At about noon on March 26th, Steve Bellan was working in his office at Etosha Ecological Institute in northern Namibia when he got word of a fresh zebra carcass near the Gemsbokvlakte water hole, about 20 kilometers east on a dusty park road. Over the next hour, the bushy-haired Berkeley graduate student got his gear in order and hooked up a trailer to the back of his pick-up before rumbling out of the fortified rest camp with his metal carcass cage, a pipe and mesh box designed to keep scavenging jackals away. His mission: “A randomized control trial, but with carcasses as the participants,” he says, which will hopefully yield clues about how to combat a bacterium that kills hundreds of cattle and wildlife each year in the United States and thousands more in developing countries.
Etosha National Park is one of southern Africa’s great game parks—a 22,270–square kilometer protected ...
