A lioness in the grass, displaying the radio collar that enables Serengeti scientists to track her.

This morning I drove around with Ingela, a Serengeti Lion Project field technician. She’s collecting baseline data on all the lion prides in the Serengeti for Craig Packer, Ph.D., with whom I’m writing a grant on the ecology of aging in African lions. So, I went out with Ingela to see how she finds the lions and collects fecal samples for analysis.

Follow up:

Here’s how it works: there is one radio-collared female lion in each pride. Each collar has its own frequency. So Ingela dials the receiver to a particular lion’s frequency and, based on previous locations, heads out in search of that individual.

We did find one lioness among the tall, golden grass. She looked healthy and well fed. Unfortunately for my research, she did not defecate, but I got an idea about the conditions and logistics needed to collect the valuable feces that will tell us what her stress values are and if she’s pregnant.

It’s thought that pride size impacts a lion’s stress values. If a pride is too small, there is a threat of a takeover by other male lions, which may kill the females’ offspring. If the pride is too large, there is a competition for resources.

After our trip to the field, we headed to the laboratory and extracted hormones from 20 lion fecal samples using my newly design field-friendly extraction method. It’s exciting to know that this tool will help us learn more about this key species!

Rachel Santymire