Dylan McDowell will spend six months studying wildlife management in Africa. (Photo courtesy of Dylan McDowell)

In the place where Dylan McDowell grew up, wildlife meant sea lions, sandpipers, salmon and passing pods of spouting whales. Where he’s going this summer, wildlife means something else entirely, something reminiscent of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, exotic and fearsome: wildebeests, jackals, baboons, leopards, warthogs. And rhinos that have been poached nearly to extinction.

These are the beasts McDowell will encounter when he travels to Africa for six months of study and research, first with Nyati Conservation Corps in Zimbabwe and then with SIT Study Abroad in Tanzania.

But wild animals aren’t his sole interest. Humans captivate him, too. “I feel it’s my responsibility as a person to explore and embrace different cultures,” says McDowell, who’s working on two degrees at Oregon State University, one in K-12 education and the other in fisheries and wildlife.

Giraffes at the Cawston Block in Zimbabwe (Photo: Dylan McDowell)

In McDowell’s coastal hometown of Yachats, skin-color variations had more to do with degrees of sunburn than with ethnic or racial diversity. “There was only one African-American student in my high school,” McDowell says, sounding a little regretful. He wants to fill that cultural gap in his education. So he’s heading to Africa not only to study wildlife conservation but also to meet African people and learn firsthand about their values, their politics, their struggles, their aspirations.

“I like looking at things through different lenses,” McDowell explains. Which might explain why he gravitates toward the junctures of disparate fields — for instance, the nexus of science and public policy, his current passion. The program in Tanzania fits that passion to a T. “The program focuses on wildlife conservation and political ecology — basically, how people interact with the environment,” he says.

So although his research is on rhinos, it’s as much about the humans who kill and sell the endangered ungulates for their horns, believed to be an aphrodisiac in some Asian societies. It’s also about the people who protect the massive horned animals, which are being reintroduced to the Serengeti where they have been wiped out.

“Tanzania is one of the poorest countries in the world,” says McDowell. “There’s a lot of money in the rhino trade.” Noting that Africa is “still trying to recover from European hegemony” of earlier decades, he argues that to take an American perspective on the rhino issue is to miss the social, political and cultural context in which the poaching occurs.

Endangered rhinos must co-exist with people in some of the world's poorest countries. (Photo: Engineers Without Borders, Oregon State University)

Besides interviewing rangers and local residents about the rhinos, McDowell will live with members of the Maasai tribe, camp out during a four-week safari and take classes in Swahili.

McDowell may not have had many cross-cultural experiences growing up in Yachats, but he did get plenty of cross-species interactions at the Oregon Coast Aquarium as a volunteer and later as a part-time guide and an aquarist. He became acquainted with puffins and octopi, whiskered otters lolling in their artificial habitat and ethereal jellyfish pulsing in their tubular tank. He even kissed a sea lion named Leah. “Very fishy,” is how he describes the marine-mammal’s smooch, for which tourists happily paid extra as part of a behind-the-scenes tour.

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Follow McDowell’s travels through his blog, Under the Baobab Tree.

For more information about education abroad opportunities for OSU students, contact the International Degree & Education Abroad (IDEA) at 541-737-3006.

Haley Ohms (Photo: Lee Sherman)

A river runs through Haley Ohms’ life. Actually, a whole bunch of rivers. So spending the summer hip-deep in fast-moving water will feel familiar to the Oregon State University graduate student — even if those cold, tumbling waters flow on the other side of the Pacific Rim. The fish will seem familiar, too. The Dolly Varden, which she’ll be studying in 10 woodland streams on the Japanese island of Hokkaido, is a cousin of steelhead and rainbow trout, the topic of her master’s thesis in the Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Sitting at her computer, she pulls up a photo on the screen. “This is the Dolly Varden,” she says, pointing to the underwater image of a moss-green fish speckled in red. “See how it’s spotted? It’s very similar to a trout.”

Photo courtesy of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game

Fish is a subject she knows well. After all, you don’t sit atop a 30-foot tower in Alaska counting sockeye salmon at a rate of a million a month without getting really conversant with them. She was an undergraduate at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, when she took the tower-sitting job with the state Fish and Game Department, hopping a float plane from King Salmon to Bristol Bay and living in what she calls a “cabin-slash-shack” for two summers monitoring sockeye runs in the Egegik and Ugashik rivers.

But her kinship with fish started even earlier as a kid in Alaska. She was in her mid-teens when her dad, living out a lifelong dream, began taking summers off from his electrician’s job, bought a “bowpicker” boat, and took up gillnetting for Chinook and sockeye in the Copper River and for pinks and chums in Prince William Sound. She started crewing for him at 15.

At Oregon State, Ohms has spent two years learning the secrets of steelhead and trout in nine streams and rivers up and down the West Coast, places like Pudding Creek in California, Big Ratz Creek in Alaska, East Fork Trask River in Oregon and Secesh River in Idaho. Now she’s about to add Japan’s Sorachi River and its many tributaries to her growing list of study sites. She’ll be looking at the role of water temperature in the maturation rate of the Dolly Varden during her fellowship, jointly funded by the National Science Foundation and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. The Sorachi River, she explains, contains tributaries with two distinct thermal regimes: cold, groundwater-fed systems and systems fed by warmer surface water. That duality makes it a perfect place for an experiment, a readymade setting for studying the impact on fish of cold versus warmer habitat.

Photo courtesy of Fisheries and Oceans Canada

To get her data, she’ll be “electro-fishing” — sending a low-voltage electric pulse into the water, which stuns the animals and sends them floating to the surface. She’ll then net them, weigh and measure them and, finally, squeeze them, gently, to see if any eggs or sperm come out. “It sounds cheesy,” Ohms says, laughing. “But it’s the only nonlethal, low-tech way to tell if the fish are sexually mature.”

The timing of maturity in fish is critical to the survival of their offspring and, ultimately, of the species. “The males need to mature at the same time the females return to spawn,” says Ohms. “The females need to lay their eggs so they’ll hatch at the optimal time, not when the river’s frozen over or flooding. It’s a delicate balance.”

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For more information about education abroad opportunities for OSU students, contact the International Degree & Education Abroad (IDEA) office at 541-737-3006.