From left, Ryan Forbes, Kristen Davis, Professor Graham Kerley, Emma Evers and Nicky Dreyer.
Lions, elephants, cheetah, leopards, zebra, black wildebeest and blesbuck, all form part of the diverse and challenging projects of four Zoology students, who all graduated with their MSc cum laude at Mandela University’s recent autumn graduation.
The external examiners were all highly laudatory of the candidates’ work and commended both the quality and the relevance of the science undertaken, said their supervisor, Zoology Professor Graham Kerley, Director of the University’s Centre for African Conservation Ecology.
Prof Kerley shared more about the importance of their research for sustainable conservation.
Ryan Forbes assessed the diet and dispersal of lions and leopards in the Greater Limpopo Transfrontier Conservation Area. He analysed their prey and population genetics in samples from South Africa’s Kruger National Park and Mozambique’s Limpopo and Banhine national parks.
He has already published one chapter from his dissertation, with another two papers in review.
Kristen Davis’s MSc showed that the proposed connection of the Mountain Zebra and Camdeboo national parks would provide a unique opportunity to support viable populations of three species that are endemic to South Africa – the Cape Mountain zebra, the black wildebeest and the blesbuck.
Such viable populations represent the holy grail of conservation, but her project is the first attempt to assess the prospects of achieving this in conservation planning.
Both Ryan and Kristen benefitted from an Erasmus+ student exchange with the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences.
Emma Evers worked on the space use of elephants in Liwonde National Park, Malawi, and made an important contribution by demonstrating the appropriate scale to assess elephant space use.
This was based on elephants’ response to landscape resources and, for example, the positive or negative associations that they showed towards the different parts of the landscape.
Importantly, she indicated that these association can vary across the landscape at this scale. This clearly has implications for understanding the impact of elephants in conservation areas.
Nicky Dreyer, working in the Lapalala Wilderness Reserve, first showed that cheetah preferentially prey on juveniles, while lions focus on the adults of their prey species. She then developed a set of sophisticated population models to show that lions have greater impacts on their prey than do cheetah.
For all your graduation content across your social media platforms, please use #MandelaUniGrad24. We would love to collate, share and celebrate this amazing achievement with you on official University platforms.