2% of the world’s rarest zebras wiped out in Kenya’s relentless drought. There was a good chance that this was all caused by the loss of the herd’s preferred forage species. But when we compared the population of wild baboons in Maasai Mara National Reserve with Maasai Mara’s baboon population and found that the Maasai Mara population was almost identical to the population of wild baboons in the reserve, which is a safe distance from the Maasai Mara border, we knew that the baboon population was not the cause of the drought.
In fact, from what we already knew about the Maasai Mara baboon population and what we now know about the Maasai Mara drought, we may have reached a conclusion that was not as apparent at the time: that in the event of a serious disease spreading through an entire population, _all_ populations may be affected. When drought wiped out hundreds of thousands of wild baboons and the wild population of zebras in Maasai Mara, the Maasai Mara population of baboons was next to unaffected. As for the wild population of zebras on the periphery of the reserve, they suffered just as we knew they would.
As the drought increased in intensity with little relief in sight, we decided to conduct another experiment. As usual, we worked with ten pairs of wild baboons and ten pairs of wild monkeys. Our goal was to compare a population of wild baboons, like the Maasai Mara baboons, to a population of wild monkeys, like the Chobe monkeys, and to see how the baboons reacted to the same drought conditions.
We had originally planned to work with ten pairs of wild baboons from the Western Highlands of Kenya and ten pairs of wild monkeys from the Chobe National Park in the north of the country. But some of the Maasai Mara baboons we originally planned to work with were not doing as well as we had hoped, and their mortality was becoming more obvious. On the morning of Sunday, August 19, while the baboons were resting, we decided to take the baboon population at the Maasai Mara reserve and move it to the Chobe National Park, the largest national park in Kenya. With just a small population of baboons to compare its performance to, our findings would be more credible.
Because the Maasai Mara baboons had
