Where Do Wolf Babies Come From?

Glancing at a classified ad in the Riverfront Times, Bauman flippantly suggests that maybe she'll sell her eggs for $5,000.

"Oh no," Asa cuts in, dead serious. "Your eggs are too old. They're looking for people in their twenties, and you're in your thirties."

The talk turns to dogs, and why they make such poor dads. In the wild, Asa imparts, male dogs are monogamous and take care of their offspring; domesticated dogs make no such effort.

The personal lives of the assembled humans, meanwhile, receive virtually no mention. When pressed later, Asa will speak glowingly of her two grown sons. ("Even though neither of them are scientists," she jokes.) She's even more reticent to discuss her ex-husband. They divorced a few years after they moved to St. Louis in the late '80s, and he now lives in the San Francisco Bay area. As to what may have led to their uncoupling, she won't disclose. She will say that she grew up in the small town of Herrin, Illinois, a few hours southeast of St. Louis. Her father, an air force pilot, died after the Second World War, when she was a year old.

The greatest happiness of her childhood, Asa says, was to be found at her grandparents' nearby farm. "That's what shaped who I am: being able to spend time in the country, wandering around in the woods and looking for snakes and frogs."

A standout science student in high school, Asa went on to major in zoology and psychology at the University of Wisconsin, where she would earn a Ph.D. in endocrinology and reproductive physiology in 1981. After studying Sechura desert foxes in Peru, she did postdoctoral work in Minnesota with L. David Mech, a giant in the field who has authored ten books on wolves and has spent the better part of 45 years studying them in the wild.

"She was a wonderful worker when she was here," Mech says from his office at the University of Minnesota. "She was involved in behavioral studies that had to do with using urine and feces for marking territories. You know how a dog urinates on a fire hydrant? That's territorial marking, and wolves do a lot of that as well."

"I'd been interested in wolves for a long time, but that absolutely took it to a new level," Asa says of her experience working with Mech. "I was always more interested in carnivores, because I see them as being more clever and intelligent than the animals that they eat: You have to be smarter to hunt than to run away."

She went on to do electron microscopy of sperm cells at the Rockefeller University in New York City, then moved to rural Nevada, where she lived in a tent for a couple of years while working to apply contraceptive techniques to feral horses.

"I vasectomized the harem stallions," she says, growing animated. "The question had been whether the bachelor stallions on the periphery that don't have a harem: whether they were ever successful in siring young, or whether the dominant stallion in the harem really did all the mating."

Turned out the studs "did a very good job of protecting their mares from the outside males," Asa reports.

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The Saint Louis Zoo's Endangered Species Research Center is housed in a squat brick building on a quiet corner of the zoo grounds in Forest Park. Asa's staff of three full-time scientists and four graduate students, all of them women, share the building with the zoo's veterinary hospital.

At first glance Asa's domain looks like any other lab one might find in a university biology department. But on closer inspection you might notice the semen-analysis system, the machine that does nothing but shake vials filled with fecal matter, and the seven containers of frozen semen, each about the size of a half-barrel of beer.

Animal sex humor pervades the décor, from a postcard on the wall of a bull humping a trailer to a cartoon of a zoo panda complaining about his line of work. ("You heard me, I work at a federal facility where they force me to perform sexual acts against my will.") Asa herself can be counted on for a humorous yarn every now and again, as well.

Ever hear the one about the fennec fox in the children's zoo who couldn't get the job done?

"For some reason he couldn't intermit," Asa begins in her habitual jargonese. "It was really sad, because he would mount the female and try to copulate over and over. Her sides lost fur from being rubbed so much. After a while she would just get disgusted and try to get away from him, but this would be after a day or more of this.