localpeople and to establish protected areas.In the past 20 years, according to Moehl-man, the wild ass population fell frombetween six and 30 per 100 square kilo-meters to one or two. The accessibility ofguns has made it easy to hunt the wildass—a source of folk medicine for tu-berculosis, constipation and backache.

Nevertheless, her forays seem to havehad some impact. “I am coming from along way away, so people are real im-pressed that I think it is important,” shelaughs. “They say that if I had not shownup and discussed the wildlife’s plight withthem, all the asses would be gone now.”Many of the Afar and Issa people of theregion—often somewhat taken aback bythe appearance of a woman—explainthat although they recognize its endan-gered status, the occasional wild ass canmean the difference between someonestarving or not.

One Afar elder recounted a tale to il-lustrate this point, “sort of an interest-ing story for a desert people,” Moehl-man notes: A woman is standing in thewater with her child on her hip; the wa-ter rises, and the woman puts the childon her shoulder; the water rises, andthe woman puts the child on her head;the water rises, she stands on the child.True to form, Moehlman responded:“There are many things the woman cando. She can swim to shore. She can builda boat.” Equus africanus appears to bein good hands. —Marguerite Holloway

News and Analysis32 Scientific American February 1997

RESIDENTS OF THE SERENGETImigrate near Moehlman’s African camp.

PATR

ICIA

D. M

OEH

LMA

N

Copyright 1997 Scientific American, Inc.