12 | WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 7, 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
science
Last summer, not long after releasing a
pioneer pack of 13 African wild dogs into
Mozambique’s Gorongosa National
Park as part of an ambitious wildlife
restoration effort, Paola Bouley went to
see for herself what in the name of Canis
Major could have happened to the wild
dog pups.
As Gorongosa’s carnivore expert, Ms.
Bouley knew that Beira, the alpha fe-
male of the pack, had been pregnant
when the dogs were set free. She knew
that the closely bonded and highly en-
dangered apex predators had dug a ma-
ternity den for their queen, and that
Beira had spent a lot of time down there
— until one day, she didn’t. She and the
pack had moved on.
But where were the pups?
As Ms. Bouley was crouching by the
abandoned den and peering into the
hole, she met the likely answer. A giant
African rock python — the continent’s
largest species of snake — dropped from
a nearby tree, stared her in the face and
then slithered off.
“I think it was disappointed that I
wasn’t a warthog,” Ms. Bouley said.
For a snake that can grow to 20 feet
and swallow an impala whole, even a
large litter of Lycaon pictus pups would
barely rate as an amuse-bouche.
Yet the wild dogs were unbowed, and
this year, after migrating to a less ser-
pent-y sector of Gorongosa’s one million
acres, they made up for lost time in spec-
tacular fashion. Beira give birth in late
April to 11 pups, who emerged from their
den in early June and appear on camera
trap footage to be thriving, as well as in-
excusably cute (although the runt of the
litter eventually died).
Of greater surprise to Ms. Bouley and
her colleagues, Nhamagaia, the beta fe-
male of the pack, defied the L. pictus
convention that only the resident alpha
female gets to breed, and in late June de-
livered her own litter of eight.
The researchers initially feared that
Beira and the other adult dogs might re-
ject the off-label young, leaving them to
die of neglect. But no: The new pups
have been swept up into the sens-a-
round frenzy of carnivore kumbaya —
life as an ardently, obligately social
mammal for whom, as wild dog expert
Scott Creel of Montana State University
put it, “the worst thing that can happen
is to be alone.”
Gorongosa’s pup eruption didn’t end
there. Not far from the Beira-Nhama-
gaia crèche, a group of four adult dogs
that had split off from the original pack
in the spring — three males and one fe-
male — appeared to be successfully
rearing yet another litter of eight pups.
“It’s incredibly exciting,” said Cole du
Plessis, coordinator of the wild dog
range expansion program at the Endan-
gered Wildlife Trust. “At the beginning
of last year there were no wild dogs in
Gorongosa, and now we’re closing in on
50.”
And why not? “When I flew over
Gorongosa,” Mr. du Plessis said, “look-
ing at the prey numbers, the water, the
topography — I thought, if you could
sketch what wild dog heaven would look
like, Gorongosa is it.”
The successful reintroduction into
Gorongosa of African wild dogs under-
scores the park’s position as one of the
bright spots on an otherwise grim land-
scape of shrinking forests and accelerat-
ing loss of large, charismatic animals
unlucky enough to not be our pets or
livestock.
During Mozambique’s civil war,
which ended in the mid-1990s, Goron-
gosa’s abundant wildlife was almost
completely destroyed. Since then, the
park has been steadily recovering,
aided by an unusual partnership be-tween the Mozambique government
and the wealthy American philan-
thropist Gregory Carr, along with input
from local communities, international
teams of scientists, conservationists,
human rights advocates — really, any-
body Mr. Carr can get on the phone.
Researchers see in Gorongosa the
chance to track the recovery of a com-
plex ecosystem from the ground up, and
to see what will heal on its own and what
requires intervention.Getting the right mix of grazers and
meat-eaters has proved a particular
challenge.
Herbivores were the first to bounce
back in post-conflict Gorongosa, and to-
day the park pulses with more than
100,000 of them: blue wildebeest, buf-
falo, impala, hippo, waterbuck, reed-
buck, elephant, eland, nyala, oribi, the
hauntingly beautiful sable, the dis-
turbingly furry bushpig.
Experts thought that, with so much
meat on the hoof, carnivores of all
stripes would surely immigrate from
surrounding areas of their own accord,
but predator rebound has proved spotty
— or not spotty enough.
The lions in the park have fared well,and from the handful that remained af-
ter the war, the number today is 146 and
rising. “We’ve got cubs everywhere,”
Ms. Bouley said. “It’s hard keeping up
with them.”
Not so for the other major predators.
Spotted hyenas, which are common in
many parts of sub-Saharan Africa and
once were a Gorongosa staple, have yet
to return, and the park team hopes to re-
introduce a clan or two in the next few
years. So, too, the leopards: Camera
traps have picked up a lone leopard,
probably a male, skulking around at
night, but for all the park’s abundance of
a leopard’s favorite dish, baboon, that
loner has remained a party of one.
“We’re pushing to translocate some
females from outlying areas into the
core of the park,” Ms. Bouley said. “That
should draw in other males and jump-
start the leopard population.”
In the meantime, the wild dogs are
having their day, hunting ferociously
and cooperatively every morning and
afternoon and sometimes in between.
Wild dogs, which are also known as
painted wolves, are not like other dogs.
According to a recent genomic analysis,
they split off from the rest of the canid
lineage some 1.7 million years ago. They
twitter and sneeze rather than bark or
howl, and their ears are like satellite
dishes to track prey and one another’s
high-pitched calls. Their legs are like the
sticks of a shadow puppet, and they
have four toes rather than five, an adap-
tation that helps them run at up to 45
miles per hour.In Gorongosa, the dogs target bush-
buck, impala and waterbuck, surround-
ing the prey, grabbing at legs, nose and
hindquarters, disemboweling it from be-
low. Whatever they do, they do as a
team. A lion may stray from its pride for
hours or even days at a time, but wild
dogs are never out of sight, smell and
sound of their pack mates.
Group life has its privileges, including
being cared for when sick or injured.
Last year Nhamagaia, the beta female,
broke a front leg. “You could see it dan-
gling,” Ms. Bouley said. “We thought we
were going to lose her.”
But though the dog straggled behind,
the pack would wait patiently for her
and make sure she could feed at a kill,
and the leg eventually healed.
The dogs are cooperative hunters and
cooperative breeders, a fairly rare re-
productive strategy among mammals.
In this system, the alpha pair of the pack
do most of the breeding, while the other
adults serve as childless helpers. They
regurgitate meat from a kill to feed the
lactating alpha female, and they regur-
gitate still more to fuel her weaned but
dependent, ever-begging pups.
The alpha dogs defend their status
through minor acts of aggression, nips
and charges, but the subordinates don’t
seem to mind.
Subordinate females generally don’t
bother to ovulate, and their balance of
sex hormones resembles that of women
on birth control pills. It’s a tough enough
job to keep the alpha female’s litter alive,
especially in brutally competitive set-tings where the dogs are surrounded by
lions and hyenas eager to steal their
prey and kill their young, and where the
ranges of other dog packs encroach on
theirs.
Nevertheless, subordinates may seek
higher status and personal parenthood
in a number of ways: by dispersing to a
neighboring pack if available, forming a
new pack, or getting pregnant at home
and hoping for the best.
Ms. Bouley suspects that Gorongosa’s
lavish conditions, of abundant prey and
light competition, explain the success ofNhamagaia’s insubordinate act. The al-
pha female not only didn’t shun the be-
ta’s young — with her own pups mostly
weaned, Beira pitched in as wet nurse to
the new brood.
“The bonding between the new pups
and the whole pack, especially Beira, it’s
not what we were expecting at all,” Ms.
Bouley said.
Beira may be grateful for the extra
dog power come September, when an-
other pack of 22 dogs will be relocated to
Gorongosa from the Kalahari, and turf
battles are sure to begin.Wild pups romp again in an African paradise
An African wild dog pup at Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique. The wild dogs are cooperative hunters and cooperative breeders, and the whole pack takes part in feeding and caring for pups.BRETT KUXHAUSEN/GORONGOSA MEDIAAfter 13 wild dogs were reintroduced to Gorongosa last summer, the pack’s alpha female
gave birth to 11 pups and, to researchers’ surprise, the beta female also had a litter.PAULA BOULEYWhatever wild dogs do, they do
as a team. The dogs are never
out of sight, smell and sound of
their pack mates.Dogs have returned
to a Mozambique park,
and they’re thrivingBY NATALIE ANGIERIn recent years, the alternatives to cows’
milk have proliferated. The local gro-
cery store is likely to offer any number
of plant-based options: milk made from
soy, almonds, oats, rice, hemp, coconuts,
cashews, pea plants and more.
But most nondairy milk pales in com-
parison with cows’ milk. Plant-based
milk is made by breaking down plants
and reconstituting their proteins in wa-
ter to resemble the fluid from a lactating
bovine. These proteins differ fundamen-
tally from true dairy proteins, and the
results — milk, cheese and yogurt in
name only — often fail to measure up in
color, taste or texture.
Inja Radman, a molecular biologist
and a founder of New Culture, a food
company, put it plainly. “Vegan cheese is
just terrible,” she said. “As scientists, we
know why it doesn’t work. It doesn’t
have the crucial dairy proteins.”
Dairy tastes like dairy thanks to two
key proteins, casein and whey protein.
Researchers at several start-up compa-
nies, including New Culture, have begun
producing these proteins in the lab with
the aim of creating a new grocery store
category: cow-free dairy.
Their process is loosely comparable
to the way Impossible Foods or Beyond
Meat makes meatless burgers. Mi-
crobes, such as yeast, are given the ge-
netic instructions to produce the dairyproteins. The microbes are then culti-
vated en masse, with nutrients added
and the temperature adjusted. Eventu-
ally the organisms start churning out
large quantities of the proteins, and
these are isolated and added to various
recipes.
For the Impossible Burger, the essen-
tial protein is a molecule called heme,which is abundant in animal muscles
and gives the burger its meaty flavor,
and even makes it appear to bleed. New
Culture is focusing on producing casein,
a protein that coagulates to give moz-
zarella cheese its stretchy texture.
Ms. Radman said the company had
conducted double-blind tests to see if
people could tell the difference betweenthe proof-of-concept cheese and store-
bought mozzarella. “We’ve had really
positive results,” she said.
The quest for cow-free dairy is ex-
panding. In Oakland, Calif., scientists at
a community science lab are trying to
make their own open-source recipe for
lab-made cheese. And a start-up in Bos-
ton called Motif Ingredients is engineer-
ing a variety of proteins from dairy, eggs
and meat.
Another company, Perfect Day (origi-
nally Muufri), may be the furthest along
in perfecting a recipe for lab-made dairy.
The company produces whey protein
and mixes it with other ingredients
found in traditional dairy — fats, carbo-
hydrates, calcium and phosphates. In
early July, a limited-edition batch was
released with flavors including choco-
late, vanilla salted fudge and vanilla
blackberry toffee; it quickly sold out.
Hundreds of thousands of tons of
whey and casein are consumed in the
United States each year, virtually all of it
produced by dairy farms. Proponents of
lab-made milk see the product appeal-
ing to dairy lovers broadly, while satisfy-
ing concerns about animal welfare and
environmental sustainability. But to
make a real impact on the planet and
eliminate the carbon emissions from all
those belching cows, a great many mi-
crobes will need to be corralled.
The challenge is scaling up. Perfect
Day plans to sell its lab-made whey toice cream makers, dairy companies and
restaurants rather than directly to con-
sumers. It has also partnered with the
agriculture giant Archer Daniels Mid-
land, with its industrial-scale fermenta-
tion infrastructure, to try to meet mar-
ket demand and reduce the cost of pro-
ducing proteins.
“That’s what the two of us spend the
most of our time on now,” said Perumal
Gandhi, a founder of Perfect Day. “Sure,
we have A.D.M., but even if we max
them out, it’s still just a drop in the
bucket.”
And there is already stiff competition
from plant-based dairy alternatives,
which offer similar environmental bene-
fits and have gained popularity among
consumers. Sales of plant-based milk
jumped 6 percent last year and now
make up 13 percent of the entire milk
category, according to data from the
Plant Based Foods Association and The
Good Food Institute. Sales of plant-
based ice cream and frozen desserts
grew 27 percent; plant-based cheese
grew 19 percent, and plant-based yogurt
grew 39 percent.
“All of a sudden people are realizing
that they don’t have to depend on cows
for milk,” said Cheryl Mitchell, head of
research and development at Elmhurst
Milked, one of New York City’s largest
dairy companies, which switched to
making nut milks in 2016.
Technology has also improved thetaste of plant-based milks and de-
creased the amount of water needed to
produce several of them. “We want to be
increasing our agricultural diversity to
help environmental sustainability, not
just relying on one source,” Dr. Mitchell
said.
Beyond Meat and Impossible Burger
have been popular with consumers.
Whether lab-made milk can replicate
that success is an open question.
“What helped the Impossible Burger
was their lab-made heme, which had a
tremendous impact on both the flavor
and visual appearance of the burger,”
said Sam Alcaine, a food scientist at Cor-
nell University in New York. “I don’t
know if lab-made dairy can make that
leap and make consumers notice a dif-
ference in their dairy products.”
Labeling also has a big impact. The
Food and Drug Administration has a le-
gal standard for what can be called “ice
cream,” Dr. Alcaine said. Officially, ice
cream must contain no less than 10 per-
cent milk fat (or cream) from a cow. Per-
fect Day products have none; they con-
tain coconut oil and sunflower oil in-
stead, to remain animal-free, and must
be labeled “frozen dairy dessert,” not
“ice cream.”
Dairy farmers are also likely to push
back, lobbying for stronger laws gov-
erning the labeling of lab-made prod-
ucts, as they have done for plant-based
milk.The quest for lab-made dairy
The company Perfect Day developed a vegan, lactose-free frozen dairy dessert like ice
cream that contains milk proteins made by microbes rather than cows.PERFECT DAYBY KNVUL SHEIKHРРcrobes, such as yeast, are given the ge-crobes, such as yeast, are given the ge-
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