Senior's research shows genetic horse sense

Catherine Wood and a friend at Cornell's McConville Barn, just east of campus. Wood is an animal science major in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences from Annapolis, Md. Charles Harrington/University Photography

By Blaine P. Friedlander Jr.

With summer's rains, it was time for Kenya's Maasai people to celebrate the life-giving water. As part of the cultural ritual, the Maasai ate termites. Catherine Wood swallowed hard and joined in the observance, eating a termite. "They taste like carrots," she said. "I am a vegetarian, so I had moral quandaries at the time."

All last summer, Wood worked and lived, through Boston University's School for Field Studies, in a Kenyan park where there were lions and tigers and billions of termites. The termites built tree-trunk shaped nests from sand, saliva and excrement, and those structures rose from the ground like entomological skyscrapers, 8 to 10 feet high.

Wood was monitoring the animal travel corridor between the Tsavo West National Park, Kenya's largest game preserve, and Amboseli National Park, also in Kenya, an area close to Mount Kilimanjaro.

Despite the vast expanse of Africa, these game areas are increasingly becoming developed with farmland that squeezes out the animals. "The elephants are trampling the crop fields, lions are eating the livestock and the farmers are killing the lions. The congoni [antelope] and the impala are competing for the remaining grasslands with the cows and the sheep," Wood explained.

She joined with international organizations and students from other universities to examine the problem. "We wanted to give the Maasai people a livelihood and at the same time keep the animal corridor open," she said. The solution was to establish a community conservation area, where wildlife could travel freely between the Kenyan parks. Wood conducted wildlife surveys for the project and prepared a report for the Maasai. The Maasai understand that the animals are their livelihood, she said, as they attract tourists, so the people vehemently safeguard the wildlife byways.

On campus, Wood has been studying the genetic imprinting of horses, and her undergraduate research may be very valuable to the horse breeding industry. Working at Cornell's Equine Genetics Center, at the Baker Institute for Animal Health, with Douglas Antczak, professor of veterinary medicine, she has sought to understand which growth-factor genes are turned on or off during specific racehorse generations. She has found that "greatness in racehorses often skips a generation. Offspring are often so-so, but the grandchildren do better than the parents," she said.

Wood plans to enter Cornell's College of Veterinary Medicine in the fall.