Darby McPhail: ‘Paw’ndering’ the role of big cats in Belize

This photo shows a young white woman with blond braids standing in a field of thigh-high plants. She is holding a yellow notepad. Dense fog surrounds her, and another person can be seen dimly in the background. — Darby McPhail with field technician Charlotte Moore, taking measurements for a habitat survey to assess understory, canopy cover, and tree density in a field site in Belize. Photo courtesy of Darby McPhail.

This story was written in the fall of 2022 by GRAD 5144 (Communicating Science) student Ronnie Mondal as part of an assignment to interview a classmate and write a news story about her research.

In seven years of studying jaguars and pumas in Belize, Darby McPhail has only ever seen three big cats. But that doesn’t dampen her enthusiasm for the research.

McPhail, a third-year master's degree student in the Department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation at Virginia Tech, works with Dr. Marcella Kelly. McPhail has studied big cats for over seven years, including two years of undergraduate work at the University of Virginia, two years of research after graduation, and three years of graduate school at Virginia Tech.

McPhail’s interest in jaguars and pumas began during her undergraduate studies, when she majored in environmental science and biology. Now the project leader of the Belize study, she spends six months of the year in the rainforest, gathering data for spatial modeling of jaguar and puma population dynamics.

This photo shows 8 people thigh- to chest-deep in water and holding onto a rope or branch as they cross a river in a rainforest. — The Jaguar Project field team traverses a flooded trail after a hurricane to check a camera station. Photo courtesy of Darby McPhail.

McPhail has always been outdoorsy and connected to wildlife and the environment, she says, with her family playing an essential role in shaping her values in this area. In a twist of fate, her mother is allergic to cats, but Darby has always loved them – and now gets to study them full-time.

McPhail’s work does not focus just on big cats. She knows that humans are an essential part of the story, too.

Belize, a country in Central America just south of Mexico, became independent in 1981, and since then, according to McPhail, it has received a significant chunk of its revenue from ecotourism focused on its forests and rich wildlife. Jaguars form a crucial part of the country’s wildlife diversity and play a significant role in Mesoamerican culture, with the Mayans having a jaguar god and the Olmec featuring jaguars in their religious practice.

But jaguars also are endangered, and McPhail’s work includes teasing out all the factors that affect jaguar and puma space use. Belize has become home to a significant population of people of the Mennonite faith, McPhail explained, who came to Belize from many different countries, including Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador, and brought with them different approaches to land and resource use and stewardship. A tangled web of interconnected factors, including tax breaks, agriculture, and forestry, has now given this new human population influence over much of the agriculture and livestock of Belize, and increased human activity in these forests has increased the problems for wild cats, she said.

This photo shows a young white woman with blond braids seated on a concrete stoop and holding a machete blade in her lap as she smiles at the camera. — Researcher Darby McPhail sharpens her machete before conducting trail maintenance in the field. Photo courtesy of Darby McPhail.

Belize has both protected and private forests, and now agriculture and livestock rearing tend to spill over to the protected forests, home to the big cats, the focus of tropical ecology in the region. With her research, McPhail intends to provide data for policy making, highlighting habitat and landscape features that promote big cat populations so that people in Belize can better manage wildlife, conserve the ecosystem, save the jaguars and pumas, and support sustainable profit-based and conservation-based policies in the region.

While her research is not directly in policy, understanding it is a valuable asset in stakeholder meetings, as the people in the region trust and value McPhail’s and other researchers’ opinions because of their familiarity with the place, ecosystem, and people. Recently, their quantitative research was included in a meeting where several NGOs came together to quash a road development project that would have cut through an important protected area with a strong density of jaguars and vital habitats.

McPhail’s research is based on the overarching idea of linking habitat, environments, and anthropological factors to big cats such as jaguars and pumas. For example, how have the puma densities changed in the forests and how do the animals use the space they reside in? McPhail and other researchers on the project have collected data for 20 years, with McPhail contributing to the research for more than seven of those years.

This photo shows four young people in the back of a pickup truck seated around a picnic cooler. Surrounding them is lush green forest. — From left, Jaguar Project research team members Jossiah Vasquez, David Lugo, Darby McPhail, and Jeddiah Vasquez take a lunch break during field work in Belize. Photo courtesy of Darby McPhail.

McPhail explains that the research uses the top-down control model in ecology. This idea is based on the assumption that larger predators, like jaguars and pumas, regulate the ”lower” levels of the ecosystems by keeping their populations in check. For example, if the ecosystem has four levels, with jaguars, deer, rodents, and foliage representing the levels, a change in the population of the jaguars affects the population of deer, which changes the amount of foliage and so on. Additionally, top predators are often referred to as umbrella species. This means that if large wild cats are protected, then many other species will also be protected under their “umbrella” because large predators require such large areas to survive.

The research project is investigating whether this umbrella species concept of protecting the jaguar will indeed protect other species such as the puma and prey species. While ecosystem dynamics have been extensively studied in the grasslands and savannas in Africa and other places, it has been explored much less in the forested neotropics. In Belize and other Latin American tropical rainforests, the forests are dense and the animals elusive, making sightings very rare. Thus, animals are difficult to study.

This photo shows a person from the back with a large axe over her shoulder, poised to swing down into a fallen tree blocking a road. — Driving to the camera stations requires clearing the trail. Darby McPhail's research skills include wielding an axe. Photo courtesy of Darby McPhail.

Marcella Kelly, McPhail’s research advisor at Virginia Tech, addressed this problem with camera trapping – setting up cameras in the middle of the jungle to “capture” animals not otherwise seen. Kelly, a pioneer in the use of camera trapping and statistical modeling of wildlife and quantitative research to determine animal densities in the wild, uses long-term data collection in place of extrapolations of short-term research. The Kelly lab group (the Wildlife Habitat and Population Analysis Lab) is the first to use camera trapping for such an extensive period of time, recording animals 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for 3 months per year across 20 years, one of the world's longest-running camera trapping projects.

McPhail says this work can be used as a case study for tropical ecology research in Latin America and even the rest of the world, and she wants to be part of it. Her ideas on the intrinsic value of life make her want to stay in Belize and continue her lasting relationship with the local communities in that area. She takes a great interest in building community ties, engaging in meetings, working with community members, and creating lasting friendships through learning about people’s lives. She says that being a part of the local community while working closely with people to take care of the ecosystem is important to all. She wants to continue this research and keep working in the tropics, becoming an independent researcher or a professor in this same field.

This photo shows four young people lined up for a photo in front of a thatched building. In the background is an old station wagon and another thatched wooden building. — From left, Jaguar Project leaders David Lugo and Darby McPhail with assistant leader Lucy Weate and field technician Ben DeVries in front of the field house in Sylvester Village, Belize. Photo courtesy of Darby McPhail.

McPhail also wants to deconstruct academia and remove pretensions and barriers, she says. Increasing diversity and equity in research and making people in power accountable for their actions is crucial to moving away from a colonial mindset about research and toward allowing all who want to enter STEM fields, she feels. She values compassion and care for others and wants to play a role in the world by somehow making it better than she found it.

"We're a part of the ecosystem, not above it,” she says. “Everything matters, and we should not care for big cats just for science or for personal gains, but for the value they hold in their very nature."