This archive report was first published on 10 August 2019.
Wild Pups Thrive in Gorongosa National Park ¶
August 10, 2019
Paola Bouley, Gorongosa's carnivore expert, was on a mission to find the missing wild dog pups. Last summer, she had released a pack of 14 African wild dogs into Mozambique's Gorongosa National Park as part of an ambitious wildlife restoration effort. The pack's alpha female, Beira, had been pregnant when they were set free, and Bouley knew that the closely bonded and highly endangered apex predators had dug a maternity den for their queen.
However, when Bouley arrived at the den, she found it abandoned. As she was crouching by the hole, a giant African rock python dropped from a nearby tree, stared her in the face, and then slithered off. Bouley joked, 'I think it was disappointed that I wasn't a warthog.'
Despite the initial setback, the wild dogs were unbowed. This year, after migrating to a less serpent-y sector of the park, they made up for lost time in spectacular fashion. Beira gave birth in late April to 11 pups, who emerged from their den in early June and appear on camera trap footage to be thriving.
But that was not all. Nhamagaia, the beta female of the pack, defied the L. pictus convention that only the resident alpha female gets to breed, and in late June delivered her own litter of eight. The researchers initially feared that Beira and the other adult dogs might reject the off-label young, leaving them to die of neglect. But no: The new pups have been swept up into the sens-a-round frenzy of carnivore kumbaya.
Experts see in Gorongosa the chance to track the recovery of a complex ecosystem from the ground up. The park's successful reintroduction of African wild dogs underscores its position as one of the bright spots on an otherwise grim landscape of shrinking forests and accelerating loss of large, charismatic animals.
Researchers are working to get the right mix of grazers and meat-eaters. Herbivores were the first to bounce back in post-conflict Gorongosa, and today the park pulses with more than 100,000 of them. However, predator rebound has proved spotty. The lions in the park have fared well, but the other major predators, such as spotted hyenas and leopards, have yet to return.
Wild dogs, which are also known as painted wolves, are not like other dogs. They split off from the rest of the canid lineage some 1.7 million years ago. They twitter and sneeze rather than bark or howl, and their ears are like satellite dishes to track prey and one another's high-pitched calls. Their legs are like the sticks of a shadow puppet, and they have four toes rather than five, an adaptation that helps them run at up to 45 miles per hour.
Dr. Scott Creel, a wild dog expert from Montana State University, said, 'If you don't see an individual for an hour, you know the dog has either died or dispersed.' Group life has its privileges, including being cared for when sick or injured. Last year, Nhamagaia, the beta female, broke a front leg, but the pack waited patiently for her and made sure she could feed at a kill, and the leg eventually healed.
