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The Lion King

Photograph by Craig Packer

By Greg Breining

When University of Minnesota researcher Craig Packer and his graduate student Peyton West (Ph.D. ’03) first spotted the four larger-than-life stuffed lions they had ordered, they roared with laughter. The dummies, created by a Dutch toy maker and crammed in the back of an airplane on the landing strip at Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park, looked absurd.

But, Packer says, they had a lot riding on the project. So he and West carted two of the decoys into the nearby countryside, cranked up a tape of hyenas cackling and whooping at a kill, and waited. They didn’t wait long. “It was amazing,” recalls Packer, a Distinguished McKnight University Professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior. “It worked. It worked really, really well.”

Despite Packer’s long list of accomplishments, the recent mane experiment was what caught the public’s imagination. It began in 1996, with Packer and West exploring the mystery of the lion’s mane. They first considered that the mane might protect a male lion in fights with other males. Yet their own observations suggested the neck wasn’t often a target, or even especially vulnerable. So the researchers returned to Evolution 101 and considered whether the mane was a product of sexual selection—a highly evolved babe magnet.

As the taped hyena calls ricocheted across the Serengeti, lions began to appear, drawn by the opportunity for a stolen meal. But then they spotted the two decoys. Within minutes, lionesses had snubbed blond-maned Fabio and snuggled up to dark-maned Julio. At the end of the day, Packer and West loaded Fabio aboard their truck but had to shoo lustful females away from Julio. After many encounters with lions of different prides (they couldn’t fool the same lion twice) Packer and West concluded mane color was a signal of fitness, intimidating male rivals and luring breeding females.

Packer and West’s findings were reported in Science in August 2002, National Geographic, and newspapers and television news stories around the world, as well as the subject of a recent exhibit at the University’s James Ford Bell Museum of Natural History. In short, they found that for a male lion, there’s no substitute for a dark, luxuriant mane.

“The lion’s mane is the reason why we find them so appealing,” Packer says. “Asking why the lion has a mane is one of those basic questions, like why the zebra has stripes or why giraffes have long necks. So it isn’t surprising that there is so much interest in the topic—especially since the research used such cool toys.”

Packer has lived a double life between Africa, where he began work in 1972, and the University of Minnesota, where he joined the faculty in 1984. Since then, he has become one of the world’s foremost authorities on lions. He has written dozens of scientific articles on their behavior, reproduction, ecology, and diseases, as well as Into Africa, a popular account of his work. He was admitted to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2003.

Among the world’s lion researchers,

Lion dummies made by a Dutch toy maker looked hilarious to researchers, but they fooled real lions. Photograph by Craig Packer

“I’d put him fairly solidly at number one,” says Luke Hunter, a lion expert for the Wildlife Conservation Society based in New York.

Packer had stumbled into Africa. As a Stanford undergrad he majored in “a million different things,” with intentions of going to medical school. “I knew I wanted to do something vaguely scientific,” he says. Before graduating in 1972, he had the chance to study baboons at Jane Goodall’s field station in Tanzania’s Gombe National Park on the shore of Lake Tanganyika. “So I went over on a lark. I got over there and I just got hooked.”

He then went to the University of Sussex to complete his Ph.D. research on the Gombe baboons. After a study of Japanese macaques in Hakusan National Park, Packer returned to Tanzania in 1978 to head the Serengeti Lion Project.

There, much of his work involved darting and radio-collaring lions. “Everyone thinks it must be dangerous,” he says. “The only time I’ve felt endangered is when I’ve been reckless.” Once, he darted a female in estrus and stepped from his truck to collar her. “Her jealous lover was snarling at me, and he leapt at me. That’s when I realized how fast I could move,” Packer says. “I’ve been around lions probably more than anyone else ever, and I’ve handled hundreds of lions.” Except for that careless moment, “I’ve never felt endangered, not in the Serengeti.”

Not so outside national parks, however, where prey is scarce and lions more desperate. There, hungry lions often turn to livestock and even people. “About a hundred people a year are attacked by lions outside the national parks and about three-fourths of them are killed,” Packer says. “It’s hard to imagine that that would be going on in the 21st century.

“People in the West tend to look at lions as these yellow huggy cats with big brown eyes,” Packer says. “And they are cute—when they’re not trying to attack you. Where people live [in rural Africa], they do. The lions break into people’s houses. They’ll pull old women out of their beds, drag them outside, and eat them. They attack nursing mothers. It’s horrifying,” he says. “So I think it’s really important for people to recognize that it’s pointless trying to impose our attitude toward wild animals and conservation on places where wild animals destroy that many people every year. Lions pose so much danger that it’s hard to imagine how they are going to be allowed to live outside the national parks anymore.”

For insight into the future of carnivores in an increasingly crowded continent, Packer looks to South Africa, where national parks and game reserves are fenced to separate humans and animals. Where fences aren’t practical because of long-distance migrations, one solution might be to surround the parks with buffer zones where hunting is allowed to reduce conflict and pump money from trophy hunters into local economies.

“If we really want to protect these animals, we’re going to have to acknowledge that these animals are an enormous threat,” Packer says. “People should not be expected to bear the costs. It is not humane. It is not moral.”

Yet

A lioness is drawn to a dark-maned dummy lion. Photograph by Craig Packer

it is not lions—inside or outside national parks—that have most threatened Packer. It’s humans. In 1975, Packer and his first wife, Anne Pusey (a professor of ecology, evolution, and behavior at the University) both worked at Goodall’s Gombe research station. While Packer and Pusey were away on a brief vacation, 40 gunmen kidnapped the office administrator and three students. Within weeks, all were released, physically unharmed. But the experience had been terrifying, and the Tanzanian government ordered all foreign students and workers to leave Gombe for their safety. Even Goodall had to go. Only years later were foreigners allowed to return. (Pusey, also a Distinguished McKnight Professor, is now director of the Jane Goodall Institute’s Center for Primate Studies at the University.)

In 1999, Packer had a much closer call. He and his new wife, Susan, on her first trip to Africa, were staying with an old friend in Nairobi, Kenya. Two robbers broke in and held them hostage at gunpoint. They threatened to kill the hostess and one aimed a gun to Susan’s head. “In the end, none of us were hurt,” Packer says, “but it was just awful.” He no longer travels through Nairobi. Kenya, once thought to be an island of calm in a tumultuous continent, has turned from hopeful to desperate. Corruption is pervasive. Crime is rampant. Criminals are armed with weapons from Somali wars.

Fortunately, Tanzania is still relatively tranquil. And despite the presence of dangerous animals, the Serengeti is a place where Packer relaxes. “He’s just very funny out in the field,” says West, who studied under Packer from 1995 to 2002 and now lives in Washington, D.C. “He’s just more fun and crazy than you would expect.

“He is such a serious scientist and is so wary of anyone he thinks will become a bunny hugger,” she continues. “But then you get him into the field and he loves lions so much. He’s really intense. But it’s so great working with him because he’s so smart. But he’s not snobby smart—he has such a joy in what he does.”

Over the years, Packer has studied lions’ cooperative behavior and competition; their sex lives and menopause; and their genetics, diseases, and parasites. His students are studying, among other subjects, the killing of livestock and humans. Packer’s research takes him to national parks and reserves throughout Tanzania and South Africa.

Perhaps Packer’s greatest contribution has been his nearly 30-year stewardship of the Serengeti Lion Project. Field workers track about 250 individual lions to maintain demographic records dating to the 1960s. “That is an amazing contribution, to maintain data contribution over a long time,” Hunter says. “Craig has kind of driven this process . . . with a view that you need to collect the same data over a long term to know what is going on at the population level.”

The value lies not only in knowing lions, but also in saving them by understanding their habitat needs, social interactions, and mortality. Packer’s knowledge and research have allowed him to work with hunting groups to foster sustainable

Then–graduate student Peyton West and Craig Packer in the Serengeti. Photograph by Georgia West

trophy hunting of lions. In Packer’s view, for example, if killing is restricted to old males, hunting lions is entirely sustainable.

“Craig’s main contribution has been in providing a fundamental understanding of the behavioral mechanisms that drive lion biology,” says Rob Slotow, professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa, who has collaborated with Packer since 1997. “This has provided . . . a firm foundation for management of lion populations. The principles that Craig and his team have demonstrated have been applied widely in management of small lion populations in South Africa.”

As satellite TV and other modern communications show remote villagers the security and prosperity of the outside world, tolerance of marauding animals is eroding, Packer says. “Literally in the last two to three years, rural people have said enough is enough.”

Modern communication has also changed Packer’s perception. He once felt a deep gulf separated his American life and African work. “In the past I often would have no idea what was going on till I actually showed up and talked to people because communications were so poor.” Now, he communicates by e-mail, no matter his location. With eight graduate students in the field, Packer’s own work has changed from field work to supervision. “Last time I went to Africa I was there for four weeks and didn’t see a lion.”

The Internet has also expanded his research horizons. “The Internet makes it so easy to learn new things. Science has never been more exciting.” Packer’s own interest has shifted from lions themselves to the diseases that infect them. “I don’t call myself a behavioral biologist anymore,” he notes. “I’m much more interested in the ecology of infectious diseases.” Reflecting this change in interests, Packer in fall 2004 became an adjunct professor in the University’s Medical School.

With a $1.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation, Packer is tracing the pathways of three viruses among domestic dogs and Serengeti wildlife. “We’re trying to understand how dangerous diseases circulate through natural systems,” Packer says. “We’re using the lions as a part of the larger puzzle.” A 20-year record of lion blood samples helps to explain the spread of diseases among lions and other wildlife, domestic animals, and humans.

“By trying to find out how these things circulate we can look for the weak link,” says Packer. For example, learning what stage of its cycle a disease is most effectively treated. One project Packer supervises vaccinates domestic dogs in villages surrounding the Serengeti to cut off the source of canine distemper that infects not only dogs but also wild lions.

“I’m much more excited about what I’m going to be doing in the next couple of years than the work I’ve been recognized for,” Packer says. “Science has never been more exciting.” At 54, Packer says, “I’m just getting started.”

Greg Breining (B.A. ’74) is a St. Paul–based freelance writer.

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