Lydia Möcklinghoff, 45, champion of the giant anteater

The giant anteater is easy to treat as a curiosity: a narrow head, poor eyesight, strong claws, and a tongue that can reach beyond its mouth. Its life can appear simple until someone tries to study it. Then come harder questions: where it feeds, what cover it needs, and how fire, drought, roads, and ranching change its chances.

Those questions drew Lydia Möcklinghoff into the Pantanal, the vast wetland in western Brazil and neighboring countries. She died on July 3rd, in a plane crash near Campo Grande, during a flight connected to Pantanal fieldwork. For colleagues, readers, listeners, and children who knew her through radio reports from Brazil, the news carried a particular cruelty. She had made a difficult, overlooked animal visible, with humor, discipline, and a rare gift for explanation.

Born in Wilhelmshaven, Germany, she studied biology in Giessen and Würzburg, with an interest in tropical ecology and animal behavior. She once imagined becoming a wildlife filmmaker, but work experience in film changed her direction. The image mattered less to her than the animal in front of the camera.

A university posting led her to Brazil on short notice. What might have been a student trip became a career. She studied giant anteaters in northern Brazil and later in the Pantanal, where she spent long periods each year from 2009 onward. The place demanded stamina, improvisation, and attention to animals that do not perform for human schedules.

Her research was applied. To protect giant anteaters, researchers need to know how they use space, which habitats matter, and how they respond when a landscape is cut, burned, drained, or simplified. She helped turn a species many people recognized only from zoo enclosures into an animal that could be studied, explained, and protected.

Her affection for anteaters was clear: she enjoyed their strangeness, and used it to make listeners reconsider the assumptions behind human judgments of intelligence. An anteater did not need to be like us to be well adapted to its world.

Her books, radio reports, films, science slams, columns, and podcast work opened field biology to people who might never read a scientific paper. For WDR’s MausRadio, she reported from the Pantanal in a way that respected young listeners, taking them into the work of looking, waiting, failing, and trying again.

The sadness of her death lies partly in how much more she seemed ready to do. She had given an obscure mammal a wider public life. At 45, she still had many field seasons ahead.

Now the work continues in other hands. To follow giant anteaters well will require patience, accuracy, humor, and care for animals that do not ask for attention. She made the work feel necessary. She made it feel possible.

💐 Her full obituary: mongabay.cc/lydia