African wild dogs (Lycaon pictus) once flourished from the mountainous areas of sub-Saharan regions to the deserts of Africa. Now endangered, these pack-living relatives of domesticated dogs still have a population in Botswana, where researchers like Neil Jordan — a research fellow at the University of New South Wales Sydney and Taronga Conservation Society Australia — study them.
While spending immersive hours of observation in the field is less common among researchers these days, Jordan and his colleagues who work with the Botswana Predator Conservation Trust (BPCT) believe this time is well spent. Such efforts often require long hours of watching resting carnivores and waiting for them to become active, such as by leaving their rest site to go hunting.
"It was during these long waits and subsequent high energy rallies that I first noticed a possible relationship between sneezing and leaving," Jordan said. "I could predict whether or not they were going to move off by listening to the number of sneezes."
To test the unorthodox theory, he and his team collected data from five packs of African wild dogs in and around the Moremi Game Reserve in the Okavango Delta from June 2014 to May 2015. VHF radio collars affixed to at least one dog in each pack allowed the scientists to track the animals.
Through direct observations and video recordings, the researchers documented 68 "social rallies" that occurred among the five packs. Such rallies are the times in which these dogs interact with each other.
The researchers were amazed that the data confirmed Jordan's suspicions: the more sneezes that occurred, the more likely it was that a given pack moved off and started hunting.
"The sneeze acts like a type of voting system," Jordan said.
