Susanna Lewis de Amable hails from England with a degree in Biological Sciences from Lancaster University, graduating in 2012.
She started her career as an Ecological Consultant in the UK, working with protected species doing field surveys and creating mitigation plans. But by then she had already got a taste for the exotic, having spent a month after graduating in the jungles of Peru with an NGO doing wildlife monitoring. It was there she met her future husband and the reason she returned in 2013, this time for 4 months volunteering for a Macaw research project while he was a local guide.

In 2015 she abandoned her fledging career to join him in South America and together they worked in the Pantanal wetlands of Brazil and the cold southern Patagonia of Chile, her husband as a guide, and Susanna as a puma tracker and as resident biologist collecting data on jaguars seen by the guests, maintaining a long-term monitoring data base of the jaguars, mapping territories, and registering behaviour, as well as giving lectures to visitors on the local wildlife.

During her second season in the Pantanal, 2018, she decided to investigate the local giant river otters that resided in the area – they are the world’s largest species of otter which live socially in family groups on lakes and rivers but due to the historic fur trade were dramatically reduced in their populations and are considered endangered. Now they face other threats including conflict with humans, particularly fishermen over resources, and rumour was that a local fisherman had killed a family, but no one knew enough about the local families to know for sure. Like leopards and jaguars, giant otters can be individually identified from unique markings on their throats, so she set about identifying the local families, the individuals of each family, piecing together family histories and mapping family territories.

During this time, her husband, Naun Amable Silva, had been the guide for AfriCat’s Karen Codling (Director) and Wayne Hanssen (Founder) both in the Pantanal to see jaguars, and in Chile to see Pumas. In 2019 Naun and Susanna (aka Suze) were invited to visit and stay at Okonjima Nature Reserve and did so for 3 months. Naun, an amateur photographer, with his big lens and a passion for birds and felines went about the reserve taking photos of the wildlife. Susanna also spent her time learning about the ongoing research on the reserve by the AfriCat Foundation.

She took what she learned, particularly about the useful application that was helping the AfriCat researchers in their work in the field, and applied it back home to her work with both jaguars and giant otters in Brazil. It helped her immensely in her work by allowing guides and guests to help contribute to the data collection as citizen scientists. As we all know due to COVID 19, the world has changed, and while she wasn’t able to return to Pantanal to continue her work there, a local research group took up the work and are also using the same app! Although unable to get to the Pantanal, they were able to get back to Namibia when restrictions allowed and escape into the Okonjima bush for another 3 months. While there she began to look at the data still being collected by the guides on the reserve, but which was no longer being used with no researchers being able to remain with AfriCat through the pandemic and has continued to do so after returning home to the jungle of Peru.

While in Peru she is working as an independent biologist with the local giant river otters, trying to implement the same citizen science project as in Brazil. The COVID 19 pandemic has forced many locals to resort to alternative forms of income, including fishing, and there is a worrying trend of shrinking otter families and even disappearance of resident families from their lakes with rumours of otters being caught in the fishing nets and drowning.

In mid 2021 AfriCat decided to offer Susanna the opportunity to continue her work with the leopard data, but as an official part time researcher, working long distance and crunching numbers! She is still transitioning, collecting data from various sources and the previous researchers, and is looking forward to what interesting things can be learnt about the leopards and other wildlife of the Okonjima Nature Reserve from all the valuable data collected even throughout the pandemic. Continuing the good work of the past researchers and perhaps onto new and interesting areas of investigation.