810: Studying Social Behavior, Reproduction, and Health in Female-Dominant Species - Dr. Christine Drea
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Hi, everyone, and thanks for joining me today for Episode 810 of the People Behind the Science podcast. I'm Dr. Marie McNeely, and today we're sharing our conversation with our guest, Dr. Christine Trey. Listeners, research in Christine's lab examines animal behavior from an integrative perspective. She and her colleagues are investigating the genetic, behavioral, cognitive, sensory, and endocrine mechanisms involved in social interactions and communications in

in socially complex animals. Christine primarily studies female-dominant species such as hyenas, lemurs, and meerkats. And in our interview, Christine shared some wonderful stories from her career, her lab, and her life. So listeners, sit back, relax, and 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 be speaking with our guest scientist, Dr. Christine Dre. So, Christine, welcome to our show today. How are you? I'm fine. It's a pleasure to be talking to you today. Well,

Well, it is a delight to have you here with us, and we're excited to learn more about you and the wonderful work that you do. But let me first start by telling our listeners a little bit about your current position and your background. So listeners, Christine is the Earl D. McLean Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology, as well as Professor in the Department of Biology, the University Program in Ecology.

and the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences at Duke University. She completed her undergraduate training in zoology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and Christine earned her master's and PhD degrees in psychobiology from Emory University. Afterwards, she conducted postdoctoral research in physiology at the Morehouse School of Medicine, and she was also awarded a National Institutes of Health National Research Service Award Postdoctoral Fellowship in Psychology at UC Berkeley.

Next, Christine served as a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley before joining the faculty there at Duke University. And at Duke, she has been awarded the Thomas Langford Lectureship Award for the appeal of her research to an interdisciplinary audience and the embodiment of Langford's dedication to teaching, research, and service. And Christine, today we are excited to learn more about you as a scientist, but also more about you as a person in general. So can you start by telling us what you like to do when you're not doing science?

When I'm not doing science, that's a trick question. I guess gardening, playing and walking with my dogs, nothing too exciting these days. Travel is always a top priority, but free time is scarce. I totally understand. Tell us a little bit more about your dogs. I'm a dog crazy person myself. So what kind do you have?

I have a black and tan coonhound, female, and then she bred with a Catahoula male that I have. So I have their son who is part Catahoula, part black and tan coonhound.

Oh, they sound beautiful. Do they get to travel with you at all? Not really. Usually my travel requires plane rides that are not their favorite thing. Completely understand. Well, Christine, it's great to get a window into some of your hobbies outside of science, but I'd love to chat about your work as well. So can you tell me how you describe what you do to someone who's not familiar with your specific research or your field?

There's not a simple caption that encapsulates it all, but I say that I study animal behavior from an integrative perspective.

And I focus on socially complex mammals, so including primates and carnivores. And I'm interested in the mechanisms, the things that make social animals tick and relate to one another and communicate with one another. And that can be anything from a genetic mechanism to a behavioral, cognitive, olfactory, other sensory endocrine, for example.

I like it. Well, you've piqued my interest, Christine. I look forward to chatting more about some of these projects that you're working on as we go through our conversation today. But let me start first by talking a little bit about what motivates you. I think scientists in general are often very excited about the subjects that they're studying. But I love to gather motivational quotes and sayings, little pieces of inspiration that me and our listeners can use in our own lives. So do you have a favorite quote or a saying or something that really motivates you?

I guess I would say the thing that motivates me the most is my interest in the animals themselves. So a lot of what I do is question-based, but the questions are focused on animals that are really interesting to me. So very undisputed.

unusual animals. And by unusual, I'm referring to animals that are female dominant. So they roll the roost often with a heavy hand. And that female dominance comes along with a suite of other traits that suggest masculinization of females. So

I study animals that are experiments of nature, if you will. So that's one of the main things that motivates me is not just the question, but the animals that I can study to answer those questions. So that gives some common basis for my selection of spotted hyenas, my selection of various lemurs, and my selection of meerkats.

I know you mentioned you study quite a few different animals and even a few different types of hyenas or lemurs. Do you have one that's maybe got a special place in your heart that is your favorite right now? Well, I shouldn't say this too loudly being so close to the Duke Lemur Center, but spotted hyenas for sure. Oh, good choice. Good choice. They're just so fascinating.

You can't beat a spotted hyena. I love it. Well, we heard a little bit about what motivates you to go in and do the hard work that you're doing every day. But I'd love to talk a little bit next about some of the people who might have motivated you or inspired you or just had a really big impact on your career. So can you tell us about some of these role models or mentors or figures that you've looked up to?

I guess closest to home would be my parents, my dad in particular, who was a research entomologist. And his pursuit of his dreams and research is really what formed some of my early interests in the world around me, the environment, animals, travel, curiosity about the things around us. So I'd have to say my dad.

Otherwise, I had a really fantastic experience working with Steve Glickman at the Hyena Berkeley facility. So that was very motivational and influential.

Certainly. Well, it sounds like you had some great role models and mentors at these different stages of your career. And I'd love to talk a little bit more about the early days of your career in your life. Christine, you mentioned that your father kind of got you interested perhaps in science and travel. Can you tell us when you first started getting excited about science? Do you have particular memories of things that you did or what was going through your mind?

Well, we grew up traveling with him. So I was born overseas, raised overseas and traveled throughout all of that time. He was a research entomologist who worked in biocontrol. So essentially looking for the good bugs that ate the bad bugs to control pests in the US primarily.

So, we were always on collection trips, devising ways to collect insects and their parasites. And that just meant that family trips were always outdoors and not necessarily in tourist destinations, but in the communities, in the countryside, in the forests, in the desert, wherever there was a relevant insect to look for. So, that just sort of opened up my eyes to the environment, the interactions between animals.

the communities, the ecosystems. So I can't necessarily point to the earliest experience because they were from day one. I had a passport by the time I was a couple months old. You were fully immersed. Yeah.

I guess it was sort of an unusual upbringing and people around us in our neighborhood recognized that. So if they ever came across an injured animal, they would bring it to my house because Dr. Dre, meaning my father, would know what to do.

So yeah, it was always a hub of activity and a hub of species diversity from our pets to animals that we were temporarily caring for and just the other animals that you would see while traveling. And I was particularly interested to the furry kind rather than the insect kind. So the large mammals of Africa always held a special place in my heart.

Gotcha. So even from that early age, did you kind of realize that this was a career that you wanted to pursue or was it off the radar for you? It was off the radar in terms of a

a professorship, for instance. So that came later. But the passion for the natural world around me was present from the get-go, but how I came to study, it was not necessarily a laid out plan. I didn't go through that whole college of your choice kind of experience that many people do. I went to schools overseas and we didn't have career fairs or advice about picking colleges, what

to do career-wise and so forth. So it was kind of haphazard. So can you tell us a little bit more then about how you went from this curious kid, maybe with an attraction particularly towards mammals and understanding them, to where you are today? What are some of these key moments that really helped you get there?

Well, I think my father being transferred to the States when I was about 19, although a difficult transition, was probably key to facing undergraduate school and choosing a major and ultimately pursuing graduate school. So I don't know if that would have happened necessarily if I had stayed in Europe.

So, Christine, I love hearing a little bit more about how scientists' passions began for the fields and the work that they're doing. And you mentioned that this move to the United States was a big transition for you, and then you enrolled in undergraduate. Can you talk a little bit about your undergraduate experience and whether you were able to participate in research then?

I was able to participate in research. I think I thought it out in particular because I was having such a hard time with the transition. Moving from Paris to Beltsville, Maryland was a bit of a culture shock in the 80s. So I'm afraid to say I was very motivated to leave as soon as possible and as often as possible. And one of those experiences was to go

go to Australia and participate in a study of bowerbirds and their mating behavior. So that was just an experience in a beautiful part of Australia that was so rich with different species and curious critters and was just absolutely fascinating. So ultimately, even though that was on birds,

They were amazingly sophisticated in their behavior and unusual in their courtship and so forth. So that trip to Australia was particularly enlightening for my professional track. Certainly. And then you made that decision to then continue on to graduate school at Emory University. Can you talk a little bit about your experience there? Well, it happened a little bit with a delay. So I ended up working at the National Institutes of Health in Pennsylvania.

in Bethesda, Maryland for a few years doing real science, sort of hardcore looking at the effects of diabetes on vision.

It was important work, but it wasn't where my heart was. And I think that's part of the trajectory. So knowing what you like to do and knowing what you don't necessarily like to do are somewhat equally important. So it wasn't until I had been working in a ultra microscopy lab for a few years that I realized I was curious about the scientific process. I enjoyed being able to pose questions, designations.

design studies, conduct the research to answer those questions. But the push for being able to design my own questions was in areas that were of particular interest to me were what really led me to go to graduate school with somewhat of a delay from graduating from undergrad. Can you talk about then some of these key moments from graduate school on, maybe just touch a little bit on your graduate school experience and then your subsequent postdoc experiences?

Well, my graduate experience, which was at Emory, as you said, was doing research at the Yerkes Regional Primate Center, which has a field station associated with Emory. So it was these large enclosures for outdoor housing of large groups of animals. So that's what really got me interested in the social interactions. I was working with rhesus macaques and studying behavioral endocrinology, so how hormones

change over the course of seasons or different life stages or for animals of different social status and how those hormonal changes influence behavior. So really looking at mechanisms to understand social

social interactions and social behavior. And I ended up becoming interested in these effects of dominance and looked at that for my own dissertation, which was more on learning behavior. How is it that animals learn and perform a task that they know? How do they do so if they are high-ranking versus low-ranking?

So it had some parallels to human societal issues and questions. So my dissertation research was basically showing that

dominant and subordinate animals could learn equally well, but their performance would be inhibited under certain circumstances. So then I really became interested in this powerful effect of dominance and kind of guiding behavior or limiting expression of behavior. And I think that was when I heard about some new studies coming out of the Berkeley Hyena Facility that just really completely captivated me. And I was...

probably for one of the only times in my life really drawn to a particular species and a particular question. And I pursued that with great vigor, I guess, and wrote a grant to get a position funded out there. And once I got it, headed to the Bay Area. Wonderful. So can you tell us a little bit about what drew you then to Duke University afterwards?

Well, I was working at Berkeley on the only captive hyena population in the world, which actually made it a little bit challenging to move on to the next position. What do you do when you've funneled yourself down a very narrow, highly specialized trajectory? So what drew me to Duke was I

I had already been looking to see how I could continue my interests but make them broader, if you will. So I had already identified lemurs as a comparative group that would be very interesting.

because they were known to be female dominant, but there wasn't so much information about that other suite of traits that I was talking about earlier. And yet I had seen some very early studies that had commented on the unusual morphology of lemurs. So I was interested to see if there was a link between those traits. And lo and behold, a position was advertised.

looking for a reproductive endocrinologist to work on lemurs at the Duke Lemur Center. So it was almost kismet that there was actually a fit to be so specialized and yet to be able to fit the bill for something that was being advertised was really quite remarkable. So I didn't see myself as an anthropologist and yet it was a perfect opportunity. So that's what drew me to Duke was the Duke Lemur Center and the diversity of animals that they have.

The fact that they're in these beautiful outdoor forested enclosures and live socially semi-free ranging in a very naturalistic habitat. It was perfect.

Absolutely. I'm glad you hinted at this point of being open-minded when you're looking to take that next stage in your career and sort of being ready to jump on any of those opportunities that might come your way that look like the perfect fit, even though, like you said, you weren't necessarily ready to be labeled as an anthropologist, but you've touched on some different projects that you've been able to work on over the course of your career, Christine, but I'd love to chat about some of the projects that are ongoing in your lab right now. So do you have a particular project you are particularly excited about that you want to tell me and our listeners more about today?

Well, I have two main projects that are ongoing. One, we finished the data collection, but it's a culmination of some six years of research on meerkats in the Kalahari. So that is, again, another species that is female dominant and I was interested in hormonal mechanisms underlying that female dominance.

and was able to do a field manipulation of hormones which is quite rare and was quite exciting. The results from that project are really interesting so it's kind of an exciting time to tie that up and get that published and out there. So a lot of work still ongoing with analyzing meerkat data. And then another project for which I'm currently funded is looking at lemurs.

using the Duke Lemur Center animals and looking at effects of antibiotics on the health, well-being, recovery of animals and the effects on their chemical signaling. So there's been a lot of recent work on understanding the microbiome of animals, so how those billions of microscopic critters that live within us are actually influencing our behavior and

This is sort of adding a new mechanism, which is the microbial diversity within us. So up until now, I had been focusing on the animal itself and its endogenous systems within and how those affected the interactions of the animal with its peers and group members. And now this is actually looking at another level, which is the interaction of that organism

organism, but now as a host to all of these microorganisms living within it and with which it has formed a symbiotic relationship. As an example of that, lemurs are heavily olfactory critters, so they scent mark their environment, they scent mark one another and communicate through these chemical signals.

These chemical signals have long been thought to be influenced by the bacteria that live within the scent glands. Now, with the advent of new genetic techniques that allow us to separate out the genetic material of these cells,

microbiota, we can now assess them and evaluate them, describe them and understand their function more completely. So that is what this ongoing project is about, is looking at how antibiotics might negatively impact our microbiome and might change how we communicate with others, how

how we can handle the digestion of the food that we eat and so forth. And so this is sort of a hot area of research right now and we're exploring it from a somewhat unique perspective.

Absolutely. And Christine, both of these projects are absolutely fascinating. And I can imagine in sort of envisioning the experiments that must go into them that there are quite a few challenges that you encounter. And I know there are a variety of different problems you have to overcome as a scientist. So do you have a story of a challenge or a problem or a failure that you experienced at one point in your career that you were able to overcome? And you can tell me and our listeners about it.

I don't know if I'd call it a failure, but it was definitely a challenge, which was that the research we conducted on the meerkats out in the Kalahari occurred during an unprecedented drought. So here we have all this investment in time to secure the grants to fund this research, getting out a whole team to go out to the Kalahari, live there, learn about the animals and study them. And essentially, we

We were trying to look at mothers while they were pregnant and then follow their offspring once they were born all the way through to adulthood. So it was a transgenerational study looking at the hormone concentrations of the moms while they're pregnant, how those hormones affected their behavior, and

and then how those hormones actually affected the future behavior of their offspring. So everything was all lined up and perfect and going to plan, except that this drought kicked in. And unfortunately, the animals were dropping like flies, including animals that we were studying. And in the first year we were there, there was for an entire population of meerkats, there was one surviving pup due to the drought.

So it was, like I said, not a failure on our part, but just one of these challenges that is beyond anyone's control, probably related to all the negative effects of climate change.

And we had to cope with that for virtually the entirety of our study, which just made it not only emotionally difficult to watch all of these animals die of starvation, but also very challenging to be able to conduct the research in a prescribed time, right? Once you've started something, you can't just push halt. The research has to go on. So what ended up happening is that we found

found some pretty interesting findings related to the drought and related to how animals cope with the drought. One of them being that meerkats are a cooperatively breeding species. So the dominant female or queen for ease of reference monopolizes most of the reproductive opportunities. So she produces the most pups by and large and the others help her raise those pups.

Subordinates are physiologically capable of breeding, but they just don't do so successfully, oftentimes because the dominant female kills their offspring. And what we found during the drought was that this reproductive differential between the queen and her servants was much reduced. It's almost like the drought evened out the playing field. So all of a sudden, subordinate females were now becoming male.

reproductively successful to the point that they were almost as reproductively successful as the dominant female. So this bizarre ecological event, which in the grand scheme of things isn't out of the realm of normal in the Kalahari Desert, right, to have extra arid spells, showed that

There are other factors that influence the behavior of animals, including in this case, what their breeding system looked like in ways that were unexpected and in ways that you couldn't study without a really long-term focal study on the species.

that included good times and bad times. But it provided some insight into how animals cope with the elements, including not only their social group members, but their environment by modifying their strategies accordingly. Certainly. Well, Christine, thank you for sharing this story of a difficult time that you went through. And I am really impressed by your ability to really take away valuable information and sort of pivot your project so that it wasn't a complete loss, even though the original study could not be conducted as you planned.

Well, we managed to conduct the original study. We just didn't achieve the sample sizes that we had hoped to achieve. So we'll see if the reviewers will be kind in accepting. The findings were profound. It's just, do we have enough numbers to convince people of that? So the challenge remains to be resolved. Well, Christine, we don't just want to talk about the difficult times. I would love to talk about one of your successes next. So do you have a favorite success story from your life or career that you want to share with us?

Well, I guess sometimes the favorite success stories are the ones that you weren't necessarily anticipating. So I'd say one of those came from research with the hyenas.

where we had hypothesized something, which seemed like a very reasonable hypothesis, and our results didn't support that at all. But in the process, we ended up being able to resolve a question that has been around since the time of Aristotle. So that made me feel pretty good to just be able to

answer a question that has been puzzling naturalists and evolutionary biologists for such a long time. So what was the question? Well, the question revolves around one of the female spotted hyenas' unique traits, which is that she doesn't have the same external reproductive morphology that other females do. And she essentially has to give birth through a structure that for all intents and purposes is a

akin to a penis. So a female mammal who has to give birth through a male structure, the why and how of that has been intriguing people for a very long time, as you can well imagine. She's the only female on the planet that does this. And the belief was that she had this structure in place because of the high levels of testosterone that she would have been exposed to while a fetus

and that these high testosterone concentrations would have masculinized her. And what evolution would have been selecting for is for the effects of androgens on aggressive or dominance behavior. In other words, spotted hyenas have the most extreme form of scramble competition for food, which means they hunt their food collectively, they take it down as a group, and then they also have to eat it as a group

which means if you aren't fast and you don't have a seat at the table, you don't get to eat. They wolf down a full-grown wildebeest in a matter of minutes. So what that means is that if

If you're a female and you're either pregnant or have young, your priority is to make sure that you eat well to produce milk or that your cubs get to eat well to survive. And the only way they can do that is through ensuring their own dominance, which they do through aggression.

So you're selecting for exposure to hormones that mediate aggression. And what you might get as a side effect is the selection for all of the things that androgens mediate, including the differentiation of genitalia. So while you might be selecting for androgens because it gives you a benefit to being dominant, you might get

as a side effect, masculinized female genitalia. And that could be a reproductive cost that you would bear in order to get the benefit of getting a seat at the table. So that was the guiding

model. And what we did was we blocked those androgens while females were pregnant and saw that it didn't majorly alter their genital structures. It reduced the sex difference between males and females, but not to the point that you didn't have this pinaform structure in the female. So

So what it was suggesting instead was that there was a genetic mechanism in addition to an endocrine mechanism and that those two mechanisms were working together to produce this unusual structure. Very interesting. Well, Christine, I have to ask, how did you celebrate when you started to uncover the mysteries of one of these long unanswered questions?

I think at most you go out and have a drink. We may have gone to see the Lion King and cheered for the hyenas. I think we need to work harder on how we celebrate these things.

It sounds like it. You've got time. You've got time. Start to work on those parties and celebrations. Well, you know, academia is all about delayed gratification, right? You write a grant and you're all excited. Oh, this is great. But you don't find out for six months to a year whether or not you're going to get the money. And if you do, you're like, oh, well, that's good. Right.

It's so delayed from the initial submission that it kind of loses its appeal. And I think that you have to get used to delayed gratification. Absolutely. I think it helps maybe reduce the sting, though, when you get those rejections. You're like, I've moved on mentally anyway. Yeah, I've moved on. So what we do in my lab is we celebrate submissions.

Oh, cool. How do you celebrate? Well, we have a little lab party and champagne, nice food, mark the moment. Then regardless of the outcome, you've at least enjoyed one moment. It's all part of the process, of course. Yeah. Well,

Well, Christine, thank you so much for talking about one of these exciting successes and how you celebrate the successes in your laboratory. And I'd love to jump outside of the world of science for just a moment here to talk a little bit about what you are reading. We love getting book recommendations from everybody we have on our show. So do you have a particular book that you've enjoyed, whether it's a science book or a non-science book that you can share with me and our listeners today?

Now you're going to see the real sad truth, which is that I'm so busy reading academic material that I just don't have much time for reading for fun. It can be an old book, too, if you have one that you liked when you were younger. I liked A Prayer for Owen Meany. I just liked the story about this little boy who had so many challenges in life and how he overcame them and how he impacted the people around him.

Well, Christine, we will add a prayer for Owen Mime to our reading list on our website if our listeners are in search of their next great book to read. And we've talked about some of the different projects that you've worked on over the course of your career and sort of hinted at the fact that you have a lot of opportunities to travel, to do work in the field, and also to go to conferences to share your work with other scientists. And I think this is a great aspect of the career that not everybody realizes is part of it. So do you have a favorite place that your science has taken you, Christine, that you can tell me and our listeners about today?

I think I would say Namibia holds a special place in my heart. The travel I did there for research on brown hyenas in particular, as well as a little bit on spotted hyenas and assisting a colleague with some lion and leopard work. It was just a fabulous place to be.

It's a little bit the road less traveled when it comes to the safari destinations that people take. So there's a lot fewer people, which is particularly appealing to me. I had a growing love of deserts, which I hadn't necessarily realized. But I guess given that I was born in the Sahara, it's not too unexpected. You've come full circle, right? Yeah, I've come full circle. A

A lot of people think of deserts as these barren wastelands, but the fact that they're so inhospitable and yet animals, plants manage to still eke out a living there is pretty fascinating. And I think there's just real beauty in these large expanses that are seemingly untouched. So I had the privilege of working behind the security lines of southern Namibia in the De Beers Diamond Mines.

So it's been an area that has been closed off to the public since Namibia's discovery of their first diamonds, which I think was in 1903 or something like that. So it's de facto the longest stretch of protected coastline in the world.

So it just felt like a real privilege to be able to see a place that very few people have seen, to be able to appreciate the wildlife, the fauna, flora of this inhospitable place. The weather is extreme. The terrain is extreme. It's the closest I think I'll ever get to feeling like I'm walking on the moon. And it just has this rawness and ruggedness about it that I

I found very appealing seeing these mainland seal breeding colonies that would be visited by brown hyenas, like they're going down to a pumpkin patch. It was just remarkable. But also it's a country that I had the good fortune of visiting pretty thoroughly. There are still places I didn't get to see, but

Damaraland was breathtaking and the Caprivi Strip was very interesting. So getting to spend a day hunter gathering with the San Bushmen, just lots of great memories.

Well, Christine, it sounds absolutely phenomenal. And I think throughout our conversation, you've sort of hinted at some of the wonderful people you've been able to work with either in your laboratory or sort of over the course of your career, the different mentors and advisors you had. And I think the people are part of what makes science great. And I think there are a lot of stereotypes out there about what scientists are like. And we try to break some of those on our show by talking about some of the fun things that scientists do when they're together or just some of the quirky traditions that spring up or fun personalities that you get to meet.

So do you have a story of yours that kind of shows this human side of science that you can share with us today? Well, I think part of the people that you didn't mention are my students. So not just the people who have influenced me as mentors, but the people that I get to welcome into my lab and see develop over the course of however many years that they're with me, either as undergraduates, graduates, postdocs. I think that's one of the

real strong points about being a scientist is not just being able to benefit from other people during your own personal trajectory, but being able to select the people who will join your lab and form a community, if you will.

of people with shared interests with whom you go traveling to field sites, with whom you do the research out in the bush or the desert or the jungle or wherever your project takes you. So I think that part is really influential and satisfying in a way that being mentored and receiving other people's insights is a great privilege.

but also being able to influence others and help them along their trajectory. That's also one of the great benefits of a career in academia or in science. Definitely. And I understand you've had some wonderful students come through the lab. Do you have an example of a funny or maybe an unexpected experience that you shared with students, whether it was in the field or in the lab? Well, I guess working in the Kalahari area,

It was hard work. It was day in, day out. And ultimately, we managed to take a break with the members of my team and I was able to take them to the Halahadi on a little excursion into Botswana for our own little safari. So that was fun. It's a nice bonding experience. It's time away from work. So it's well-deserved.

just to get to be tourists, if you will. Oftentimes the travel, it sounds great and it is great and you go to faraway places, but oftentimes you go to that faraway place and that's where you spend your entire time. So it's maybe less exotic than people might think. You've gone all this way and literally you spend your whole life in a couple square kilometers.

So yeah, those breaks are few and far between, but they're great when they happen. And whether you spot an animal that you hadn't seen before or hadn't seen in a while, or you're just seeing them living in a new, a different environment than where you've seen them before, lots of good times associated with those things. Definitely. Well, Christine, thanks so much for sharing some of these travel experiences because I think you're absolutely right.

right? There are so many memorable moments in the field, but it's maybe not the same situation that you experience out there in the field as a lot of people imagine it would be. Like you said, you're spending a lot of time in the one place where your study is being conducted, collecting the data and trying to answer these big questions that you're working on in the lab. And I know there's often a lot of things that prevent you from answering the questions you would love to answer. So if things like funding and technology and feasibility and all of these normal barriers in science are

were not a problem. What is the one question, Christine, that you are just dying to know the answer to?

I think I felt like I didn't get to do what I wanted to do with the brown hyenas in Namibia. It was a timing thing, I think, between having to establish myself in an anthropology lab versus wanting to do research that may not have had an anthropological focus. So I think continuing work with brown hyenas to ask questions that I didn't really get to ask or see to fruition

So there's part of that need to want to finish up what you started. I also had the opportunity to work on mandrills in Gabon and they are not at all a female dominant species. And so they were kind of the exception to the rule. And I think sometimes it's really good to ground yourself and study something completely different to get things in perspective and appreciate the diversity.

So, do I have a particular species that I would like to work on for that? Maybe not necessarily off the top of my head, but there are so many interesting critters out there that going back to some of the ones that I started to work on but didn't really go as far as I would have liked to or some questions that remain unresolved and still merit further investigation.

Certainly. Well, great to hear about some of these unanswered questions. And I know I myself am quite the completionist, so I can totally feel your pain here. Having these questions that you want to answer, you're at a point in your career where you need to move on and work on other things. And I think there's a lot of great advice that you receive over the course of your career from different sources, Christine. So is there a piece of advice that you received that really helped you that you can share with me and our listeners today? I guess one of the best pieces of advice that I received is to listen to the data and

I think there are perhaps too many people who might have agendas in terms of what they want to find, in terms of what fits the story that they've been pursuing for a long time. But I think that the interesting findings really come from letting the data answer the questions and listening to what the results are telling you as opposed to trying to put a spin on things.

I think that's great advice. I think that's one of the challenges as a scientist because you go in oftentimes with hypotheses and you have these ideas preconceived about how things might be working. And it's difficult not to just sort of fit the data into your already preconceived ideas of how a system should work. Yeah. Academia is becoming more...

of a business model, which I have found to be very disappointing in all honesty. The whole pressure to get grant money, the pressure to publish in high profile journals, some people might think that it's having a good effect. I'm not one of those people. I think it actually hinders some of the creativity.

and pursuit of intellectual questions for their own merit. There's a push to follow the money. Someone makes a discovery and it's all exciting. And so then everybody follows that for a while until something changes and they start veering off in another direction. And I think just

Being true to the questions that are of interest to you, sometimes it can be hard to maintain that in this new business model of academia.

And I think that in some ways that's related to also how you interpret. I think conservative interpretations tend to be truer and the push is to maybe overstate some things at times, not to get too negative, but academia was about freedom of intellectual pursuit. And I think some of that is being lost.

Well, I think you've brought up some really important points here and you're certainly not alone in having these struggles. And I think you provided some really great advice to follow that data, follow those questions that you're pursuing rather than being distracted by all the shiny objects that are coming up here. So do you have any other last piece of advice or a last message of inspiration that you want to share with our listeners at the end of our call here today?

I guess, to be fearless and resolute in pursuing your dreams because it does take passion, it takes dedication, and it takes resolve at times and to not lose sight of that in a field that can be laden with delayed gratification.

Well, Christine, a wonderful note to end our interview on today. And I think such an important message for our listeners out there. And we really appreciate you sharing your time and your insights with us. And if our listeners want to learn more about you and the wonderful work that you do, where should they go or how should they get in touch?

Well, if they had direct questions, they could email me at cdrea.duke.edu. Or if they're more interested just in learning more about research and publications and the lot, they could visit my website, which is draylab at Weebly, I think, something like

that. You've got lots of great pictures of lemurs and hyenas and stuff on there as well, which are fabulous listeners. And meerkats. And meerkats, yeah. And lab members. We can't forget them. And lab members. Now, it would definitely not exist without the lab members. It takes a village.

That's right. Well, listeners, definitely check out that website. Get in touch with Christine if you have any questions. And Christine, it's been such a pleasure to chat with you today. Thank you for joining us on the show. Likewise. Thank you for having me. And listeners, wonderful to have you with us here as well today. We'll see you next time on another episode of People Behind the Science.