How a Saint Louis Zoo Researcher Is Saving Zebras, Foxes, and Wolves, by Jeannette Cooperman

An absolutely fantastic look at the life and career of one of the most remarkable professionals in the zoo and aquarium field.  The research that Dr. Asa and her colleagues do, at the St. Louis Zoo and around the world, is providing vital tools that may allow us to save some of planet's most endangered species.  It's good to see that more of an effort is being made to get the word out about their work.

How a Saint Louis Zoo Researcher Is Saving Zebras, Foxes, and Wolves

Cheryl Asa has slipped birth control pills to teenage orangutans, performed vasectomies on wild horses, and ensured the survival of the Mexican gray wolf.  

by Jeannette Cooperman

Photography by Jennifer Silverberg

The carnival pony spooked, rearing up. Clutching the reins tighter, 4-year-old Cheryl Asa thought, Wow! This is the greatest thing in the world! Flooded with delight, she barely heard her mother screaming.

Cheryl was an only child, and she was allowed no pets—they shed, tracked in filth, and destroyed domestic order. So she sought out snakes and frogs in the green tangle of woods around Herrin, Illinois. And after a conventional start to adult life—studying psychology at Northwestern University, marrying young, and having two sons—she divorced her business-minded husband and combined psychology with a degree in zoology at the University of Wisconsin.

She found animals far more interesting than people.

She also found sexual reproduction interesting. “I was raised to be very uptight,” she’d say later. “In the ’50s? My God. Sex was clearly something really important, yet nobody wanted to talk about it.” By the ’70s, though—“the height of the hippie era”—love was free and discussion was frank. Finally she could explore whatever she was curious about, from the ovulatory cycle of the rhesus monkey to the embryology of the African clawed toad.

She earned a doctorate in endocrinology and reproductive physiology while living with a woodsy wildlife biologist on a rented farm. When they went canoeing, she discovered the only creature on earth that she loathed: the leech. “Get it off of me!” she shrieked, all girly, this woman who’d go on to crush baby cockroaches with her thumb in Manhattan and discover a rattlesnake inches from her face in the Nevada desert.

Her dissertation was on the reproductive behavior of horses, but she was also developing a deep respect for carnivores, especially canids (foxes, wolves, dogs). They were—had to be—cleverer than their prey. So she did postdoctoral work at the University of Minnesota with L. David Mech, who studied wolves in the wild.

Read the rest of the article here.