I am fortunate to have met some truly wonderful people during my time in Kenya. My nephew Scott is also extremely fortunate to have the opportunity to have worked with these people. Sometimes things don’t go as planned and sometimes good results from a tragic event. For Scott, this happened and is a lesson in how to keep moving forward. He was all set to go to Puerto Rico to work on a study of introduced monkeys when a terrible hurricane started to bear down on the island. Flights into the island were canceled and he waited. A few days passed and there was no word. The damage that happened in Puerto Rico was devastating and still the island has not fully recovered. His project site was destroyed and he was forced to look for another job. He needed field experience to have a better chance of being admitted into a doctoral program.
It is here that fate, connections, and work ethic pointed him back to Kenya. A job opening that would give him considerable experience opened near where he had done his undergraduate research in Mpala. A group of four primary investigators: Dr. Todd Palmer, Dr. Corinna Riginos, Dr. Jayne Belnap, and Dr. Jake Goheen were looking for a project manager for an important project. The project’s official title is: Landscape Consequences of Mutualism Disruption by an Invasive Ant, also known as: the Big-Headed Ant project. The project is funded by the National Science Foundation and is slated to last four years and is nearing completion. I learned about the ant and the native species that normally inhabit a keystone species in the savanna landscape while I was at Mpala, which I wrote about in the post “All Things Great and Small.” Scott’s adviser at Princeton, Dr. Rob Pringle, is good friends with all of the primary investigators on the project, and this gave Scott a considerable advantage. Some people say, it is not what you know but who you know, but it is really both. They are linked together. If you are able to impress people with what you know, and they are able to vouch for your character, you are more likely to go places. It will be interesting to see where Scott winds up. The lead picture is of Dr. Belnap and Jackson Ekadeli, a Kenyan research assistant, having fun while driving from one research plot to another on the property of Ol Pejeta Conservancy.
For more pictures on the property click here.
Update from 2024 -Disruption of an ant-plant mutualism shapes interactions between lions and their primary prey. Click here for a link to a copy on ResearchGate of the article that resulted from the research spoken of above