Emmanuel Masenga

Tanzania Wildlife Research Institute | TAWIRI · SERENGETI WILDLIFE RESEARCH CENTRE

Habitat type and their vegetation composition play important role in determining the abundance and diversity of animals including small mammals, hence any change in habitat type will influence their abundance and spatial distribution. This study aimed at investigating the influence of habitat types (that is, Wetland grassland, Miombo and Vachellia...

Roads that traverse through protected areas if not well managed can have adverse impact on wildlife such as road-kills which is of global conservation concern. Though mammalian road-kills have been reported in different protected areas worldwide, very little information on the problem is available in the Serengeti ecosystem. This study employed bot...

Understanding habitat preferences and distribution of threatened species is a cornerstone of conservation, however many of the techniques available can be resource intensive. One cost-effective method is by collecting information on species presence and absence from people who regularly interact with the area of interest, also known as Local Ecolog...

The disappearance of an endangered African wild dog population from Serengeti National Park (SNP) led to international debate centered around one question: were researchers to blame? The “Burrows' hypothesis” postulated that stress induced by research‐related immobilization and handling reactivated a latent rabies virus, eliminating the population....

Vehicle collisions with wild animals are acknowledged as a non-negligible source of death of wild birds and often affect their spatial-temporal distribution, abundance and diversity. However, data to ascertain the impact of road kills on wild birds are scarce, especially around the Serengeti Ecosystem in Tanzania. This work aims to investigate the...

p class="1Body">Conservation of the African wild dog ( Lycaon pictus ) in human-dominated landscapes faces many challenges. Understanding human opinions of wild dog conservation is important to inform management decisions. Questionnaire surveys, including both open and closed-ended questions, were administered by researchers through face-to-face in...

This study discusses the conflict between Maasai pastoralists and African wild dogs (Lycaon pictus) over livestock before and after the Maasai were evicted from the Serengeti National Park (SNP) in 1959. We surveyed 181 randomly selected households from six villages in the eastern Serengeti ecosystem. A semi-structured questionnaire was used to acq...

Wild carnivores are often involved in conflicts with humans due to their predation on livestock. We investigated the herding efficiency of pastoralists in association with depredation on livestock in the Loliondo game-controlled area (LGCA), northern Tanzania, to identify specific herding practices that may reduce predation occurrence. Randomised f...

We used a four-day program with a pre-test–post-test approach on 355 selected school children to investigate the influence of a wildlife education project on the acquisition of knowledge about large carnivores in Loliondo, Tanzania. After the school program was completed, a significantly higher number of school children correctly identified six car...

Humans and wildlife have coexisted for millennia, but conflicts often occur and are intensifying with rapid growth of human populations and concomitant shrinkage and isolation of wildlife habitats (Woodroffe, 2000; Conover, 2002; Graham et al., 2005). Human-wildlife conflict usually involves large carnivores, mega-herbivores and keystone species th...

For communities living around the Serengeti, wildlife is often regarded as a burden causing significant losses of crops and livestock at the household level, large opportunity costs of lost grazing and farmland held in protected areas and immediate dangers to human life and wellbeing. As agricultural land becomes more scarce and local sources of in...

Attitudes towards the conservation of lions, leopards, cheetah, spotted hyenas and African wild dogs were assessed in the Loliondo Game Controlled Area of northern Tanzania in January 2013. Our survey encompassed 181 individuals each representing onehousehold, of which 30 were chosen randomly from six Maasai pastoralist villages. A semi-structured...

During 2007–2009 we conducted a survey of attacks by wild carnivores on the livestock of the Maasai and Sonjo tribes in the eastern Serengeti ecosystem of northern Tanzania. Local enumerators systematically recorded incidents of carnivore predation on livestock and their data were quantified by us, with the aid of District Game Officers or trusted...

Compared to their main competitors, African wild dogs (Lycaon pictus) have inferior competitive abilities and interspecific competition is a serious fitness-limiting factor. Lions (Panthera leo) are the dominant large carnivore in African savannah ecosystems and wild dogs avoid them both spatially and temporally. Wild dog young are particularly vul...

Top predators can dramatically suppress populations of smaller predators, with cascading effects throughout communities, and this pressure is often unquestioningy accepted as a constraint on mesopredator populations.In this study, we reassess whether African lions suppress populations of cheetahs and African wild dogs, and examine possible mechanis...

Background/Question/Methods Predators can affect prey populations by stimulating costly defense strategies (trait mediated indirect interactions, or TMIIs). Meta-analyses indicate these behavioral responses can have greater demographic impacts on prey populations than direct mortality, even triggering cascading effects across trophic levels. Howe...

The retaliatory persecution of large carnivores is a worldwide conservation concern. We report a case of malicious strychnine poisoning of African wild dogs (Lycaon pictus) in the Loliondo Game Controlled Area (LGCA), Tanzania. Eight out of ten individuals (80%) in one of our study packs were poisoned in retaliation for a livestock attack. Samples...

Deciphering patterns of genetic variation within a species is essential for understanding population structure, local adaptation and differences in diversity between populations. Whilst neutrally evolving genetic markers can be used to elucidate demographic processes and genetic structure, they are not subject to selection and therefore are not inf...

The major histocompatibility complex (MHC) is a set of highly polymorphic genes involved in the immune response. Extensive research on the canid MHC has found moderate-to-high levels of diversity at the DLA-DRB1, DLA-DRA, DLA-DQA1, and DLA-DQB1 class II loci with frequent transspecific polymorphism among Canis species. In this study, we assessed MH...