University of Idaho Professor Ryan Long has traveled to North America and Africa for his research, recently entering Denmark. Seven years under his belt at the university, his wildlife research has opened many doors, leading him to complete projects based on literal dreams and nibble on gummy bears in the field.
Sweet tooth
Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park is “One of the most beautiful places on the planet,” Jeremy Van Driessche said.
Van Driessche is a doctorate student that has been working on Long’s projects.
Gorongosa was the epicenter of the Mozambican Civil War through the 70s and 90s, harming the wildlife in the park. According to Van Driessche, over 90% of large mammals in the area were killed. Only 200 of the park’s original 2,000 elephants remained.
Fast forward to today, the park is now hailed as the greatest restoration project in Africa.
Joining Long’s team, Van Driessche’s first impression was that Long was professional and quick to reply, always staying on top of his various projects. Now getting to know him more, Van Driessche has seen a lighthearted side to Long.
“As much as he works hard, he’s also the fun character to be around,” Van Driessche said. “He makes the work rewarding and fun.”
This past season, Long and Van Driessche were traveling together to the national park. When they arrived in Mozambique, airport security pulled some things from both their luggage, opening a large bag Long had with him and revealing what was inside.
“And I swear, half of his bag was like gummy bears, Sour Patch Kids, all these kid gummies,” Van Driessche said. “He was only going to be in the field for a month, and they lasted him a week… he was just tearing through them.”
Local park workers noticed Long’s affinity for the gummies and it soon became a running joke. Gummy bears were synonymous with his reputation.
“They’d be like ‘Hey, we’re going to have people do a run into town, do you need anything?’ and I would be like ‘I need gummy bears!'” Van Driessche said. “He’s definitely fueled on sugar when he’s in the field.”
Jurassic Park
Growing up, Long’s family lived what he called a “utilitarian” lifestyle, neither of his parents having a college degree. Here, he became familiar with the outdoors.
While working on his senior thesis, he was led into the world of research, ending up at UI where he has been enjoying his time in the Department of Fish and Wildlife Sciences.
Now, Long runs up to six student projects at a time.
“It allows me to be engaged in the fieldwork and stuff, but also to still have time to have a family life and help raise my kids,” he said.
With the opportunity to participate in research at Princeton as a research associate, he worked on an antelope horn project.
“It was outstanding,” Long said. “That’s what has led to a big part of my research program at the UI.”
He explained that this project opened doors for him moving on forward in his various research topics, leading him to Mozambique.
One of these projects that Long worked on gained notoriety. His study of tuskless elephants’ survival rates in connection to poaching has made its rounds among scientists and the media.
“It’s fun, I really enjoy it, it’s also a little bit of a mixed blessing,” Long said.
The research followed the impacts on elephants after the Mozambican Civil War and how ivory poaching contributed to the development of tuskless elephants. While the elephant population returned after the war, a large portion of female elephants were born without tusks.
Working with the elephants firsthand has been a unique opportunity to connect with the animals.
“You can touch it, you can watch it breathe,” Long said.
The experience is one Long paralleled to the animal experts of Hollywood—Jurassic Park.
“There’s a scene where there’s a researcher where they’ve got a sleeping anesthetized Triceratops and she’s like, laying, breathing,” he described. “I’ve done that with elephants and it’s just such a massive animal. It really reminds you how lucky you are to be able to do stuff like this and how special those animals are.”
Research in dreams
Straying away from Long’s usual study of wildlife, the researcher applied his knowledge to a more sociological-based issue.
Long studied the U.S.-Mexico border crossing and accounted for the water loss migrants experience through respiration and sweating. Calculating these physiological costs, the study quantified the difficulties of making the journey.
Using a model called a niche mapper, Long was able to take information about humans and simulate how one would react in a certain climate.
“One of the nice things about working with humans is that humans are very interested in humans, right?” Long explained. “Almost everything you could ever want to know about humans with respect to things like sweating rates and metabolic rates…is known.”
Shifting from his normal focus, the idea for the project actually came in a dream from fellow researcher Shane Campbell-Staton.
Long had been working with Campbell-Staton, who specializes in genomics, on another project. While they did talk, they both had different focuses, Long with mammals and Campbell-Staton with ectotherms, and didn’t expect to work on another project together. But six months later, Long got a call.
“He calls me up at like, seven in the morning, on a Saturday completely out of the blue. He’s like, ‘Man, you’re not gonna believe this. I had this crazy dream last night,'” Long said. “It’s just this random phone call, after a dream that this friend of mine had, and I thought about it, and I was like, ‘You know what, I bet we can do that.'”
The study detailed the dangers of border crossing, predicting high-risk areas. It reveals the extent to which dehydration played into the mortality rates of those trying to get to the U.S.
Long was initially nervous taking on this project with a controversial subject matter and politics surrounding the issue. Instead, by the end, he felt he had learned from the experience.
“I’ve never had, what I would call, an emotional reaction to a project,” Long said.
The human connection made this project different. For part of the research, Long worked with an anthropologist and listened to messages left by border crossers.
“Listening to their audio recordings… it was hard,” he said. “It was very moving in a way that resonated with me as a human, I guess. It created a substantial amount of sympathy that I frankly didn’t have before.”
Hallie Walker is another doctorate student who has worked on studies in Mozambique. Walker joined the team as she was looking to work on large mammals, a focus of Long’s.
“I thought he was incredibly smart, really personable, easy to talk to, and incredibly passionate about his work,” she said.
Getting to know him, Walker found him inspirational as an advisor.
“Ryan is definitely one of those types of researchers who it’s never about the end goal, but it’s really about the journey along the way and the relationships,” Walker said.
Haadiya Tariq can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @haadiyatariq