It’s one of the first questions interpreters at the zoo get.

“How long does this animal live?”

Lisa Faust, a research biologist at the Lincoln Park Zoo, uses her expertise in population biology and demography to take the guesswork out of gauging animal lifespans.

Her work doesn’t just answer popular questions, though. It also helps scientists promote sustainable growth in zoo populations as well as animals in the wild.

Faust, who has a Ph.D. in biology and ecology from the University of Illinois at Chicago, came to the zoo fresh out of college for a three-month internship and ended up staying more than 10 years.

“I was one of those kids who made their family go to the zoo on every place we went on vacation,” Faust says. “It was something I was always interested in checking out, but I didn’t really realize how much science went on at zoos.”

Faust rarely has contact with the animals. She sits behind a computer and crunches data provided by zoos across the country.

Births and deaths, recorded over several decades, provide patterns that Faust uses to inform the Species Survival Plans produced by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA). These scientific breeding plans help zoos to cooperatively manage populations of animals that are threatened with extinction.

“Zoos are a great place to start generating some of this information, because you have these historic data sets,” says Sharon Dewar, the Lincoln Park Zoo spokeswoman. “Other than some very well-known field projects, like Jane Goodall's research at Gombe, most wild populations have not been studied for 40 years.”

Elephants are getting special consideration in Faust’s computer modeling work. Elephant populations are projected to continue declining in zoos and have been fluctuating in the wild.

Her collaboration with researchers Charles Foley and Lara Foley of the Tarangire Elephant Project recently helped the zoo garner an American Zoo Association award for international conservation, which it shared with eight other zoos. The zoo has been providing funding and scientific expertise for the Foleys for over 10 years.

Tarangire National Park is a protected wildlife area located in northeastern Tanzania. Elephant herds freely move in and out of the unfenced park, attracted to the Tarangire River during the six-month dry season.

The Foleys began studying the effects of massive poaching on elephant behavior there 15 years ago. Their research produced one of the largest and most developed demographic data sets on elephants in Africa.

Faust recently returned from her second visit to Tarangire where she worked with the Foleys to analyze their wealth of data, much of it culled through close observation.

“With elephants, you can tell individual animals by scars and patterns in their ears, and holes and tears, and sometimes size,” Faust says. “Charles is amazing. He can drive up to a group  and say, ‘oh, there’s Clara and Cassie, her calf. I wonder where so-and-so is, he should be around.’ It’s like a soap opera, basically.”

Lisa Faust / By Jennifer Slosar

Faust is developing a model to forecast the Tarangire elephants’ future population dynamics, which is crucial because the population is growing very rapidly.

As human settlements grow on the perimeter of the park, conflicts between migrating elephants and villagers, as well as competition for resources between animals, have supplanted poaching as chief threats to elephant survival.

“We want to give park officials an idea of how the population could grow in 10 or 15 years, if it keeps going at this rate,” Faust says. “You have to make sure you protect the migration corridors and the areas outside the park as well.”

Faust sees the Tarangire Elephant Project as a model conservation effort.

Although the Foleys were drawn to Africa by their love of elephants, Faust says, they quickly realized that it would be necessary to do conservation work outside the park to protect migratory areas.

Ultimately the conservation effort protects other animals that use the park’s water in the dry season, but disperse across the plains around the park in the rest of the year. These include zebras, wildebeests and buffalo.
Faust also applauds the way Charles Foley has worked with local villages to achieve cooperation.

 “He doesn’t want to push anyone off their land,” Faust says. “Instead he talks to them about the value of having wildlife on their land. How can they benefit from it in terms of eco-tourism and stewardship of their heritage?”