Daniel Rosengren/Frankfurt Zoological Society

TLF IC Camilla Catlin spent the formative years of her career in the fine jewelry industry, scouring the globe for the world’s most beautiful products. Hidden Gems is her field guide to the special spots she’s discovered along the way.

The pandemic has me thinking a lot about the communities and organizations that are supported by and dependent upon tourism. So I reached out to my friend Peyton West for an update on conservation initiatives in East Africa. Peyton – that’s Dr. West to you – obtained her PhD at the University of Minnesota while studying the function of the lion's mane in Tanzania and Kenya. She is currently the Executive Director — US of the Frankfurt Zoological Society, which operates 30 projects in 18 countries around the world with a focus on protecting wilderness areas and preserving biodiversity. Peyton is awesome and just listening to her makes me want to pack my bags and follow her out to these incredible yet fragile corners of the world!

How long did you live in Tanzania and what were you doing there?

I lived in Tanzania over the course of five years during grad school. I joined a long-term research project on lions which had started in the 60s. By the time I got there it had been operating for 30 years and was the longest running study of large mammals after Jane Goodall’s chimps. My question was “why do lions have manes?” which bizarrely, no one had tried to answer before.

So why DO they have manes?

It turns out that manes are a signal. There’s a lot of information that lions could use about other lions just by observing their mane. For males defending (or seeking) territory it’s “Is this other lion going to be tough to fight?” It’s dangerous for males to fight each other – even if they win they could walk away mortally wounded – so it would be helpful to evaluate the risk in advance. To females: who are they going to mate with? They need males to help protect and raise cubs because the biggest threat to lion cubs is other male lions, so it’s helpful to have a sense of how well males will be able to fight off attacks from strangers. If there’s a way to judge whether a male has good genes, that’s also helpful. So, we collected a lot of data to figure out whether lions discriminated at all between males with different types of manes. Some of this involved using fake stuffed “dummy” lions. We would set them up and then see which ones the females preferred and which ones the males avoided. It turned out that males avoided the dummies with longer and darker manes, while the females were more interested in darker manes.

Is a darker mane just coloring? Does it mean anything?

Darker manes are hotter and thicker and heat load is a major issue for large animals like lions. You’re expending a lot of energy trying to stay cool - it’s not ideal. Heat can impact fertility for one thing. Having that disadvantage means that there needs to be some advantage or there wouldn’t be manes in the first place. Our research showed a clear advantage in that darker manes intimidate rivals and attract mates, but what’s in it for the other lions? Well, for one thing, there’s a link between darker manes and testosterone. As we all know, testosterone is linked to aggression so if a male sees a lion with a dark mane it’s a good bet he’ll be more dangerous to fight. Meanwhile, for females, that’s just what they’re looking for. Another cool thing is that both the color and length of manes can change over time as a result of weather, nutrition or injury, which means that they’re a pretty accurate indicator of a male’s current condition.

Anyway, all this seems pretty crazy but we did a lot of other different things to test it too. We tested blood samples for testosterone, measured individual mane hairs, borrowed a $40,000 thermal camera and took a million images, and looked at 30 years of information on cub survival. I never was 100% sure that it was going to work, until the end.

What has been the impact of the pandemic this year?

One result of Covid is that tourism has just completely dried up and there have been almost no people in places like the Serengeti. Normally hundreds of thousands of people visit the park every year and without them there’s a lot less money for the park and the people living around it. That’s a bad thing because people need to feel like they benefit from parks, and there are major threats like poaching that need constant vigilance. But we’ve also seen some good things. A lot of tourists can stress animals out. Now, with fewer people, we’re seeing some animals spreading out into places we’ve literally never seen them before. So it’s an interesting conundrum: you need the tourism, you need the revenue, but with fewer tourists you see the landscape becoming wilder and animals taking advantage of that. We think we can learn from this.

So in your opinion, is tourism a good thing or a bad thing?

Tourism is totally essential in Africa. Most of these protected areas, they have to pay for themselves. In Tanzania for example, the top two income-producing national parks are Serengeti & Mount Kilimanjaro. But while you could argue that there are too many tourists in the Serengeti, the government needs the numbers there in order to support other national parks, which have fewer visitors. Ideally what you would have in Tanzania is visitors spreading out among them and then you could reduce the human footprint in the Serengeti NP. Another idea is to restrict the number of tourists in some parts Serengeti and make those areas more of an exclusive experience.

Which parks in Tanzania are under visited?

Ruaha National Park is amazing. It’s a good alternative to Serengetti because the landscape is similar. It is also the largest national park in Tanzania so there is tons of space with no crowds. And then Mahale Mountain National Park, which is a very different landscape, on Lake Tanganika. You see chimps on safari there. The lodges are amazing - right on the lake – really nice tented camps. Very few people go so that’s an incredible experience because it’s beautiful and remote.

Are there other lion studies still operating today?

Yes, many! There’s actually a really interesting one in Ruaha (The Ruaha Carnivore Project) that does an amazing job working with people living around the park to prevent human-lion conflicts.

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What other projects is the FZS working on that we should know about?

The Gonarezhou National Park in southeastern Zimbabwe is really cool. There are very few tourists and very little human disturbance, and it has a higher density of elephants than almost anywhere (more than 10,000). It’s a magical place and really, really wild. The park is managed by the Gonarezhou Conservation Trust which is a partnership is between us, the government, and communities around the park so it’s all done very sustainably and cooperatively. It benefits everybody. We are introducing rhinos back into the park this year and that’s going to make it even more special. Gonarezhou is one of my favorite places.

How can people be sure that their tourist dollars are going to the right places?

What you want to see in a tour operator or lodge is that they’re doing everything sustainably and trying to minimize their footprint. Look for local staff, which is a sign that they are providing benefits to local communities. Make sure their philanthropic arm is legit and robust. I think a cool kind of tourism is connecting with NGOs working in some of these areas. There are parks where the NGO does both the conservation work and runs the tourism arm (like Gonarezhou), which can give a unique opportunity to see behind the scenes. I think it’s important that people get a sense of how much work it takes to keep these places safe and how threatened they actually are. It makes the experience more meaningful.

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What other countries do you recommend for safari?

The problem with me now is I’m spoiled! All I want to do is not see a lot of other people so that’s always what I recommend. Zambia is very cool. It has had less tourism in general, partly because there were no direct flights from Europe. It’s very off the grid and authentic; and these experiences are going to get more and more rare. And there are places like the shores of Lake Tanganyika that are incredible; it looks like the Caribbean! I tell people that one of the best things they can do for conservation is to visit parks that don’t attract many people because almost all of them need more money from tourism.

Where haven’t you been that’s on your list?

I’d really like to see the gorillas in either Rwanda or Uganda—that would have to be my 1st choice, then Namibia (to see the desert adapted lions), Botswana, and Virunga NP in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Dr. Peyton West is the Executive Director of FZS-US and runs the organization from its base in Washington DC. She also serves as Secretary and Treasurer of the Board. She obtained her PhD at the University of Minnesota studying the function of the lion's mane in Tanzania and Kenya. Subsequently she worked with the Bell Museum of Natural History, the television show "Go Diego Go," and the Mammal Department at the Wildlife Conservation Society's Bronx Zoo. Most recently, she was the Senior Project Director at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)’s Dialogue on Science, Ethics and Religion program. She has a BA from Yale University.

Hidden Gems: Mane Attraction