799: Protecting the World's Most Peaceful Primates - Dr. Karen Strier
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Hey everyone, I'm excited to welcome you to episode 799 of People Behind the Science. Today we are revisiting our conversation with our guest, Dr. Karen Stryer. Listeners, Karen is an accomplished primatologist who's working to better understand the biological basis of human behavior and

evolution, and adaptation by studying some of our closest living relatives. In particular, she and her group have been observing a critically endangered primate, the northern murakai.

in its natural habitat to understand how their behaviors are similar to or different from human behaviors. And in our interview, Karen shares some wonderful stories from her life and research. And I hope you enjoy this episode of People Behind the Science.

Every day, discoveries are made that will change our understanding of the world around us. Dr. Marie McNeely is here to bring you the brilliant minds who are making these discoveries so they can share their incredible stories and take you on an amazing journey. Welcome to People Behind the Science. Hello, everyone, and welcome to People Behind the Science. Today, I am thrilled to speak with our guest researcher, Dr. Karen Stryer. So, Karen, welcome to our show today. How are you?

I'm fine. Thanks so much for having me. Well, thank you so much for joining today. And I look forward to chatting with you about your work and some of your career experiences. But before we dive into those questions, let me first start by introducing you to our listeners. So listeners, Karen is the Vilas Research Professor and Irvin DeVore Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She received her bachelor's degree in sociology and anthropology and biology from Swarthmore College.

She was awarded her master's degree and PhD in anthropology from Harvard University. And after completing her PhD, Karen served as a lecturer at Harvard University and subsequently became a faculty member at Beloit College. She joined the faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1989. And Karen has received numerous awards and honors throughout her career, including being elected as a fellow of the American Anthropological Association, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science,

a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In addition, she's an honorary member of the Latin American Society of Primatologists, an honorary member of the Brazilian Society of Primatologists, and she has received an honorary doctoral degree from the University of Chicago. Karen has been the recipient of the Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation, the H.I. Romney's Faculty Fellowship, the Kellett Mid-Career Faculty Research Award,

and Wharf Professorship from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Hildale Award for Excellence in Teaching, Research, and Public Service from UW-Madison, and also the Distinguished Primatologist Awards from the American Society of Primatologists and the Midwest Primate Interest Group.

She is currently the president of the International Primatological Society. And in our interview, Karen, we are going to learn more about both you as a scientist, but also you as a person. So can you start by telling us what you like to do in your free time? What free time? That's the real question. But when I do have free time, I love being outside. I love nature. I love exercise and walking. I

I cook. I read a lot. I have a small number of really close friends and I love my cats. Amazing. So what do you like to cook? I think my favorite thing is I like to have friends over and sit them down in my living room and give them 20 course tapas dinners. Oh, 20 courses. That's impressive. Well, that depends how ambitious I am and how much patience they have. But I like to cook for my friends and family.

I'm impressed. I think the most courses I've ever managed to put together is like three, maybe three and a half if you count cookies after. Well, the good thing about TAP is if one doesn't come out, you can always compensate with the next one. Absolutely. Well, I love it. And you mentioned that you are an avid reader as well. And we love talking about books on our show. So Karen, do you have a favorite book that you can recommend for me and our listeners today?

Oh, no, I couldn't even pick a favorite. I love reading books written by lots of authors from all around the world. And I try to read authors from the countries that I'm going to visit. So I've read a lot of Brazilian authors and I've read a lot of...

authors from European countries and Asian countries. I think it's really interesting to read literature through the voices of people from those countries. Well, it's wonderful to hear more about life outside of science, Karen, but I'd love to talk about your work next as well, because you are doing some phenomenal research there. So how do you describe your work to people who maybe aren't familiar with your field?

So I would be described as a primate behavioral ecologist. I'm a biological anthropologist by training. Biological anthropology sounds like a lot of biology and a lot of anthropology. And it's really about trying to understand the biological basis of humans, human evolution, human behavior, human adaptation.

And my specific area in that is in primatology. So humans are primates. They're our closest living relatives. And I got interested in understanding them because I'm curious about humans and trying to understand the evolution. Where do our social behaviors and our social patterns come from in primates?

One way of exploring that question is to study our closest living relatives to understand what kinds of behavior patterns we share with them and maybe what kinds of behavior patterns are different. So over the course of that initial interest in understanding the continuities and discontinuities between human and non-human primate behavior, I got involved in studying primates in their natural habitat.

For the past 36 years, I've been working in a small forest fragment in southeastern Brazil with one of the most critically endangered primates in the world called the northern moraqui. And these monkeys turned out to be tremendous.

tremendously different kinds of animals than anyone could have anticipated. And there's continuously new discoveries coming from them that are helping us understand more about the range of behavioral options that primates can exhibit.

Certainly. And I think being curious, being able to answer some of these big questions like why humans are the way we are can be really motivating. But I love talking to scientists to understand if they have particular favorite quotes or sayings or forces, maybe outside of this big question kind of thinking that really motivate and inspire them. So do you have any favorites of your own?

I guess I think now that the most important thing in life is to love what you do and do what you love. And I have no idea who said that first, but I think it's maybe like some clothing product or something. I don't know, but I just think it's just so important to find something to spend your

time doing something you really enjoy. And if for whatever reason you can't do that with your work, then it's really important to make time in your life for things that you really enjoy. I was lucky. I always joke that I must have done something really good in my last life because this life I had the good karma to be able to do what I do to study these marrakesh. I was so lucky to get this opportunity.

Certainly. Well, it sounds like you are so passionate about the work that you do. And I'd love to hear a little bit next about some of the people who might have motivated you or inspired you on your journey to getting to this place where you're able to do the work that you love. So do you have any role models or inspirational figures that have really had a big impact, Karen?

I would say that it's sort of at every stage in my life. I've just been so lucky. I had some amazing teachers in elementary school who got me interested in science and that continued through high school. And my college professors were great. My PhD advisor was

It was really supportive and helpful. My parents, of course. So I don't have one particular person who was like a role model that I wanted to be that person. I think what's worked for me was to find the traits in people and the way they respond to things and their views of the world that resonated with me. And I put them all together in this sort of composite. And that's what my role is. That's the kind of person I've tried to be.

Excellent. I think you have so many wonderful opportunities to work with great people along the career path as a scientist, starting all the way back in elementary school. I know I had some phenomenal teachers as well that I still try and pull inspiration from. Maybe because I'm a professor, but I think teachers often don't get quite as recognized as they could. Certainly. So you mentioned this kind of early interest in science, maybe starting in elementary school. Do you have some early memories that you could share with us of when you first started thinking about science or getting excited about it?

Well, one of the things that just popped into my mind when you said that is I remember in third grade learning about the solar system. I just love that. And I don't know, there was something about being able to order the world in some way and look up in the sky and imagine worlds that existed beyond our own.

And it's kind of funny because I ended up going into biology, which is working in a tropical rainforest, which for many people would feel like another planet, a different world, entirely different than our own. I love it. So then what took you from this curious kid starting to get excited about science and the solar system to where you are today? What are some of these key moments along your path that really helped you get there?

So I think that it was kind of a confluence. I mean, I can think about it with some key like landmark memories. One being just as I grew up, I was a suburban kid and I made some friends that helped get me into nature. My family were never people that went camping or anything. So I got into nature through friends and then ultimately through clubs and outings and things like that.

And I just discovered that it feels so good when I'm outside, when I can't go outside for a long time. Like when I'm, say, in cold weather or something, I don't feel as healthy as I normally do. I love being outside. And then I would say that in high school biology, I loved anatomy. Again, just the sense of being able to make sense out of worlds you can't see. So even just imagining where all the body parts inside an animal are.

are. I thought that was really cool because they all fit. You take this for granted, yeah. Yeah, I mean, just understanding how things work and where they occur. Then in college, I was interested in animal behavior.

all along. And I worked for a physiological psychologist that I had in my freshman year at Swarthmore College. And his name was Alan Schneider. And he hired me as a freshman to work in his lab. And this was really instrumental for me because we were doing research about memory and trying to figure out whether our study subjects were rats. And the questions we were asking with them were...

Whether when people have memory loss, is it because you lose the memory entirely, like it's no longer in your brain? Or is it there, but you just can't access it? It's a retrieval process. And again, I was so fascinated by the fact that you could ask a question and then it was almost like the creativity of the science to try to figure out how you can answer that.

And with the rats, we were manipulating different features of the experiments to try to answer that question. And I love the process. I mean, it's very much like cooking in a way. There's a creative element where you sort of try to answer a question. In the case of cooking, you're trying to answer the question of, you know, is this going to come out right? Will this taste good? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, and it's the way I want it to taste. And in the question of science, it's also there's a lot of creativity that goes into how you think about setting up your question and going about answering it. And I just really liked it. And he was such a great professor because we talked about these things all the time.

And the idea that it could even be a sort of a social thing that you could talk to people and get feedback and change ideas around. So I would sort of mark that as the trajectory for my interest in science. But I did in college get tired about not wanting to keep working in a laboratory with animals that were living in unnatural habitats for them.

And that coincided with me taking some anthropology classes, again, taught by a fantastic professor, Steve Piker. He was a psychological anthropologist, so completely different from the kind of anthropology that I currently do. But it got me thinking about people in their natural environments. And then I thought, why can't we study animals in their natural environments?

So my junior year of college, this was pre-internet days, pre-computer days. I hand typed using Whiteout, if anyone remembers what that is, about 40 letters to different people whose contacts I found by going to the library and reading articles, most of them because I had never been out of the U.S. before, maybe to Canada right across the border in Niagara Falls or something, but I never otherwise traveled.

So they were mostly domestic North American projects. And I was writing a paper for a class on brown bears and black bears. So I wrote all these researchers, most of them worked at national parks and some of them were at other universities about the possibility of working on their field projects. But one of the people happened to be a program officer at the National Science Foundation in charge of the program in animal behavior. And

he called me on the phone and he said, Karen, I just, I didn't know who he was. I didn't realize then how unusual it was for someone out of the blue to write a program officer at the National Science Foundation or

Or how extraordinary it was that he took the time to call me. I mean, I answered the phone in my dormitory. This was when he had hall fund to take his call to find out. He said, we just funded three projects. I'll give you their contacts. So he gave me their contacts. And one of them was...

a professor at Cornell University who's unfortunately deceased now, but his name was Glenn Hausfauder. He had just been funded on a study of wild baboons in Kenya in Ambezeli National Park. So I contacted these three people.

And at the end of this whole process, I had three invitations to join field studies, including to spend six months in Kenya as a field assistant on the Mpaceli Babrun project.

That is amazing. My parents were like, you're not going to Kenya. It was a good experience for you to interview for that, but you're not going. But I was able to persuade them. So over the winter between my fall and spring semesters of my junior year in college, I got on a plane and went to Kenya with a graduate student who I just met during an interview at Cornell, who was going to do his PhD research and I was going to be the field assistant.

And that was an experience, again, that changed my life. When I got to Kenya, I met Jean Altman, who is the main PI, one of the founders. She and her husband founded this project, the Amboseli Bat Broom Project, which I didn't realize at the time was and still is one of the pioneering field studies in primate behavioral ecology.

And it's still in existence. But that was in 1979. I spent six months on that project. I learned about baboons. I learned about baboon behavior. And I learned that I love this combination. And I can still remember, I talk about this in my lectures to students sometimes, this moment sitting on the savannah,

taking notes on a baboon that were sitting right in front of me because they were already habituated, just thinking that this was that moment where all the things I love in life, being outside, watching animals, doing science, came into this perfect alignment. I knew that was what I wanted to do.

So when I got back from that experience, I still had to graduate from college. And I did that. And I was applying to different field projects, including some of the other projects to study bears in North America again, that had looked like they might have openings previously. I hadn't yet made a commitment to primates. But I applied for graduate school as kind of my backup plan B, if nothing worked out. And at first, it looked like I was going to get an opportunity

opportunity to study brown bears in the Northwest Territory of Canada. And that project then fell through and didn't happen. The funding for it, the PI had contacted me and he said, oh, I'm really sorry. It's not going to work out. So the next thing on my list was graduate school. And I had already applied and I had some opportunities. And I went up to visit Harvard and

partly because my roommate was going up to see her sister and we had a place to stay. So it was convenient. And I really liked my advisor. It was really exciting. And I thought that was what I was going to do. So I ended up going to graduate school and I wasn't sure what I was going to end up studying, but it would clearly be primates.

And then my second year of graduate school, my PhD advisor had been asked by his former student to narrate a film that had been made. His former student's name was Russ Mittermeier, who is a big name in conservation. He was a former vice president of the World Wildlife Fund and then the president of Conservation International. And now he's senior scientist or director of the Global Wildlife Conservation and

And he, at World Wildlife, had made a film on the Marrakesh. And he asked his former PhD advisor, who was then 10 years later my advisor, to narrate it. And my advisor knew I was trying to think of a PhD project and I was looking for primates.

primates that hadn't really been studied before to test what were current models of primate behavior at the time in the early 1980s. And I saw these animals and I thought, these are really interesting animals. No one really knew much about them except that they were really endangered.

And I liked the idea of doing science for a bigger cause. So I was able to go to Brazil in the summer of 1982 with Russ Mittermeier. He took me to the field site with some other people who were also visiting and another undergraduate who had made the film.

And I stayed there for a couple of months, fell in love with the Marrakesh. And I just knew that I was going to come back and study Marrakesh. So I did a year later. And that was the beginning of what's turned into a 36-year-long project.

Oh, wonderful. Well, Karen, it's been great to hear your story. And I think you've lined things up well, if graduate school at Harvard is a backup plan. Well, at the time, it didn't seem strange, but I do really think that's another tip. I think that helps me. It just makes me calmer to know that I always have a plan B because you never know what's going to happen. And sometimes plan B turns out to be better than plan A.

I love it. Well, it's been wonderful to hear more about how you got to where you are today. And I understand you were doing some amazing work there with the Meraki Project. So can you tell us what are you working on right now that you are just so excited about?

So the thing about Marrakees is that they are really different from other primates, different from what we expected them to be like. First of all, they're the largest New World primates. They live in these complex multi-male, multi-female groups. They are

arboreal. They live in trees. They travel around by suspensory locomotion. They have these big prehensile tails that they use to swing as pendulums, and sometimes they hang down by them. But what makes them scientifically fascinating and still fascinating after all these years is that they live in a completely peaceful, egalitarian society. So

Unlike almost all other primates, in Morikis, males and females don't have any dominance hierarchies. It's not like there's a picking order and one male's dominant and one female's dominant and then the males dominate the females. In Morikis, the males kind of just all socialize with one another and the females all socialize with one another. When males and females want to be in the same place, eat the same fruit, there's no consistent pattern about who gets it first.

They hug each other instead of fight. They've been called the hippie primates because of this, because they're just all lovey-dovey. And they're also actually very promiscuous. So females mate with lots of different males. And again, something that's a bit different from most other primates is that not only do they have a lot of partners when they're mating, but it's very much about female choice.

So something that you would rarely find in other species of primates would be a female mating with a male and other males just sitting casually nearby waiting their turn. And sometimes the females will mate with other males. I've seen female mate with five males in 11 minutes successively. Oh, wow. And then whenever she's done, she just leaves. And the males might keep an eye on her, but they don't harass her. There's no bullying. There's no threat.

and they don't overtly interfere with each other's mating attempts. So I just love, I mean, it was intriguing scientifically because, wow, how did they do this? This is such a different model of behavior. And then also it's kind of nice because wouldn't we all like to live in a world that was completely egalitarian and peaceful? So in that sense, the Marikis stand out at this model of, well, here's another way of life that

is so different from our own and maybe one that we could learn a lot from. But I would say that those scientific questions, kind of the murky pattern of behavior, came out really clearly early on. And there were lots of reasons to be a little bit suspicious of it because murkies are really endangered. They only occur in a

Atlantic forest of Southeastern Brazil, which if you think about the continent of South America on the Atlantic ocean side, if you kind of a vision in your mind of how it goes in and down, so it's where it goes in and down, that's the Southeastern Atlantic forest.

And of course, that's also where Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, some of the biggest cities in the country are. And it's an area that's been heavily farmed and there's lots of coffee plantations and pasture land. So most of the Atlantic forest has been previously disrupted, disturbed, in many cases clear cut in the 19th and early part of the 20th century. And what that's meant is the forest

are fragmented. What remains of these forests are fragments and all the primates are really fragmented in small populations. And in certain regions, there's been heavy hunting pressure. So there were reasons to think that maybe the pattern I was initially seeing was an artifact of animals living in this really disturbed habitat at low population densities. There were

only about 23 animals in my study group when I first began. And there was a second group in the forest with about the same number. So about 50 animals in this forest of about 2,000 acres.

Over time, though, the population has grown. In fact, it's peaked in 2015 at over 350 individuals and the group split. So we had four different groups. And even with all of these changes in demography and the habitat regenerating, we now have almost a thousand hectare forest. And it was a privately owned property that the family converted to become a private nature reserve. So it is protected.

for perpetuity now. What we've seen is this population expansion, lots of things changing, and lots of parts of the murky's behavior have changed, and that plasticity and adaptiveness of their behavioral responses is what keeps me fascinated by them. But

But the part of their peacefully egalitarian society has been a constant. So now we have not only long-term data from my long-term field site, but also comparative data from other sites that my students and colleagues have also began to study the murkies in other places. And it's a characteristic that we see everywhere.

So we can, I think, confidently say that the Northern Marikis have figured out how to live in peaceful, egalitarian societies and with great success because despite all the odds against them, they're still holding on.

Well, this is absolutely fascinating, Karen. And in talking about this project, you sort of hinted at some of the challenges that you encounter in studying what is a highly endangered species. So can you talk a little bit more about some of the challenges that you've faced, whether they were just difficult situations that you found yourself in or maybe major failures that you've had in your career? And give me and our listeners a sense of how you work through these tough times.

Well, we try to forget the hard times and concentrate more on the good times. So the hard times, whenever you're living through them, they seem like the worst times and then you get over them and things go on and you survive and the monkeys survive and you feel like it wasn't so bad until the next hard time.

What's been really challenging is that this is a small population of monkeys living at a protected reserve. And I need to give the name of this reserve and tell you a little bit about that story too, because it's really cool. This is a private Leon forest. The owner of the forest is Sr. Feliciano Miguel Abdalla. He's a Lebanese ancestry. His family came to Brazil when he was a kid.

And he ended up buying this big coffee farm and it's a fazenda they're called in Brazil. And it had a patch of forest in it. And he protected the forest, unlike almost everyone else in the region who cut their forests. He protected the forest and he prevented the people who worked in the region from hunting the primates.

And as a result, this one person created a sanctuary. And I think it's a really important lesson because it shows what a difference one person can make. I mean, this one man decided to save his forest when he died in 2000. His family, instead of cutting it up and dividing it between them, they decided to save the forest and turn it into a protected reserve. And today it's named in his honor, Feliciano Mingalabdani.

in the township of Caratinga and Minas Gerais. And it is the sanctuary. It's the site of one of the largest populations of this critically endangered species in the world. And in fact, about one third of all the northern Marrakech in the world live in this one forest.

And that realization, the idea that this little patch of forest, which when you look at it on Google Maps is really scary because you see it's this patch of forest surrounded by non-forests. You realize how fragile it is. And that it really became a sense that it's not just about the science and we're going to learn everything we can about these monkeys because a lot of the information that we have learned...

has become really valuable for conservation efforts here and other places. But it's also that we have to do everything we can to protect this forest and these animals. So getting the forest to be protected was a really important progress, which was thanks to the family that owned it.

And now as a protected reserve, we're continuing to try to develop the activities so that we can continue the research and protect the animals, but still generate some support for the reserve through ecotourism and other activities that have low impact on the animals or on the region, but actually could be beneficial to the region.

So we can protect the forest. There's no clear cutting, no selective logging anymore. There's no hunting. But then in 2014 and 2015, there were two years of drought. And this was a major drought in southeastern Brazil. Major cities like Sao Paulo were having water rationing and there were power shortages because the hydroelectric dams didn't have enough power.

power because of this extended drought. We had two forest fires during that time. And that was really scary because we realized that there were limits to what we could do to prevent things like that. And then in 2016, we had a nice rainfall and thought this is going to be great. It's

But with the rain came a lot of mosquitoes and one of the worst outbreaks of yellow fever in this region. And humans can be vaccinated against it. But even so, not all the people were vaccinated. So there were hundreds of people who died during this yellow fever outbreak. Oh, dear. But in addition to that, primates are really vulnerable. And especially some other species of primates that also live in our forests.

brown howler monkeys and buffy-headed marmosets. So in our forest and in other forests in this region, we saw a complete devastation, this major loss of life in the primates. And

The sense of going back to this forest, which had always been this refuge after the long trip to get there. And then you get to this forest and there's so much life and energy. And visiting the forest right in the middle of the yellow fever outbreak was just heartbreaking. There used to be so many howler monkeys howling and you could just hear the life in the forest. It was silent.

And it took us a long time to relocate the Marrakees. And many Marrakees died during that time. We lost 10% of our population during that period. We're not 100% they died of yellow fever because we were never able to recover any biological material that would allow us to test it. But it was awfully, it was the first time we saw this kind of loss.

And I have to say, it didn't ever make me think that I would stop the work. Not once. It just reignited all my energy and motivation that, oh my gosh, we can never really relax our vigilance. I mean, you think everything's good and the population's doing great. And then you have these natural events like the drought and then disease and suddenly everything.

It's kind of a scientific gift because there are all sorts of new questions we can study as the population starts to recover and we can look at the different interactions between the different species because the murkies just lost a lot of their major food. The howler monkeys eat a lot of the same foods that the murkies do. And now that population of the howler monkeys are much more vulnerable than the murkies are to yellow fever. And we lost many more howler monkeys, probably 90% of that population. So...

Now the forest is wide open for the murkies in a way, and maybe this will help their populations recover. But a million different new questions, I feel in a way like I'm a 20-year-old starting out with lots of great questions and opportunities. But it's the kind of research opportunity that you would never want to have happen because it happened on the heels of an ecological disaster and a health disaster that negatively impacted a lot of people as well.

So it was a good warning sign that what we had achieved in a way was by helping through conservation efforts and our research presence of accumulating and building up a larger population is in a way in conservation biology. There's this theory that, of course, the larger the population is, the better it

It can withstand these kinds of catastrophic population declines. And the Murkies are like a perfect example of that because the population had gotten big enough that even losing 10% didn't wipe it out. And now we're seeing lots of babies and the population is growing again.

So we lost a little bit of ground, but I think we're going to recover and I'm still optimistic. But these are really hard things when you watch something happen so quickly at that scale and there's nothing you can do about it. We couldn't vaccinate these animals. We couldn't catch them all. We couldn't move them anywhere. Translocating them, moving to the someplace might be something that we might want to do with different animals in the future.

But it's not like there was necessarily a better place to move them at this time, and nor is it a simple process. So I think really it was a sense of just realizing that because the population had gotten so big, had grown so well, had been so successful in its recovery over the past 30 years, that it could sustain these successive catastrophes of the drought followed by the disease. Yeah.

Certainly. And Karen, I really appreciate that rather than in this situation sinking into despair, you really looked at the positive notes, looked at the silver lining and it reinforced your resolve to continue doubling down on your efforts to not give up on this project. I think that's so important.

But I also have to say that I've also been really lucky to have met early on in Brazil, my first visit there really. And ever since, Brazilian colleagues and I have a team of students and former students and people who are now colleagues who were students.

as well as long-term colleagues, including Sergio Lucena Mendez, who was living in the research house when I was doing my dissertation research in 1983 and 1984. He was there studying the howler monkeys at the time. And then he subsequently started a murky project in his home state of Spiritus Sanctus. And he's been collaborating with me in kerating ever since the late 90s again. So he's

to these long-term dedicated colleagues and students and former students. So we have this big research team and we're all concerned about conservation and the murcianinus and the primates and the habitat. And science is not a solitary endeavor and conservation cannot be a solitary endeavor. You really need to work with other people.

And I'm really lucky that these Brazilian scientists and conservationists have welcomed me and let me participate and in some cases lead some of these efforts. It's just a really important opportunity. And it meant that.

When you have people to share in the good times and celebrate the successes of the population's growth and when we see good things happening and also people to share in the hard times. And when we were having trouble back in January 2017, it was after the current team of students had just come back from their winter breaks.

And it was the peak of the yellow fever outbreak. And we got to the forest and we couldn't find any howler monkeys. They used to be everywhere. And now suddenly it was silent and we couldn't find the murakis. And I was able to call in some former students, basically former students from all over Bruggele were contacting me, volunteering to come at their own expense to help us try to find all the murakis so we could get really good data. And at

the end of about a month and a half, we were able to figure out that we had only lost 10%. It was so important. And then they had just scattered. I don't know whether they were noticing that suddenly there were no more howler monkeys or that the howler monkeys that used to eat all their food and force them to travel further were gone or whether they were celebrating the return of the rains. Abundance of food. Yeah. We don't know what was going on, but it was just scary.

That sense of, did we just lose our animals? Has all of this just gone? But it didn't happen. The monkeys are still there and the monkeys are doing well. And the howlers, one of my former students and long-term collaborator, Carla Passamai, we have projects studying the other primates and they're coming back as well.

Wonderful. I think finding and building this scientific community that's willing to drop everything and come help is definitely a big success in and of itself. But I'd love to talk about some of your wins, Karen. I think in science, success can be rare. So we have to take these moments to celebrate success when it happens. So do you have a favorite story that you can share with us of something great that happened?

Well, I think when I started putting the demographic data together and started realizing that this population was growing and we were really learning how big the population had become and that there were more babies and the animals were starting to splitting up into more groups. I think that felt like a huge success as well.

But that was a process that it happens with the populations growing, but you have to sort of sit down and look at the data. And when I sat down and I realized how solid the population was becoming, that was probably in the late 90s. I was pretty excited about that. That was like, whoa, this is fantastic. There's real hope here.

But also, I think in the course of all these changes, the Americans have just amazed me. One of the things they've started doing as the population got so big, because I've only told the good side of it, but of course, they're living in this isolated forest fragment. And they actually started showing signs that they might have been experiencing the crowding that comes with lots of animals in the same relatively small space. They started...

coming down to the ground. And again, I thought that was a really exciting discovery that we were able to document early on in the process of a new behavioral tradition that these animals whose bodies are completely built for living in the trees are now walking around on the ground and eating on the ground. And they discovered this whole new range of foods that you can only find on the ground or close to the ground.

And that gets us, again, it just gives me hope because it seems like, well, if we can just keep protecting them, they're going to figure out ways to survive. And I love the idea that they can do that. Some other scientific milestones were when we were able to, using completely non-invasive methods of collecting murky dung. It sounds like fun. We were able to

crack the code of their whole reproductive biology really non-invasively it still gives me goosebumps to think about this because I just think it's such a great success and I did this work in collaboration with a colleague of mine at Wisconsin at the Wisconsin Primate Center Tony Ziegler she

She visited me in Brazil in the late 80s, and she was just asking simple questions about what she was interested in, primate reproduction, asking me about what their reproductive life was like. And at that time, we only had information about behavioral issues.

basically what we could see. So I could document every time they copulated, anytime they mated, I could mark the last time they were seen mating. They might meet when we don't see them. And then I could document the first time I see them with a baby.

But that was sort of what it was limited to. Well, she said, I bet we could figure out a way to get at this. Oh, well, I don't want to catch them. I don't want to do anything invasive. They're critically endangered and I didn't want to do anything that would interfere with them. So we developed this project that basically involved collusion.

collecting their dung, their poop. And then we could extract the steroids, the hormones like estrogens and progesterones and other steroids as well, and use those to map their response

reproductive cycles. And it was incredibly intensive research. I did the pilot study, which meant basically following a few females, we can recognize them all individually from their facial markings. And every time they pooped, once a day, I would collect their dung and we would extract from the dung their steroids.

and map it out. And we could see when females were experiencing ovarian cycles and the timing of the cycles relative to when they were mating. And then when those cycles stopped, which was indicative of them becoming pregnant. And then with enough samples, enough different females, we could figure out

between when those cycles stopped and the steroid levels never returned to baseline levels. And then when their babies were born, figure out things like gestation length. So our information about gestation length in this species, this critically endangered species of primates comes from a non-invasive hands-off observational studies of wild primates. I think that's so cool. And by the way, gestation length is 7.2 months. Ah, wonderful.

And we learned many more things about steroids as a result of these studies that we did over many years. And a lot of Brazilian students on the project participated not only in the collection of the fecal samples, but also in the extractions that we were doing in the forest. It was really challenging to bring that material back.

travel with it back. In the beginning, I would bring it back as just like dung suspended in ethanol. And then after 9-11, airlines didn't want to carry anything that would be flammable. So we were doing all the extractions in the field. That was a lot of work. My fingers would get exhausted because it basically meant pulling the steroids out and then transferring them to these little filters that are in what are called solid phase extraction cartridges and bringing those back and then dealing with customs in the US because when

it looked like poop, it was almost easier to get it through. Right. You can explain what this is. Yeah. When it looks like white powder, it's a lot more challenging. Yeah.

But we have all the permits and everything like that. But I just thought that was such an amazing study. It took a long time to do. But I'm so proud of the fact that we did this without, again, in a completely non-invasive way. And we were able to validate some of these questions using fecal steroids as opposed to urine, using some animals that

had been in captivity at the Rio de Janeiro Primate Center from other sites. But it really came out of the field work. There was all this information that was really exciting. And then also the murky genetic work, which was done in collaboration with Tony DeFiore, who's at University of Texas, and two Brazilian geneticists and a graduate student and his Brazilian genetics advisor.

And this was really cool because not only were we able to confirm what we saw in the behavior that if you want to know what the outcome of populations are, you see babies and you always pretty much know who the mother is, but you don't always know who the father is. There's no way to know, especially if a female has mated with lots of different males, as is true in murkies. So the paternity data that we obtained, again, just from collecting poop,

from the dung. In this case, extracting the DNA, and this was done again in Tony DeFiori's lab. All the Tonys in my life is kind of crazy. But we were able to show through that study that what we saw was actually what was happening, that there was very low reproductive skew, lots of males, sire babies. And we don't know if they know

that they're the fathers or not. The males are nice to everybody, so they're nice to each other's babies as well. But that was really cool. And then we saw this really intriguing pattern, which I'm not sure if it's going to hold up over time or not, but it looks like it has. And that is that the males have this really low reproductive skew. Lots of males, I think it was like 22 babies were sired by 13 different males, something like that. It's really lots of fathers.

But the mothers of those fathers of the sons, so the grandmothers of the babies, they have concentrated, they have more reproductive skills. So there were only four grandmothers who were responsible for 75% of these babies. So that was a really kind of interesting question to me because it's dented out when you look at

reproductive success in animals and who's having babies in animals that live as long as murkies into their 40s. We are just discovering now as the study goes on long enough, we can say that it's not surprising that you might see multi-generational effects on

reproductive success. And that's something that because primates are so generally long-lived, it's something that maybe hasn't been a question that was accessible in the wild until pretty recently as long-term studies like the murky study have begun to show. So that's a really exciting direction to go as well. And like I say, all of these things, diet, how the range of foods as they move into new niches like the ground,

or reproductive parameters or genetics are also all of the things you need to know if you're going to develop a conservation management plan for a critically endangered species. So it's really exciting to...

go from science, which has all these really fascinating theoretical questions about animal behavior and evolution and ecology and about the implications for human behavior patterns. And then to also say everything that we're learning can also be used to help save these animals.

Absolutely. Well, congratulations, Karen, on all of these wonderful successes. I love that you've been able to point out some of the cool places you've been able to travel in this discussion of the work that you've been doing. And I think this opportunity to travel is relatively unique to careers in science and maybe particularly for some of the field work that you're doing. So Karen, do you have a favorite place that your science has taken you?

I love Brazil. Everywhere I visited in Brazil has been fantastic. And I haven't seen a lot of places. When I was younger, I used to try to save time at the end of my summer trips to go up the coast of Brazil. And I have visited most of the beaches there.

I don't do this anymore, but when I was younger, I would just wear my bathing suit underneath my clothes whenever I traveled because you never knew when you could go swimming. It was important to be adaptive. You've got to be ready for anything, right? You want to be able to go into the ocean if you can. But

There is a really special place in Brazil that my work led me to visit. It's called the Ibechipaca Reserve, and it's in the southwestern part of the state of Minas Gerais. And it's a really special place that is owned by a Brazilian businessman named

And he decided to make a major commitment to conservation. He's reforesting, he's buying up the farmland in the area, making concentrated reforestation efforts. He financed and built a pusada for tourists that he has turned over to the local people to run.

He basically footed the cost in the beginning. And once his expenses were compensated, there was a payback plan. So the local people are benefiting. I mean, he's putting resources back into the community. And I met him indirectly because of the Murakis, because one of the parcels of forest that he owned had...

had a very small population of murkies. And he knew about this years ago, more than 10, 15 years ago, and had actually contacted us. My colleagues went to visit and they counted the murkies. And then over time, a small isolated population began to start losing animals.

And in one of the cases, the females are the dispersing ones. So the males stay in their natal groups for life and the females leave. And if the females leave and there are no new females coming in, then the population ultimately will go extinct because there's no one to reproduce. That's why females are the most important. You only need one male, but you need lots of females. So he was committed and really pushed me

and my Brazilian colleagues who work in conservation and especially are concerned with the murriquís to do something about this. And he was offering to support any efforts we could think of. When we finally were able to organize a meeting there with the group that is the Brazilian National Action Plan for the Conservation of Murriquís, he only had four males left in his population. And now there are only two males left.

And he's been so devoted to helping us, providing resources and really calling us, making people keep it on their radar. So my Brazilian colleagues have been amazing about this. And they translocated, they brought an isolated female who was living all by herself because in other populations, you've got females leaving these small places and they're looking for new groups.

But if there are no new groups nearby, then they need help. So they were able to capture her and bring her to this population. And for some reason or another, she didn't like the males. And anyway, it didn't work out the way it had planned. But now they're involved in a big project that's going to ultimately, I think, have great success.

to make sure that we don't lose these animals. And this place, Ibechipac is magical. And I think it's another example of how one person with vision who just decided that he was going to make a commitment to conservation, in the case of Sr. Feliciano at my long-term field site in Caratinga,

The vision was to protect it and keep it there and open it up to me. He let me come and build my research project there. In the case of Ibitipake, it was to protect land and to expand it and involve the local people in conservation efforts and ecotourism that could help sustain the protection of these areas and make conservation part of it. But that's what, that was a fantastic place. One of my favorite places in the world.

It sounds absolutely wonderful. And I love that you've touched on a couple of times now some of the amazing people you've been able to work with, because I think that is so important to highlight in science that we're not what the media often portrays us in films or in articles and things like that. We're not these crazy haired, eyeglass wearing, white lab coated robots working by ourselves in a laboratory. We're dynamic, multidimensional people who often don't fit those stereotypes.

That's really true. And actually, sometimes when I give talks for girls and women in science groups, I show a picture of my forest and this is my laboratory. Right. And we have cool boots that we wear. I think it really does undermine that stereotypic image of scientists as just being boring, nerdy people. I love that. So I have to ask, do you have any fun field traditions that your group does or just kind of quirky or funny memories that you guys have shared?

Well, I mentioned earlier, I was talking about the reproductive project that we call the fecal steroid, the hormone study. I just remember cracking up one time. It was in Brazil. I was sitting around at a table at a restaurant with several of my students and old former students and new students and my students at the other end of the table.

We're talking about the composition of the dung and which of the females were easiest to collect. And they were describing the whole defecation patterns of some of the females. And this one holds it in and this one provides a sample. And this whole conversation about dung.

The bathroom habits of these primates. We were joking then afterward about how strange it would sound to neighboring tables. And yet here we were describing by their name. Oh, Nancy. Oh, Louise. You know, she's easy. She's hard. She holds it in. She sprays it out. These sort of bizarre things. And it's not like we're weird people.

Everyone was worried about making sure that we had the best samples possible to do this really cool scientific research non-invasively on these endangered animals. And yeah, it was a frequent occurrence during the years of that project where just the subject of the patterns of providing dung samples from the wild animals for research.

We had such a conversation that it was a really inside joke because people who didn't know what we were talking about thought we were totally weird. I should add too that working with murky dung is actually not so unpleasant because they eat a lot of leaves from the cinnamon family. So it's really aromatic. Like it smells kind of like spicy potpourri or something. And it's sort of an attractive smell. And they're vegetarian, so...

Their poop is kind of nice smelling.

That makes it maybe a little weirder. I don't know. Well, considering the amount of scientific information we've been able to get from it without ever touching the animals. And I really think that that compensates for a lot too without any interference with them. Absolutely. Well, Karen, it's been wonderful to hear about some of the fun and funny things that happen in your group. And I think you're absolutely right here. Sometimes you do have to take a step back and sort of think about things out of context and how they might sound to other people. Yeah.

But we've talked about some of the phenomenal work that your group has been doing. And I know there are a ton of challenges that often stand in the way of you being able to answer your dream questions or solve the problems that you're working on. So if we gave you all of the resources you could dream about today, Karen, what is the one problem you most want to solve?

Well, if it was a question of resources, I would put it all into saving the murky. This is a problem. We know where they all live. We know the unique situations about each of these field sites. This is a conservation problem that we can solve. And it's really just a question. We even have the people to do it because lots of people have been involved in those projects who

could work on it. So I would get together with all my Brazilian colleagues and other experts. We would sit down with the Murinque Action Plan that we published about eight years ago, go through it and see what we still need to do. And it might involve moving some animals around, and it might involve buying up some land, and it might involve hiring some guards for some places, just two or three salaries that would help the local people

would be all it would take to protect those animals. So that's what I would do. It would be conservation. Now, there are scientific questions I would answer, but they're not so much financially dependent as logistically dependent. Well, Karen, wonderful to hear about kind of what this dream problem is that you'd love to solve. And I think

And having this conversation, we've learned a lot about your career path. And as a scientist, there are a lot of people who are there along the way for you to give you advice and to guide you on your journey. And I'd love for you to provide some guidance for our listeners today. So do you have one piece of advice that you received at some point that really helped you that you can pass on to our listeners?

I have two really. One of them, which was from my PhD advisor, Irv DeVore, was to surround yourself with people who are smarter than you are. And I always think about that. You always want to be challenged. You always want to be learning from other people, realizing that you can learn and learning is a lifelong process and other people have a lot to teach you. So that's one thing. And

And the other I would say would be something that my father used to say, work hard, but have fun. I love it. When work becomes not fun for an extended period of time, it's time to change what you're doing. But fun without work wouldn't work for me. Well, wonderful advice to give our listeners. Is there any last message you'd like to leave them with at the end of our conversation today, Karen? Finding something you love that keeps you centered,

that reminds you what your values are, and that just kind of connects to who you are and that you're passionate about, that you care about, and that's bigger than yourself. I think that is what will keep you going. Wonderful message to share with our listeners. Now, Karen, if they want to learn more about you and the wonderful work that you do, where should they go or what's the best place to learn more?

Probably the best way to start is just Stryer Lab. And that should take you to my lab site at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. And from there, you find my email. You can find out some of the projects that I and my students are working on. And you can find the Facebook page to the Meraki project and from that to the field site.

Excellent. Well, listeners, definitely check out the website. Learn more about the amazing work Karen is doing. And Karen, thank you so much for being generous with your time today and sharing a piece of your story on our show. Well, thank you so much for this chance. You can tell I love what I do and I love to talk about it. I think it's really neat.

And I hope that this has helped stimulate some people to get interested in primate behavior and conservation. Absolutely. Well, thank you again, Karen. And listeners, thank you for being here as well. We'll see you next time on another episode of People Behind the Science.