The why: Marcella Kelly spends career tracking ways to protect big cats

Perhaps Marcella Kelly was destined for a career involving big cats, something she realized when her mother recently gave her a bunch of papers from Kelly’s fourth grade days.

“Your parents keep this stuff forever,” Kelly said, smiling. “I had written this essay on cheetahs and how much I loved cheetahs. It was a one-page essay. I’m like, ‘Oh, OK, I guess I’ve always been into these animals.’ I didn’t necessarily even realize that it started that young.”

For nearly 25 years, Kelly has worked at Virginia Tech and spent time in some of the world’s remotest locations to study rare and elusive felines. The California native and longtime professor in the Department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation has clawed her way to the top of her field, ranking as one of the world’s top authorities in the areas of population ecology, management, and conservation.

Kelly started with cheetahs at Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park while working on her Ph.D. at UC Davis. Today, her research ranges from gray foxes in central Virginia to the big cats in Central America.

Kelly primarily has received international attention for her research on jaguars in Belize. She and her team of both graduate and undergraduate students are leading the efforts to protect jaguars – deemed “near threatened” on the International Union for Conservation of Nature red list — along with pumas and ocelots.

Her work is important. As top-level predators, these animals help maintain ecological balance within an ecosystem, eliminating species with potential to harm certain environments. Multiple studies have shown that everything suffers when an area’s top predators are removed.

“They play a ‘top down’ role in ecosystems,” Kelly said. “They can cause declines in prey numbers (through predation), and they influence prey behavior to avoid them. There is no doubt that large cats and other predators can influence prey numbers and behavior in ways that ripple though ecological communities from a top-down ‘control’ perspective.”

Kelly admitted her career journey had been a bit of a surprise. She originally joined the pre-veterinary program at UC Davis, but that program failed to resonate with her. She spent time taking classes in art, Native American studies, and women’s studies before signing up for a wildlife course. She eventually graduated with a degree in wildlife, fish and conservation biology – six years after first enrolling at UC Davis.

Her story is an example for students – one can get where one is meant to be, but the path may not always be straight.

“At the time, it was crushing that I was like, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do with my life,’” Kelly said. “I didn’t have the most straightforward path. I wandered around a bit and then found what resonated with me.”

Kelly made her first trip to Belize in the late 1990s while working for her Ph.D. advisor at UC Davis. She spent six weeks in the country – and fell in love with both it and jaguars.

Kelly’s research on big cats has garnered worldwide interest, but her methods for obtaining her information attract the most. In 2000, she and her team borrowed an idea from tiger researchers that involved taking images of animals – a process called “camera trapping.” Animals are “trapped” when a camera sensor picks up heat and movement and takes a photo.

“At the time, only tiger researchers had done it, and they had done it only on one project,” Kelly said. “But it was successful. After doing the research, I thought, ‘Well, this could work on jaguars.’”

Today, Kelly and her team use 400 digital cameras at their study sites in Belize. The images allow researchers to analyze spot patterns, specifically of jaguars, at Kelly’s Wildlife Habitat and Population Analysis Lab at Virginia Tech. Spot patterns differ for each jaguar, so researchers can estimate population size, sex ratios, and densities.

Word gradually has gotten out about Kelly’s work, her methods, and her success and led to her traveling all over the world either to speak or to help both big cats and other species.

Kelly has been involved in projects in Botswana, Madagascar, Sumatra, and Nepal and on committees working on projects in Chile and Argentina. Nepal offered an interesting experience when she visited there to study tigers.

“It was all on elephant back,” she said. “You can’t walk in those areas because tigers could kill you, so you have to do everything from elephant back. We had to load everything up on the elephants. … Tigers don’t really want to mess with elephants. It was an interesting experience, for sure.”

Kelly also uses her expertise and experience to help with more local projects when asked. The Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources (DWR) sought her assistance on a three-year statewide assessment of the gray fox population because of a potential decline in numbers, and in addition, on a project involving the population density of black bears, a species suffering from a skin disease known as mange.

“When faced with the need to get accurate density and abundance estimates of bear populations in a mange affected area, we knew we needed someone with experience in population dynamics and modeling,” Katie Martin ’06, ’08, a deer-bear-turkey biologist with the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources, said. “And Dr. Kelly is an expert in this field.

“We’ve had great communication throughout the project that has not only benefited the research but has provided meaningful information for us at DWR to use in our future bear management decisions. … And getting to work with a professor that I had as an undergraduate at Virginia Tech makes it even more fun.”

Amidst all the research projects, Kelly still finds time to teach two graduate school courses and an undergraduate course within the College of Natural Resources and Environment. 

After nearly 25 years at Virginia Tech, Kelly admits she randomly thinks about retirement, and she already has cut back on starting bigger projects and on traveling. She makes time to go to Belize twice a year, though, with no plans on stopping that.

Her dream is to see the Belizeans take over their wildlife ecology. According to Kelly, the native people possess the heart, desire, and work ethic to do that, but for now, lack access to the wildlife education needed to make it happen. So Kelly will remain on the prowl in Central America – to check on her felines and her friends.

“My students could do just as good a job as me and maybe even better because they’re younger,” Kelly said. “I do think that, but I don’t think I’ll ever stop going back and forth to Belize. I just have so many friends, colleagues, just people that I see now twice a year. It would be sad not to see them again.”