Liza de Klerk
TEETH AND CLAWS
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Taking stock of carnivore research in the Greater Etosha Landscape
Spotted hyena
T
he Greater Etosha Landscape (GEL) is host to a wide diversity of carnivores, with an almost complete guild of large carnivores (only the African wild dog is missing). This landscape also exemplifies the situation faced by many protected areas in the world: a national park surrounded by a mosaic of different land-use types. Here it is communal land to the north and west and private free-hold farmland to the south and east. Carnivore populations are mostly declining throughout the world, especially large species, and given their importance to ecosystems, a better understanding of the drivers of their distribution and abundance is crucial to their conservation. Etosha National Park has a long history of research with a dedicated research centre, the Etosha Ecological Institute (EEI), located at Okaukuejo since 1967. In partnership with the EEI, the Ongava Research Centre conducted a literature review and search for any form of output from research conducted on carnivores within a buffer of 50 km of Etosha. This included scanning online databases, but also spending several days in dusty archive rooms at the EEI. We found that carnivore research started in the 1910s and has steadily
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increased until the 1980s, with most of the research conducted by government employees. Since the 1990s, after independence, the research output somewhat decreased and was mainly conducted by external researchers. The vast majority of research was conducted within the boundaries of Etosha and focused on ecological questions rather than being applied. Furthermore, most of the research targeted either large and charismatic (lions, spotted hyenas and cheetahs) or abundant and conspicuous (black-backed jackal) species. Finally, the distribution of research in terms of both topics and species of interest was uneven. For instance, we know quite a lot about lions and cheetahs, but almost nothing about servals and honey badgers. Additionally, while certain topics were studied in many species (e.g. distribution or population), far less is known about other topics (e.g. behaviour, reproduction and interaction).
Saddle up as we embark on our longterm and large-scale Etosha Carnivore Programme, also known as Carnivores in the GEL!
Our synthesis highlights the important role played by political decisions in research direction and output, which has probably caused the decrease in government-led carnivore research in the 1990s. It further shows that we have very uneven knowledge across species and topics, and while some are well studied, we identified many gaps needing to be filled by further research.
