Cheetah conservationist to host seminar at UNL
Conservationist Laurie Marker will give a talk about cheetah conservation efforts at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln on Monday.
Marker, an adjunct professor at the University of Nebraska Omaha for more than a decade, will host the seminar at noon in Hardin Hall on UNL's East Campus in room 901. The talk is open to the public.
In 1990, Marker founded the Cheetah Conservation Fund, the first predator conservation organization working outside a protected area, and moved to Namibia to establish an international research and education center for carnivore conservation. The center is based on about 160,000 acres of wildlife land located next to a national park in the southwest African country.
Marker, a native of Detroit who grew up in California, started working with cheetahs at Wildlife Safari, a wildlife park in Oregon, when she was 20. For 16 years, she helped conduct research on cheetahs before establishing her own conservation center in Namibia.
Through her research at the Wildlife Safari, Marker traveled to Namibia to find out if a captive cheetah could learn to hunt. It was there that she discovered that livestock farmers were killing wild cheetahs, and nothing was stopping them.
"When I came back from Africa and told people about the problem, there wasn't anybody who was really interested or cared," Marker, 70, said.
So Marker kept working at the Wildlife Safari and partnered with the Smithsonian Institution's National Zoo to research cheetahs, discovering that they lacked genetic diversity and had reproductive problems.
Marker made it her mission to tackle those issues. She moved to Washington, D.C., to continue her research, but she couldn't forget the cheetahs in Namibia. It was then that she decided to start the Cheetah Conservation Fund.
"I would say that the cheetah is one of the most iconic and amazing species on the face of the earth," Marker said. "It is the fastest of all the land animals, and it is leading the race for extinction of all earth species and us."
According to Marker, it is important to save the cheetahs because they have one of the largest home ranges of any animal on earth. Top predators are important because they maintain the biodiversity and health of the ecosystems they belong to, Marker said.
"By saving the cheetah, you save everything underneath it," Marker said.
Larkin Powell, the dean of UNL's School of Natural Resource, and his wife host a study-abroad trip to Namibia each year. As a part of that trip, Powell takes the students to Marker's conservation site, and some students will stay on as interns at the conservation fund after the trip is over.
Schools from all across Namibia visit the center to learn about their different programs and conservation efforts. The center is also open to the public.
In her seminar, Marker plans on discussing the Cheetah Conservation Fund and its programs, but she will primarily focus on human-wildlife conflict mitigation.
While the main focus of the center is cheetah conservation, the center has a number of other programs, including a livestock-guarding dog program, a veterinary clinic and a genetics laboratory. Marker and her team also work with the farming community and have a model farm at the center.
"People come to Africa to see wildlife, but then they learn so much about the different steps that are involved in helping people live in harmony with nature," Marker said.
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