Why Study Hyenas?

[xchrom]

Tuesday, June 21

“When there are so many nicer animals out there, why study hyenas?”

That is the question my mother asked me when I first told her back in the mid-1980s that I was planning to move to Kenya to study spotted hyenas. Back then, before I actually started working with hyenas, I would have answered by saying, “Because I have an opportunity to go to Africa to study an interesting large mammal, and those kinds of opportunities are too rare to pass up. I’ve wanted to do something like this all my life, and now I have a chance to do it.”

Back in those days, I thought I would move to Kenya for a few years, conduct a dissertation-length project on spotted hyenas, then move on to a study yet another new animal in another new place. I had no idea then that I would just fall in love with these animals, or that they would hook me so completely with their complexity and their oddity. Nor did I have any idea back then how useful a model system these hyenas might offer for studying phenomena as wide-ranging as immune function, skull morphology, social networks, conservation biology and the evolution of intelligence.

If my mother asked that same question today, I’d answer it very differently.




http://scientistatwork.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/21/why-study-hyenas/?ref=science

[locahungaria]

1. Very interesting article.....

thanks for posting!

[Bosso 63]

2. I thought it was about Wall street.

But thats not fair to actual Hyenas.

[greiner3]

3. I have to work on my reading comprehension;

Or get reading glasses. I thought the headline read;

'Why study hymens.'

[ImNotTed]

7. Done to death

;-)

[nichomachus]

4. So, we can understand Republicans?

[bemildred]

5. To grasp the emotional substrate of politics?

Or is that vultures.

[bvar22]

6. Why Study Hyenas?

....because the Working Class & The Poor in America are going to have to live like Hyenas
if we don't get some "change"?


Obama Administration Begins Process for Passing Three Free Trade Deals
http://news.firedoglake.com/2011/05/04/obama-administration-begins-process-for-passing-three-free-trade-deals/





Who will STAND and FIGHT for THIS American Majority?
You will know them by their WORKS,
not by their EXCUSES.