By Shel Segal for the Arcadia Weekly
Summer might be just about over, but for Arcadia teenagers Sarah Wang and Kelly Chang it was one to remember.
Both volunteers at the Los Angeles Zoo, Wang and Chang spent part of their summer conducting research in South Africa, thanks to the Greater Los Angeles Zoo Association’s Duttenhaver Animal Conservation Field Study.
This annual program gives young people who have a passion for wildlife the chance to experience field research and ecology first hand with research teams all over the world, from Thailand to the Amazon.
The girls worked alongside scientists whose goal it was to conserving leopards and monkeys at the Primate and Predator Project at Lajuma Research Centre in South Africa’s Soutpansberg Mountains.
The project’s research assesses the role of mountainous regions in biodiversity conservation, studies behavioral ecology of predator-prey interactions and evaluates the nature and extent of human-wildlife conflict within the Soutpansberg Mountains.
Wang and Chang and five other Duttenhaver Program youngsters lived in the project’s wilderness camp and worked alongside research assistants collecting data on samango monkeys and baboons, radio-tracking collared leopards, hiking through the beautiful terrain to check on camera traps, and analyzing vegetation to understand the behavior of several animal species.
Chang, who graduated from Arcadia High School and is now attending the University of California, Irvine, said she really liked working out in the field.
“My favorite experience was the more hands-on activity that we did,” Chang said. “We had to bait the leopard traps and we bait them out of the branches of the trees. The traps have spikes in them because they don’t want other animals to get to the bait. The bait was fetal cows.
They’d be in the amnio egg and we’d cut them out. We had to cut them open because the leopards had to smell them. That was my favorite experience because I took a class my senior year in human physiology. We learned about all the organs and it was nice to put my education to work.”
Wang, also an Arcadia graduate, said she really enjoyed the two weeks in South Africa.
“It was amazing,” she said. “Just that we had this opportunity was really amazing to us. There were only a few of us who were selected to go. I was really excited that there were field expeditions.”
(Shel Segal can be reached at [email protected] and followed via Twitter @segallanded).
Source Beacon Media News