Damien Caillaud
Description: Damien Caillaud is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Evolutionary Wing in the Department of Anthropology at UC Davis. As a behavioral ecologist, his research looks into the social behavior and movement patterns of primates and other animals. In this episode we talk about his work researching Mountain Gorillas in Central Africa and what we can learn about our own lives by studying the behaviors of these primates. Additionally we explore how his long term field research is conducted and how conservation, although critical, is not a one size fits all solution.
Websites: Damien Caillaud
Publications:
Resources:
UC Davis Gorilla Expert in New Documentary
Courses:
ANT 001 - Human Evolutionary Biology
ANT 155 - Primate Conservation Biology
ANT 159 - Disease Outbreaks in Humans and Other Primates
ANT 291 - Data Analysis Using R
Show Notes:
[0:00:02] Introduction and Background of Professor Damien Caillaud
[0:03:06] Significance of Primates in Understanding Human Behavior
[0:06:43] The Study of Behavior in the Context of Ecology
[0:10:39] Human Colonization and its Impact on Behavior
[0:15:35] Animal Movement and Migration Patterns in Conservation Zones
[0:19:24] Ritualized Fights and Displays among Gorillas
[0:24:20] Female Gorillas: Quality Over Quantity
[0:29:10] Safety in Numbers: Diluting the Risk of Predation
[0:30:42] The Benefits of Group Foraging
[0:32:29] Abundance of Food Supports Large Gorilla Groups
[0:36:23] Gorilla Home Ranges and Group Interactions
[0:39:51] Witnessing Interactions Between Gorilla Groups
[0:43:06] Gorilla Group Interactions and Male Displays
[0:49:37] Infanticide as an Adaptive Behavior
[0:53:07] Observing Gorillas from a Distance
[0:56:53] Young Males' Aggressive Behavior Towards Researchers
[0:58:44] Threats Facing Gorilla Populations and Conservation Efforts
[1:02:51] Bushmeat Hunting as a Major Threat to Gorilla Survival
[1:07:16] Importance of Knowledge and Education in Conservation
[1:08:40] Access to Information: Manga Bay and Conservation NGOs
[1:11:12] Finding Happiness through Nature and Non-Financial Means
Unedited AI Generated Transcript
Background Information
Brent:
[0:02] Welcome, Professor Damien Caillaud. Thank you for coming on today.
Damien:
[0:04] Thanks for having me.
Keller :
[0:06] We'd love to start off by hearing a little bit more about your story.
How did you get to Davis and what got you interested in anthropology, particularly behavioral ecology?
Damien:
[0:15] That's a good question. So it's a bit of a long story. I reached, I joined UC Davis in 2016.
And before that, I worked for a few years for nonprofit organizations specializing in protecting gorillas and tropical forests in Africa.
Before that, I was a postdoc and then a graduate student. I did my PhD in the University of Montpellier in France, focusing on gorilla behavior.
And yeah, my background before that is that of a biologist. I also have a veterinary degree.
And yeah, so I've always been into wildlife and wild animals in general, always been passionate about observing them.
And I'm glad I was able to make it my job here at UC Davis, and I'm able to teach students here, which I really enjoy as well.
Keller :
[1:07] Was your veterinary background part of your motivation for coming to Davis?
Damien:
[1:11] Um, not so much. Uh, my veteran, my veterinary background is, it's always something that, uh, counts in my career, but, uh, it's taking the backseat now.
I guess not really a major aspect of my work.
I study animal behavior mostly. Now I do study occasionally infectious diseases and other medical aspects related to wildlife and conservation, but it's not the main part of my work.
Of course, I'm very happy to be at UC Davis and have a great veterinary college here as well.
And I do know a lot of people who work at the college and whom I meet in the US and in Africa as well.
So yeah, we do come across each other. And I knew a lot of people from UC Davis before I joined UC Davis, thanks to the vet school. Yeah.
Keller :
[2:00] Okay.
Brent:
[2:00] That makes sense.
Keller :
[2:02] And you did your undergraduate in biology. Did you know at that time that you wanted to go into anthropology?
Damien:
[2:09] In Europe, and in France in particular, when I was an undergraduate student, primatology, which is my specialty, is not considered as part of anthropology, so it's really specific to theUS, where we study primates because the assumption is that they help us understand humans and what makes us humans.
Where I was an undergraduate student and then a graduate student, that's not really part of anthropology.
Anthropologists focus on people and exclusively people, and also extinct humans and hominins, we say.
But they don't usually focus on primates. So my background was more that of a behavioral ecologist, someone who studies just wildlife, primates being one of the taxa that I had particularexperience with, but nothing more than that.
Brent:
[2:59] That. And then do you believe that primates do shed light on human behavior?
Significance of Primates in Understanding Human Behavior
Damien:
[3:06] Yeah, definitely. Yeah. I think that primates, and also other animals, I have to say, so not just primates, really help us understand what makes us human, also what makes humansanimals. I think it goes both ways.
And that's important, I think, to acknowledge that we understand people a lot better when we put our species in the context of life in general, and you know, biological species, wildanimal species in particular, because we, we are somehow a domesticated animal somehow, right?
We domesticated ourselves, I guess.
But it hasn't been very long.
We became sedentary and started being agriculturalists only a few thousand years ago, you know, somewhere around 10, less than 10,000 years ago.
So that's really very recent in the history of hominins, which dates back to seven million years ago. That's really nothing.
So we are, you know, we have evolved in an environment where we were for long periods of time's hunter-gatherers.
And, and so studying animals that also rely on gathering food, sometimes hunting, as is the case of many primate species, really tells us a lot about how we interact with our environmentand how environment in general shapes behavior.
[4:26] There's only one human species, obviously, there used to be more human species, not that long ago, just a few tens of thousands of years ago, they were Neanderthals, for example,people know about, but, and then there were other hominins that existed before then.
But currently there's only one species, so we don't have a lot of comparison to make.
[4:49] And non-human primates, so the primates that are not us, they really, there are hundreds of species. There's over 300 species of non-human primates.
They occupy very different types of habitats. They have different diets.
They have also different social systems.
They have different different lifestyles, like some lived most active during the day, some are active at night, some have a very small body, some have a very large body.
In some species, sexual dimorphism, the difference between the body size of males and females is striking and strong, as in gorillas, for example.
In some other primate species, as in gibbons, the sexual dimorphism is a lot less pronounced.
[5:28] So having the ability to compare extent, primate species that live currently on Earth, and how the diversity of primate social systems, for example, and also morphology, aligns or iscan be explained by ecological variability, the type of habitats that they live with, the type of feeding competition that they face, the predation risk that they also experience.
This really helps understand what are the causal factors to behavior and behavioral variability.
And then we can apply it to humans. But if we only had the human perspective, would not have enough viability.
To really look at, you know, causal factors. And because there's only one human behavior per se, right? There are differences between human cultures, definitely.
And those differences are analyzed and studied currently, and also based on extinct human cultures.
The Study of Behavior in the Context of Ecology
Brent:
[6:43] And that definitely kind of fall under the umbrella of behavioral ecology?
Damien:
[6:47] Absolutely. Yeah, that's absolutely correct. So the term ecology, it comes from the Greek, Greek, oikos, it's our home, our house.
So that's kind of our environment, right? So the study of the, our environment is ecology.
[7:01] Behavioral ecology really puts behavior, the study of what we do as a human species, for example, into the context of the environment.
And I think it's, it's critical to really understand that behavior is a one out of many phenotypic characteristics that we have.
So it's the same as, you know, our bones, our skin, our hair, our any aspect of our morphology behavior is just invisible and it doesn't fossilize, but it's there.
And if we want to understand behavior, we have to use the same type of tools, use, look at how behavior is influenced by the environment and, you know, understand it.
Behavior is also kind of even more interesting somehow to some aspects, I guess some would disagree with me, but I believe it's more interesting than study of morphology becausebehavior changes, right?
It can change really quickly. People adjust their behavior from sometimes a day to the next day.
So, you are not going to adjust your skull from a day to another one, right? It's going to be a slow process if it happens.
But behavior is extremely flexible.
It is also partially genetic and partially cultural.
So some of what we, the way we behave is influenced by the environment, the cultural environment in that, that we grew up in.
[8:26] So I think that makes behavior particularly interesting. And to go back to your, the previous good question you asked about primates and current primates and what they can tell usabout human behavior.
I want to say that, you know, morphology fossilizes, right?
You can find bones or fossils of bones of extinct human species, but behavior doesn't fossilize.
So if we really want to understand the evolution of behavior in our species and what was possibly the behavior of our ancestors, we need to study extinct primates because they are theonly reference we have.
Brent:
[9:00] Yeah. And then when you look at behavior, do you think, our environment shapes our behavior more or our behavior shapes our environment more?
Damien:
[9:12] That's a good question.
It applies to humans, but also to non-human animals. So I think for our species, it's kind of balanced, right? The environment does affect us a lot more than we think it does.
There is this kind of recent philosophical trend to see our species as a species that controls its environment.
[9:42] However, it's only partially true. I believe that the environment really makes us the kind of humans we are and it's critical, but the environment is broad sense.
It's not just natural ecosystems or the ecosystem that humans have not affected that much.
Just agricultural ecosystems are ecosystem. They are part of our environment and they do matter a lot to who we are and how we behave and our cultures.
So yeah, I think our environment is particularly important to, you know, the way we behave, to understand the way we behave, the way we collect food, food always comes from theenvironment.
Always, right? It could be fields, it could be nature itself outside of fields, but it's still part of the environment.
Acquiring food is critical for our survival and reproduction, obviously.
So yeah, it's a big part of who we are.
Human Colonization and its Impact on Behavior
[10:39] In addition, humans, what has characterized, I would say, our species in the past tens of thousands of years, but even more recently in historical times, is the fact that we're a speciesthat colonizes new places.
We move a lot, a lot more than non-human primates. For example, we have expanded our range dramatically.
[11:07] It's kind of incredible to realize that not that long ago, all the ancestors of all the current living human beings on earth, they were all in Africa.
And they migrated outside of Africa, or they dispersed, I should say.
It's not really a migration because they didn't come back. It was not seasonal or anything.
They dispersed outside of Africa and colonized Europe and Asia, and then crossed what is now the Bering Strait, and then traveled down the coast and the inland of North America, thenCentral America, South America, reached Patagonia. It's really amazing.
At the same time, another branch of our, I guess, the people from our species colonize Southeast Asia and Australia.
And that was multi thousand years ago. It's a really long time ago.
And then people started getting on boats, colonizing Polynesia up to Hawaii.
It's really amazing to realize, like to see that. So yeah, our, the world as a whole and our environment has really impacted us dramatically.
And of course, we can also look at the current, Um, there's many aspects of our life that we don't realize is so influenced by our environment. Uh, but, uh, I can take some examples. If youtry to map conflict zones in the world where people fight, right?
A lot of those fights are driven by environmental characteristics.
[12:35] They are places where, um, the soil is particularly rich and fertile and multiple, uh, ethnic groups or people have migrated to these areas to try to settle and grow crops. And that hastriggered a lot of conflicts.
Currently, one of the major conflict zones in Africa is the Great Lakes region and the rift.
And in that region, due to volcanic activity, the soil is very fertile.
They are extremely high human densities because the soil can help produce so much crop up because it's fertile.
[13:13] And that's been a major factor in causing conflicts.
So I think, you know, we sometimes underestimate the effect of the environment.
I imagine someone who's focused on history will know a lot more than I do about the details of the conflicts and maybe the human characteristics that have influenced those conflicts.That's for sure.
But I feel like me as an anthropologist or as a primatologist, I would be like, yeah, Like, think about the origin, right? The very, very basic causes of those conflicts, very often it's theenvironment.
[13:46] Climate change is also part of the environment that's currently moving, and that is causing an increased number of conflicts around the world.
You know, you could see the revolutions that affected North Africa from Tunisia to Egypt and Syria as kind of a chain of events occurred around the same period, about 10 years ago.
And, but the truth is that this was triggered by increasing the price of food, essentially of staple food.
And that was due to climatic events that had affected the international trade of carbs in general and flour and wheat in particular.
So there's a lot of, uh, you know, uh, connection to build between the environment and the way we behave our entire civilization, like the here in the U S we say the civilization that we arepart of here in this university and a lot of people around us, it's built on, uh, the exploitation of one key natural resource for solar energy.
Brent:
[14:53] Right.
Damien:
[14:54] So that includes coal, um, um, natural Yeah, natural gas and fuel, petrol.
And yeah, so that's obviously a.
A huge part of who we are. Without this energy, we would be nothing. And an economist, you know, someone who is not necessarily a specialist of the connection between theenvironment and human behavior or non-animal or non-human animal behavior will, you know, not really necessarily see that connection.
But I think we're trying to understand the physical constraints and the biological constraints at the same time as anthropologists, and that really helps understand and who we are.
Brent:
[15:34] Certainly.
Animal Movement and Migration Patterns in Conservation Zones
Keller :
[15:35] And we talked about migration patterns of humans across time.
Could we dive in a little bit to your work with mountain gorillas and your study of their migration patterns within these conservation zones?
Damien:
[15:47] Yeah, sure. So I've studied, I'm very interested in animal movement in general.
And there are multiple reasons why animals move. They can move on a daily or hourly basis just to look for food and they move usually within what we call their home range. So the areathey know.
[16:06] Now the home range of multiple animals or multiple groups of animals may overlap or may not overlap and that can influence the way these animals or these groups interact. That'sinteresting as well.
Now beyond this kind of daily or hourly decision, movement decision that animals make, they also make a seasonal movement decision. In some species, they are what we callmigrations.
Animals moving in a coordinated way from a location to another location.
Locations may be close, may also be very far from each other.
We'll obviously live here in California in a place where a lot of birds migrate, that a lot of birds migrate through as they travel towards Central America.
And that's seasonal and that's coordinated, that's migration.
And in addition, there are the movements that we call dispersal events, which typically correspond to something you do a few times in your life.
It's when you move, you pack your stuff, you load everything in a U-Haul and you travel around the country to another location. But animals do that too.
A young gorilla, especially a female gorilla, will grow up in her natal group.
And as it reaches maybe about 8 to 10 years of age, it will typically decide to leave the group where she was born and move to and join another gorilla group.
[17:25] Or a solitary male that looks, you know, handsome and attractive enough, I guess, and where she will be able to have a family.
The reason why the female gorilla does that is because the current adult male she's associated with at the juvenile or as an immature is her father.
So obviously, you know, migrating or moving to another, dispersing to another gorilla group or to with another gorilla male allows her to reduce the risk of inbreeding.
That kind of makes sense. So that happens. Male gorillas do do that too if a young male gorilla stays.
In the group where it was born, it would typically get, I mean, in general, get in trouble with his father.
[18:07] So they live and they in some gorilla population, they live very early.
They leave when they are teenagers, essentially, they are about the size of a female, so quite big, not quite yet the size of an adult male.
They don't have this gray silver color of the back yet. They don't have this massive sagittal crest on the top of their head.
They are like developing young teenagers and pretty bold and playful and they also looking for trouble, etc. They're kind of very active.
And they leave and they become solitary. Sometimes they form small groups associated with an old male and form these bands, you know, basically roam the forest and look for troublehere and there.
They do that for a few years and then eventually they become solitary again.
And when they are silverback and young silverback, and they come and look for females that live in groups, engage into fights, which can be ritualized.
Ritualized, huh? Fights doesn't mean there's always blood being drawn.
It could just be a show of force and of strength.
And females will observe those conflicts and they will sometimes leave the group where they are and move on with a young male that comes nearby.
So dispersal is a very, very important, what we say, a life history trait.
Ritualized Fights and Displays among Gorillas
[19:24] It's a lot of what makes your personal story, right?
[19:29] As a being, as a gorilla in the case. But of course, it happens also to our species.
We all do that. We all disperse from our natal group, you know?
I mean, yes, it's possible to stay with your parents your entire life, but most people disperse and settle somewhere else. It could be the next house, next door, that's still dispersal, but itcould be also very far. CB.
Brent:
[19:49] Yeah.
Keller :
[19:50] With the ritualistic fighting, is there any signaling that goes on to determine that this fight is a ritualistic fight?
Because I know there's some things that, even in the wild, if it's a predator and prey, there's some signaling that can go on to know, oh, I'm not going to hunt you right now. Like, do theyhave a distinguishing factor in that?
Damien:
[20:08] So yeah, these ritualized fights, they include what we call displays.
So show of strength, right?
And those behaviors that advertise the strength of a gorilla, that includes things like charging, you know, running a short distance, making as much noise as possible in the forest or on anopen area.
Obviously, the other man is watching this and is like, okay, maybe he's strong or on the opposite, it's also possible. It's like, ah, I can take him, you know?
And the females are watching and that's critical, right? Females are watching.
But it could also be a male pulling branches and really breaking things and like trying to be as impressive as possible.
The males will also hit sometimes the ground with their fist to make a noise.
Actually makes a remarkably high volume sound when they punch the ground or punch the trunk of a tree.
When they are fast, it's insane. I don't know how they don't break their hands, to be honest. It's really, really, um, you can hear it like hundreds of hundreds of yards away. It's absolutelyincredible. Uh, if I do it, you, you won't hear it, you know, even if you're 20 feet away, uh, you'll hear me say.
[21:23] But yeah, and Gorilla's obviously also pretty famous for doing this, this display we call chest beat.
So they, they hit their chest with their flat hands and, and they are, they are larynx.
So the, the throat, uh, uh, inside their throat, they are sacks.
So structures and that to make structures that contain hair, which spread under the chest.
So when they drum their chest with their flat hands, they actually are drumming, but it is a drum.
So the chest beats and at the At the same time, the chest beat also produces a vocalization.
To make it even more, to carry even more. So they hoot a little bit, they produce this hoo-hoo vocalization.
At the same time, they hit their chest and you can hear chest beats over like over a kilometer away.
So it is really, really loud and that's a really cool kind of way to communicate.
So anyway, all those displays that exist and obviously also Gorillaz take postures, they are pretty known for that. They can actually stand with their hands, their feet as as straight aspossible to look tall, right?
They will also kind of mark their saddle of their back by, you know, moving their butt up and they're, they try to really look as impressive as possible.
And they will not look at each other. They will turn their head to avoid staring at the other gorilla as well when they do that.
[22:50] And they can last, right? So typically it's going to be look like a dialogue.
You're going to have one male doing a display, the other male will respond, and then they can stop sometimes and eat something or pretend to eat something, like I don't care, you know?
[23:05] And then they resume this display. And obviously it's a source of tension.
You can see it on their face. They have their lips are tight and they clearly, you know, show some tension and they are very, very focused on what's going on. Um, and you can last like thisfor a few minutes or sometimes a few hours on and off.
And, uh, and those displays, most of the time will never, um, lead to any physical contact.
And what happens is that the gorilla that at some point evaluates that he's not as strong as the other one, based on all the information he collected during those displays will, you know,back down.
Retreat slowly. But obviously, there's a cost to retreating.
It's like you lose access to females. And for a male gorilla, like for a male of almost any mammal species, the key resource you have to access to increase your reproductive success, thenumber of offspring you will have, and what really natural selection wants you to do is driven by the number of females, right?
So the key resource that males rely on are the females.
Female Gorillas: Quality Over Quantity
[24:20] For females, it's different. Females don't have any interest in multiplying the number of partners they have.
If a female has, you know, five gorilla males that she mates with, it's not going to increase the number of offspring she's going to have.
You see, like, there's a constraint, you know, the pregnancy and the number of offspring she gets per pregnancy, which is one pregnancy is about eight months, eight months and a half tonine months. So very similar to ours.
So there's no point for a female gorilla to multiply, to have many, many partners, but for a male is different, right?
If a male has multiple partners, he can actually increase the number of offspring dramatically.
So females try to find quality partners. They also try to find, to have access to good food, because that's critical for the health and the health of their offspring.
Males, they are ready to sacrifice the quality of food or a lot of things just to increase the number of partners.
So these are things that we observe when we study primates and we observe gorillas, for example, fighting. But if we think about it, it also applies to a lot of our behavior as humans,right? And it explains some of the sex differences we observe in our behavior as a human.
Brent:
[25:27] Yeah. And then how big are some of these groups?
Damien:
[25:31] Oh, that's a good question. So on average, a gorilla group is about 10 individuals.
Okay. typical gorilla group will have one silverback male, so one reproductively active male.
And it's just a matter of age on the back of the gorilla.
And then gorilla turns gray, silver around the age of 15 or so, sometimes a bit earlier, it can be as early as 12 years of age.
And then that male is going to have a few females, so three to five females typically, and those females will have offspring.
Because the female, the lactation period and the weaning age for a young individual is around four, between three and five years of age, depending on the population.
Females don't have that many babies, right? They have a baby every five years or so at best.
It's a lot less than we do. Like they reproduce a lot more slowly than humans, for example.
[26:33] And those young individuals, they stay with their mom, right?
So they, and their dad, they also interact a lot with their father, actually, they play with the silverback of the group, they do a lot of things with them.
But they stay even after they are weaned until they are about adult.
So until the age of eight to 10 for a female, and sometimes a bit more for a male, he can be 10 to 15 years of age sometimes for a male, and then they disperse, right?
So these are family groups, essentially with multiple females, one male, and a bunch of offspring.
So that's about 10 individuals. Now in some gorilla population, but these are rare and they are well studied.
So these are the best populations, but they really are not representative of all the gorillas.
But in some populations, which we call those gorillas, the mountain gorillas, the males will sometimes stay in their natal group.
Group. So you can end up having two silverback males, those can be father, son, or brothers sometimes.
Anyway, they stay half brothers and they stay in their nether group.
Not always, but half of the males do that, half of the males disperse.
[27:44] But that's possible to have group with two, three, four silverbacks.
Sometimes those groups are larger. So in that in one of those population in particular that is found in the border between Rwanda, Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda.
It's called the Virunga Mountains. In the Virunga Mountains, there can be groups with up to 60 individuals.
The largest recorded groups had 65 individuals for a short period of time, but anyway, it was there.
Brent:
[28:11] Is that because resources are harder to come by and being in a group is advantageous?
Damien:
[28:16] That's a good question. So there's multiple hypotheses that might explain why primates form groups.
For a long time and in a big part of the scientific literature, the one key reason that's put forward as explaining why primates in particular form groups is that it reduces the prediction risk.
If you form a group, it will be easier to detect to predator because there's more eyes to look around, right?
If a predator attacks, you will be able to protect yourself by attacking the predator as well as a group, you know, it's called mobbing behavior.
It's observed in some primates, actually, but also other animals that you may have seen around here, crows mobbing red-tailed hawks for example, that happens, right? And...
Safety in Numbers: Diluting the Risk of Predation
[29:10] And also, in case a predator attacks, the risk is diluted.
Like if you're, I don't know, if you go to Yellowstone National Park and you hike alone and you come across a brown bear, a grizzly bear, you know, it's your chance to outrun the bear.
If a bear is angry and hungry, I guess, and attacks you, which is rare, I don't want to say that, you know, bears are very, very rarely only dangerous to us. But imagine you're particularlyunlucky.
If you're alone, the risk that you get attacked is pretty high.
If you're with your buddy, you don't have to outrun the bear anymore, you just need to outrun your buddy. So I guess the conclusion is that you should associate with someone who doesn'trun as fast as you. I think that's why Keller likes me.
[29:57] And anyway, that's one reason why forming groups can help as well, right? Because it dilutes, it reduces the risk of predation when there is an attack.
There are some theoretical challenges to this hypothesis. this.
That doesn't mean they are not correct.
But I do think that there are other factors that influence that that are responsible for primates in particular forming groups.
And I think in particular, foraging, what you call foraging efficiency is increased when you live in a group. I'm just going to take one one example.
If you if there's a limited amount of resource in the environment, you know, if you fruit trees say that you can access to and get fruit from.
The Benefits of Group Foraging
[30:42] If you and you two guests foraging a given area, you move around independently, you don't live together and you go and get fruit in a tree, the other individual may come later tothat very same tree, not aware that you have been there before and not find any food.
So then you're like, oh, damn, I need to walk further. So you'll have to travel a longer distance to find some food because you compete with another individual whose behavior you don'tknow. You don't know where he's been or she's been or they've been.
If you decide to form a group, then you'll be able to monitor where the other individual has been because that's the same place where you've been.
So you'll be able to go to trees knowing how much food is available there.
So you'll be able to to visit those fruit trees and be certain that there is food there.
[31:36] So foraging efficiency can increase if you form groups as opposed to living alone and interacting with, competing indirectly, I guess, with other individuals.
Of course, there are some constraints to group living, especially if you form a very large group.
You will compete for food with other group members if the size of the food patch, you the area where you are feeding.
Is small compared to the size of the group, right? The area covered by the group.
Of course, there might be a limited number of feeding spots.
So there is obviously an upper constraint on the number of individuals that a group can have. Mountain gorillas and these gorillas that have, that I said earlier, can form, have historicallyformed groups of up to 65 individuals.
They feed on mostly leafy matter, right?
Abundance of Food Supports Large Gorilla Groups
[32:29] Leaves, bark, the pith inside the stem of plants, right? And that's really evenly distributed in the environment. There's like foliage everywhere.
And that foliage they feed on is terrestrial. So that's the terrestrial herbaceous vegetation.
And it's like everywhere. It covers the ground. It's like very lush.
So, a large group will not necessarily, individuals living in a large group will not struggle necessarily a lot more to find food because it's just everywhere, right? So that's probably alsowhat allowed those groups to become so large in that context.
Keller :
[33:01] And do those larger groups, I have two questions related to the grouping.
One you mentioned that the benefit is the risk of predation goes down.
I want to know like what are some of the predators for these larger mountain gorillas or just larger gorillas in general, and also within the geographic boundaries that they're living within?Do they...
Are those boundaries or borders understood and distinct, or do they tend to move around within a given larger region.
Damien:
[33:31] Okay, so that's a good question. So regarding predators, gorillas do have natural predators, actually they have one.
Natural predators aside from humans, it's leopards.
In most gorilla population, they are, most areas occupied by gorillas, they are leopards.
The density of leopards varies, of course leopards are also hunted.
So for example, those mountain gorillas I was talking about earlier, they, there's no leopards in their habitat anymore, sadly, because the forest is very isolated, is surrounded with cropfields and very high density human populations.
And a small forest can sustain some herbivores like gorillas, but predators like leopards, they need a lot more surface because they live at very, very low densities, right?
So for that reason, there's just no leopards there. are some middle-sized predators, but they don't, they are not a danger for gorillas.
So humans are in those forests, the only current predator of gorillas, even if the mountain gorillas again, don't really face any predation from people anymore because they are fullyprotected.
So, yeah, so that's for, for predation. And I want to say also that in almost the entire range of gorillas, there has been people living in those areas for a very long period of time and theyhave always hunted gorillas.
[34:56] It's rarely been like a major source of food for people. There's always been some hunting, right?
So humans are one of the predators that naturally...
Reduce or affect gorilla populations. Yeah. And somehow, you know, it's a natural thing.
I don't, I don't feel like hunting gorillas or hunting primates or hunting animals is necessarily something bad.
In ecosystems where humans have been present for a long time, those ecosystems have evolved in the presence of this predation pressure and they are adapted to handling that thatpollution pressure, which can also have positive effects.
Predation is positive in an ecosystem. It doesn't just reduce the number of animals, it can control animal populations and reduce the competition between taxa, between species or groupsof species, and help maintain a higher biodiversity as a whole.
So anyway, we are and have been one of the predators affecting gorilla populations and all the great apes in Africa for tens of thousands of years.
That's just how it is. Your second question, sorry.
Keller :
[36:07] Regarding group size and boundaries within the regions that they're in, do they stick to one area and they kind of know, okay, that's group A, 65 rules there. We're not going to goover there.
Does it change on a daily basis? What is the dynamic within the regions that they live?
Gorilla Home Ranges and Group Interactions
Damien:
[36:23] Yeah, that's a good question. So some primates, almost all primates have at least home ranges, so areas where they preferentially move within and that they know, right? They knowvery well, actually.
Brent:
[36:39] How large is that for gorillas?
Damien:
[36:43] It depends. It's between 10 and 20 square kilometers.
That's, you know, an average. Now, the, it can be smaller in some areas, but yeah, that's an average.
The, the one key characteristic of gorilla home ranges is that they overlap a lot. So a particular group's home range will overlap with a neighboring group's home range.
Now within the home range, there is often a core area that is almost exclusively used by this gorilla group, although it's not never 100%, but most of the homeland is shared withneighboring groups.
So what that means is that gorilla groups that live next to each other will interact with each other very often because they share the most part of their habitat.
[37:30] So between group interactions are a very, very important part of the life of a gorilla.
And they happen at least once a month, sometimes several times a month.
This is kind of roughly the rate at which neighboring gorillas meet each other.
So it happens every time there is an encounter, the males of course are kind of stressed about it, but excited as well because it's an opportunity to...
Get or lose females Depending it also depends on whether the females have babies or not of course a female who has a baby and he's nursing is not going to leave the male because theyneed the protection of the father of the offspring and now of course if there's a female that's Cycling and he's receptive and is looking to get pregnant Then there's a higher risk and moremore at stakes, at stake as well, I guess, during the intergroup encounter, and it can be more aggressivity, yeah, or aggressive behavior.
[38:26] So yeah, so essentially groups don't have exclusive home ranges.
Now if we talk about boundaries, they are natural barriers to the boundaries, to the home range of a gorilla group.
Gorillas don't cross rivers very well, they don't swim, but they are happy to cross a river if they can do it without swimming, right? If it's like, uh, you know, two feet of water, they'll beable to cross without too much problem.
And in, in Africa, very often, even big rivers, that's in some places, always a tree across a fallen tree that will allow crossing the rivers and gorillas know those places very, very well.
And they, they really have an excellent knowledge of their habitat, which is really large. And when I said 10 to 20 square kilometers, it's a big surface area.
And they know everything in their homeland. It's pretty impressive actually how knowledgeable they are and how amazing their spatial memory is.
It is, I'm sure, much better than my own personal spatial memory.
It's pretty impressive. They have to memorize the location of fruit trees and they do keep an eye on which tree is about to produce fruit and which tree has produced fruit in the past. Andthey have to take that into account when they decide where to to move, right?
Brent:
[39:40] Yeah, definitely. And then when you talk about these interactions, do you have any crazy stories about witnessing these interactions first person?
Witnessing Interactions Between Gorilla Groups
Damien:
[39:52] Yeah, I've seen quite a few of them, yeah, indeed. So like I said, my best memories of interactions between guerrilla groups are at least the most impressive things I've seen.
It was actually a long time ago. It was on a forest clearing in the Republic of Congo, it's where I did my fieldwork for my dissertation, for my PhD.
And it was a small clearing, so it was about the size of three or four football fields, so really not that big, right?
And that clearing had a very low vegetation actually, it was just maybe maximum a foot high, like really, really low, and very green, lush vegetation as well. it was quite...
And the soil in that clearing was very swampy and muddy. The reason why there was no trees, at least partly because the soil is rich in minerals.
[40:47] And sodium, for example, and that, you know, salt, if you try to water your plants with salt water, it's not going to work very well.
So only some plants are able to accommodate that kind of environment, but all the animals love it because one key resource for any mammal and any animal actually is minerals, right?
We need minerals, it's not part of our energy needs, but of course it doesn't provide the same energy, but minerals are critical for our physiology.
[41:16] So gorillas in that forest where this clearing was located, naturally, it was a natural clearing, they used to visit the clearing about every two weeks on average.
So a gorilla group would just be somewhere in the forest, I have no idea where, I actually wasn't able to study that, but they would appear every other week also in the clearing and thenthey would appear maybe the day after as well and the day after as well and then be gone for two weeks.
[41:42] But on any day there there would be at least one gorilla group visiting that clearing.
And because the clearing was so, so there was never one day without any gorilla, like it almost never happened.
So really, really, it's a hotspot, right? But it also became kind of the, the plaza, the place at the center of the village, you know, where everybody meets, the marketplace.
And, and very often a gorilla group was calm, stay on the clearing, eating, feeding on the, the aquatic plants, you know, that are rich in minerals, also leaking in the soil, which is also richin minerals, drinking water in elephant footprints, for example. Oh, wow.
Because it's rich in minerals, again, salty, I guess, a bit, the taste. And they would spend, you know, one, two, three, four hours there.
Sometimes they leave and then come back, depending on if there's too much sun, you know, they have a black skin and black hair, so they get hot and they would disappear a bit and comeback later.
But often, it was often the case two gorilla groups would come to the clearing, sometimes three.
And I remember a day where where there were four gorilla groups on that clearing at the same time.
So it's kind of amazing if you think about it, because four football fields is really not that big, right?
And seeing four gorilla groups, and I counted over 50 gorillas, you know, wow, they were only clearing at the same time. It was a big thing, right? And, and I remember, you know, thosemales, they look at each other, they see each other very well, because it's open.
Gorilla Group Interactions and Male Displays
[43:07] And, you know, if, if they would come close to each other, they would start displaying, you know, but almost like, I have to do it because that's, that's my image, you know, I got animage to defend.
But anyway, it was kind of interesting, but overall, they were mostly here to eat when they were only one, sorry, two gorilla groups or one gorilla group and one solitary male interactionswere usually more intense, actually.
So they could, they could be a uh, longer, uh, interactions with, with males charging, just beating.
And, uh, and I remember, you know, observing the males and focusing on the males and observing them with a spotting scope and really kind of recording data, but what display theywere doing, et cetera.
And then at some point I realized that actually, instead of observing the male gorillas doing this, I should have been observing the females.
And for me, that was one of those really cool moment. I was like, this is, you know, we have to look at the females because the females were looking.
And obviously this was key, right?
To try to understand and explain those interactions is that the females may move from a group to another, maybe not that day, but eventually, if a male gorilla consistently looks handsomeand everything, that female will be like, well, I spotted that guy two months ago, now I no longer have a dependent of spring, I'm just going to go and move on with this other guy.
[44:32] So, and I, I remember at one day I was watching, looking at pictures that I had made that day on the clearing.
And I made a picture of a gorilla doing a display called splash display, where They run in the water and splash essentially as much water as they can to be impressive.
It's really funny to observe. And I realized on that picture that there were two females, you know, maybe 50 yards behind looking, and they were like next to each other and looking atthem and be like, you know, he's not bad, is he?
And I, you know, I remember actually being like, you know, I stare at males all day and I should not ignore the females. Anyway, that was really interesting, I think, to observe.
Keller :
[45:13] Are there any like signs of interest by the females when they're watching these displays happen? If there are, you know, three females sitting watching, will they, can you tell, Iguess?
Damien:
[45:24] You can, but it's risky for the female. I mean, you can imagine, right? The female is with the male. So the male is also observing his females, right?
And if you're a female and you try to move in front of your male, he's not going to take it kindly for obvious reasons. It's in his evolutionary interest to prevent you as a female fromtransferring to another group.
So on that particular clearing, I never saw a female like move straight from my group to another one.
I know they do it, but because I could observe the composition of the group and see that, Hey, a female is no longer in that group.
Oh, now it's in that new other group. So I knew something had happened always in the forest when I guess it's easier to sneak out of a, of a gorilla group and switched to another one.
[46:10] But I have observed, I remember that female who had lost a baby, so a baby had died. I don't know the circumstances, I just saw the female with a baby and then a little while latershe was without a baby.
And she clearly didn't look particularly as active and she was probably unhappy.
That's my interpretation, of course, using a human word, human emotion, I guess, but I think that that could describe her behavior.
And she was a little peripheral, like she was not in the middle of her group.
And I saw her being like this for a few weeks.
And one day there was another group on the clearing and I saw the female kind of move slowly towards the other group.
And it kind of makes sense if you think about it, you know, you're a mother, you've lost a baby.
You don't, I don't know the circumstances, but clearly the male that you had that baby with was not able to protect the baby against whatever happened.
So you have all the reasons to try with someone else, right?
So that female was looking.
And I see her walk slowly, kind of, you know, not directly, they come slowly towards this other male. And then suddenly the male from the original group saw it and he immediately ran toher, right? And he pushed her down.
He basically asserted his dominance over the female by pushing her back down.
And I don't know if he beat her or anything, but the female screamed and then came back to her group.
[47:40] So, yeah. And it was non-violent in the sense I don't think the male gorilla heard the female. I couldn't see the female showing any pain after or limping or anything.
Brent:
[47:48] Right.
Damien:
[47:49] But the male really, I felt had to say, Hey, you're mine. Yeah.
And, uh, but the thing is that it probably doesn't work for a very long time.
It probably works short term, but in the longterm, I don't see how a male could retain a female.
They, they cannot herd females forever. It's just impossible to be vigilant, uh, 100% of the time, right? So, sooner or later that female would go and she eventually left the group.
Brent:
[48:15] Yeah. That answered one of my questions. I was going to ask if they ever had retaliatory effects, but...
Damien:
[48:24] Yeah, they do. And I think it's, you know, it's, I think when I say those stories, I know people are interested because it resonates a little bit, right?
It feels like, oh, I can see how at least people have those thoughts in our species, right? And even if they don't act or anything.
But there is an evolution, a reason why males and females would act like this, right?
And that's because it improves the transmission of their genes.
It improves the number of offspring they get. So yeah, another behavior that was, is challenging and was actually, no longer is, I guess, but it was an enigma for a long, long time.
And a behavior that's observed in gorillas and other mammals, but especially in gorillas, it's infanticidal behavior.
Male gorillas kill baby gorillas. And it was always kind of surprising.
And in the 1960s, there were, you know, hypothesis about how it was just an unnatural, quote unquote, so sick behavior, like a sign of a mental illness on the male side, or something thatwas not really interesting from an evolutionary, not adaptive, evolutionary really speaking. But.
Infanticide as an Adaptive Behavior
[49:37] But then a researcher, who's actually a former UC Davis faculty, Sarah Hurley, studied this behavior, not in gorillas, in other primates from Asia, and she formulated the hypothesisthat maybe it's an adaptive behavior.
Maybe, I understand it hurts the species, but this is not where natural selection occurs.
Natural selection is not intended, quote unquote, to favor the survival of the species. It's individuals that are the focus of natural selection.
And the male who kills the offspring of a female will lead that female to become, to stop producing milk.
[50:24] Producing milk stops the ovulation. So that female will resume ovulation and will become fertile again.
In a species where females are experienced anasterous, so are not fertile for an expanded period of time, in the case of gorillas it could be four or five years when they produce milk, thenkilling a young baby can really save time somehow, right?
And the male will be able to reproduce with that female much faster.
Obviously infanticide, If the theory was true, infanticide would specifically target not your offspring, but the offspring of another male.
And Sarah was able to demonstrate that this is exactly what happens.
Males kill the offspring of other males and to be able to mate with the females.
[51:12] Females in exchange, of course, react to other response, I would say, try to reduce as much as possible the risk of infanticide, that they stay with the male that the father of theoffspring.
In other species, if there are multiple all males in the group, they will mate with all the males.
Such that none of the males knows whether they are or not the father of the offspring and they will not take the risk to kill the offspring That's the case in chimpanzees, for example Andbut in gorillas, there's one male per group.
So females don't have to do that So, yeah, so this is what but what's observed in in gorillas and it looks cruel But it is adaptive, you know for a male to engage in that behavior Yeah, Ithink I've even seen some statistics on humans and rates of child abuse with an adopted father versus a biological father.
Yeah, there's a, there's a big difference. So there's, yeah, there's been studies on that.
Those studies that you're referring to were, were in the news, I guess, and talked about quite a bit.
There are other studies that have shown that actually, if you look at, you know, this into detail, the effect is not as strong. That's good.
And that's how science proceeds, right? Is that, you know, there's always an update.
And but yeah, yeah, you're right.
Brent:
[52:36] Have you ever had a male gorilla face off with you?
Damien:
[52:41] Yeah, I've had, yeah, I've met gorillas multiple times.
Brent:
[52:45] Would they do a display to like assert their dominance?
Damien:
[52:48] So that's a good question. So the way we study gorillas, it can be, there are many ways to see gorillas, I guess, for an absolutely non-invasive way to a more invasive, I don't meaninvasive in the sense of like an invasive surgery, but like getting closer to the animals.
Observing Gorillas from a Distance
[53:07] So the least invasive way to study gorillas is to never observe them, never see them, track them, track gorilla groups in the distance, you know, keeping like hundreds of yardsbetween on the gorillas, such that the gorillas never know you're here.
You can still study gorilla behavior and I've done this for years actually, just looking at food remains on the trail of a gorilla group, collecting feces, which can tell you a lot about thegorillas themselves.
It contains DNA. You can analyze the DNA of those gorillas by collecting and analyzing feces.
And also you can look at the food plants they fed on by analyzing genetically those feces. Anyway, Anyway, there's a lot you can do.
After that, what you can also do is hide in the forest and observe gorillas at a given spot. If you know they come to that spot regularly, when I was talking about that clearing.
I conducted my observation at the edge of the clearing, hidden in a little observation tower.
And that way the animals could not see me very well, or at least they knew that even if they saw me, they knew I was never outside of the tower.
So they ignored me completely.
And then there are places where you can observe gorillas and directly be on the ground with them them at a few yards away from them, actually, a few feet away, sometimes for them 20feet, huh?
Brent:
[54:31] Wow.
Damien:
[54:31] Could be as near as that, sometimes even less than 20 feet.
And these, to have such observation conditions, you need to habituate the gorillas to the presence of humans.
It's the process that can last for a few years.
It depends on the population. In some gorilla population, it takes only a few months to get gorillas used to people enough that they stop running away or being aggressive.
And in other populations, it can take five years.
Brent:
[54:58] Would that change your data? Because you're studying the behavior of the gorillas.
Damien:
[55:02] Yeah, of course, you want habituation to be, lead the animals to ignore you.
You don't want to interact with them.
So in the process of habituating animals, we don't feed them, for example. Okay, yeah. Because if we did, we would create a relationship, right?
Brent:
[55:16] Sure.
Damien:
[55:16] We don't play with them, at least not anymore. you could probably find videos or documentaries from the 1970s, 1980s showing people and researchers, and playing with the babygorillas in the mountains of Rwanda, which seems like a fantastic experience.
You know, I wish on the inside I had been able to do that, but I'm glad I wasn't able to. Definitely. Because that's not what I want to do, right?
I want to study the natural behavior of animals and I want them to, I don't want them, I don't want them to like me or dislike me, essentially I want them to be pretty neutral with me.
[55:54] So, so, so yeah. So when you observe habituated animals, most of the time the animals ignore you, but it is not super easy to do.
You have to make sure that you position yourself within the gorilla group in such a way that you're not on the, on the path of a gorilla, right?
A gorilla is not headed towards you because if it happens, the gorilla will be upset and They will not like necessarily walk around you and be like, move out of my way.
So you want to always monitor what's around you and understand where all the animals are, where they go, to really make sure you're not on their way.
It can happen that the gorillas will react or display, and there's multiple circumstances where that has happened to me, or I've seen that happen, but the most annoying gorillas are theyoung males because they have this, you know, high testosterone, teenagers brain.
Young Males' Aggressive Behavior Towards Researchers
[56:53] And they are bold, they try to not show that they are afraid or anything, so they kind of like try to compensate.
And they will pick on the least dominant individuals, so typically the researchers who are around.
They may just try and charge and drag your foot, you know, make you fall down.
Brent:
[57:14] Has that happened to you?
Damien:
[57:16] Yeah, I have been pulled down, you know, like this.
And I remember observing a colleague of mine who was a researcher and a gorilla pulls her down, sits next to her and puts his hand around her shoulder like this.
So, she was like, you know, sitting basically on the forest floor, on the ground and the gorilla was sitting next to her with his hand around her.
And every time she tried to move a bit away, he would like bring her back and he lasted like 10 minutes.
Anyway, and I, I, you know, I took pictures, that's what I could do.
And I was sort of smiling inside, but I knew the gorilla would not hurt her, uh, but you never know because the gorillas don't always know how strong they are, right? So they could.
Brent:
[58:02] Accidentally. Yeah.
Damien:
[58:04] Yeah. Now, you know, the same gorilla being really tensed or being unhappy for a reason or another could also do another type of dominance, display and bite, that's also possible.
So it can happen to researchers very rarely, very, very rarely to be beaten by gorillas.
But most of the time, these are dominance bites, so they are not dangerous per se, like they don't hurt as much.
But that's extremely rare. It doesn't happen to 99% of the people who study gorillas. So it's really, really rare event. So anyway.
Threats Facing Gorilla Populations and Conservation Efforts
Keller :
[58:44] We talked about earlier some of the threats facing these gorilla populations.
Could you go into a little bit more detail about some of the issues that they're facing and how we're trying to combat them?
Damien:
[58:53] Yeah, of course. So to answer that question, I need to maybe give the background I didn't give initially about gorillas, that there are two species of gorillas.
I use the word population on purpose since the beginning of this conversation.
But when we talk about conservation, we try to make sure that they are individuals in each known species and subspecies, right? That's the idea.
Because once a species or subspecies is gone, it's gone forever, right?
It's not a case of populations within a subspecies. For example, if one is gone, you could always think that reintroduction would be possible from another population, right?
So, I need to talk about species and subspecies. So, there are two gorilla species, the Western and the Eastern gorilla. It's easy so far.
In the West, there are two subspecies. In the East, there are two subspecies as well.
That's four gorilla subspecies in total.
The conservation status of those Because different population varies, different subspecies varies.
[59:54] All the gorillas are at least endangered, if not critically endangered, according to the IUCN Red List.
It's an inventory of a lot of animal species and plant species actually, and their conservation status in the world.
And the mountain gorilla is the only subspecies that is considered as endangered.
The other three are critically endangered. So that's a higher level of risk, right? Extinction risk.
Keller :
[1:00:24] What determines that distinction? The population?
Damien:
[1:00:27] The fact that, yeah, that's a good question. So all gorilla subspecies are declining in size, except the mountain gorillas. So that's why the mountain gorillas are no longer consideredas critically endangered.
That's good news. You know, I mean, moving from the critically endangered to the endangered category, of course, it's not, you know, the best scenario, we'd like them to not beendangered at all.
But that's good news. It means that conservation has worked and has been effective on mountain gorillas and that the mountain gorillas are no longer facing an immediate risk ofextinction.
The other gorilla subspecies, they are declining. Some are declining really, really fast.
The grower's gorilla in particular, also on the east side of the, one of the two eastern subspecies, is critically endangered and only lives in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.
And it's a zone where people and wildlife have been suffering for a long time due to endemic conflict.
It's one of those areas where there's a lot of insecurity and illegal activities, of course, happen as well as a result of this, the difficulty to enforce laws and control the forest and every areaover there.
There's a lot of armed militia that occupy the forest and hunt animals.
[1:01:49] So, in that region, bushmeat hunting is the number one threat to growers, gorillas.
There are also areas where people cut the forest to burn the wood and produce charcoal.
Charcoal is a fuel that allows you to cook, and it's the only source of fuel that can be used to cook in a big part of Africa.
People don't have access to natural gas or or butane or propane, obviously, and there's no electricity.
So for that reason, charcoal is really, really important to cook food.
And if you don't cook food, you can't eat.
So that's obviously critical. I don't blame, you know, I understand that people need to cook and need to eat.
So I understand why charcoal is exploited, but of course it's at the expense of the forest, sometimes forest from national parks. Wow. And, but it's very, very difficult to control because theorigin of that behavior is not.
Greed or profit. It's just the need to stay alive. And that is totally understandable.
Bushmeat Hunting as a Major Threat to Gorilla Survival
[1:02:51] Populations that have been displaced in particular create that need, right?
They're no longer near their home. They sometimes move to places and they end up being tens of thousands of refugees.
And whenever that happens, the forest nearby is immediately used and exploited for for obvious reasons.
So anyway, this is one big, big issue. But the main issue why growth gorillas are going slowly, hopefully not going extinct, but they are decreasing definitely, is because of the bushmeathunting.
People hunt and occasionally, not necessarily they'll target gorillas, but if they come across a gorilla group, they would kill animals and sell the meat.
That's a way to get some money and with the money you pay for school fees, school fees for the children, the hospital bill, there is one and buy some food.
It's also subsistence that we're talking about here on survival.
So you, you know, we're not talking about massive criminals or anything like this, right?
Western gorillas face very similar problems. Deforestation is not an extremely severe problem currently in West Africa, in Central Africa, sorry, but where the Western gorillas live, but,uh, bushmeat hunting is still an issue and a big issue.
Yeah, for sure. The demand for bushmeat is very high, especially in big cities, uh, in, uh, in central Africa and outside of Africa as well, actually.
Brent:
[1:04:16] Is that a preference thing or a need thing?
Damien:
[1:04:19] It's both, but when it comes to cities, the bushmeat can be cheaper than, I don't know, beef, for example, or chicken. It depends.
But it is also a source of meat that people traditionally value.
Brent:
[1:04:36] Is it sold under, like, guerrilla meat? Or do they kind of try to hide the fact that it is?
Damien:
[1:04:41] There's no sign. People just know what they're buying.
Brent:
[1:04:43] Yeah.
Damien:
[1:04:44] Fair. It's just, yeah, it's just there on the markets. It's usually smoked down, so you'll, you won't buy like fresh meat because obviously to preserve it in the forest, you have tosmoke it immediately.
Brent:
[1:04:54] Yeah.
Damien:
[1:04:56] But yeah, it's just how it is. But in, in big cities, usually if there is any, uh, the meat of a protected species like gorillas, and they are protected in every country where they, wherethey ranch, they, um, the meat will not be, uh, like, uh, ready to accessible.
It might be a bit hidden, it might not be something you can purchase super easily, but I've seen the meat of a lot of endangered species that are legally protected.
I've seen it at bush meat markets in many, many places. It's just how it is.
Keller :
[1:05:25] Do these markets, do the sales of these wildlife animals, does that come with any increase in disease spreading?
Damien:
[1:05:33] Yeah, that's a good question. So there's always a risk associated with hunting and processing wildlife, you know, the meat of wildlife because there's contact with the blood. Ofcourse, when you kill an animal, if the animal is sick, you could potentially contract a disease.
And there's, you know, famous precedents for that to happen.
The HIV virus, for example, responsible for AIDS in our species, a lethal disease that has been responsible for one of the major pandemics of the 20th and 21st century.
And we're talking about 50 million people affected. It's massive in the US and in in the world, sorry, but in the US as well, obviously, it all started about 100 years ago.
[1:06:14] When a hunter, we don't know the story exactly, and the genetics tells us that it all started about 100 years ago, when a hunter killed probably a chimpanzee in the forestsomewhere in Central Africa and the contact with the blood and probably the hunter's blood led to the virus, chimpanzee virus called SIV, the simian immunodeficiency virus, to betransmitted.
And at that point, it probably had a mutation that allowed it to subsist and persist in the bloodstream and in that hunter.
And then, you know, a hundred years later, we have a pandemic.
So yeah, it does happen. These are rare events, but you don't need a ton of those to obtain massive problems, right?
Obviously just in one emergent event to trigger a pandemic.
So yeah, there is a risk definitely associated with the consumption of bushmeat.
Brent:
[1:07:07] Yeah. And then how would you like the listeners to approach wildlife conservation as a whole?
Importance of Knowledge and Education in Conservation
Damien:
[1:07:16] Yeah, that's a good question. I think there's multiple things that are important and that can make a difference.
Being knowledgeable is the number one thing. I feel like we only protect what we love and we only love what we know, right? Or who we know.
That's trivial, but it's true.
And educating yourself and being curious is fundamental in life in general, but also to being a good citizen of planet earth and be a good conservationist.
I feel like most of the time when people have behavior that affects negatively our environment, it's not because they don't care about the environment, it's because they don't understandthe consequences of their actions because they don't have the knowledge of the education.
And I think it's very important that we foster that curiosity in our children first, but our students as well, at any stage, but also older people.
We don't stop studying when we leave, when we graduate from college.
We should keep studying our entire lives.
So there's a lot of resources available for people who are interested in knowing about wildlife.
I would, you know, the most basic and simplest way to educate yourself is to subscribe or follow Twitter feeds from some website that actually publish regular articles about wildlifeconservation.
Access to Information: Manga Bay and Conservation NGOs
[1:08:40] And there's one such website called the Manga Bay, which is actually a good resource.
It's not the only one. By any means, I'm not advertising for one or the other.
Another way to stay tuned and be aware of what's going on is also to follow the Twitter feed or Instagram or Facebook, whatever, of conservation NGOs, which regularly post interestingmaterial.
Actually, they try to make it interesting and small and short, right? So it's a good way to pick your curiosity, right? You will see a little video, you see, I don't know, some photos taken bycamera traps in the forest, in the outside of the world.
It's really cool to have access to this information. Now, when I was a child myself and you guys as well, it wasn't available, right?
So now we have access to this. So that's kind of the most basic form of self-education we can do.
But of course, a lot more is needed, you know, and trying to understand our impact on the environment is complex. It's not a simple thing.
[1:09:40] And even once we understand the impact we have on the environment, trying to change our behavior is even harder. I was talking earlier about how challenging it can be to reducethe production of charcoal.
In areas where people don't have an alternative. Now, you know, somehow we as Westerners living in fossil fuel-based, fossil energy-based society, we rely so much on fossil energy,right?
Every single point of GDP or dollar contributing to the GDP, the gross domestic product of our Kandri is, was produced by, with the help of some energy, right?
Because, you know, GDP is essentially production of something, produce something you need to transform resources, minerals, or anything into something else, an object, a cell phone,whatever, to do this transformation in energy.
All that energy comes from fossil fuel, like almost all the energy, like 90% of it.
[1:10:43] So, so we know it, we are completely dependent on it. Now, how do we change our behavior? That's really is another stage.
So I think that overall.
Finding Happiness through Nature and Non-Financial Means
[1:11:12] We need to document if you're trying to have fun, relax and be a happy person, which is I think essentially where we go to work in the morning, it's not, no, it's also to have freetime at some point and be able to, you know, have activities.
There's two ways to have those activities. You can decide to spend money.
And you go shopping, you buy something, whatever, and then you get pleasure from it. I get that, I do it sometimes.
But you can also look at what is available for free around you.
And I think the nature provides us with a ton of free entertainment and that we don't use as much as maybe we used to because we're more urban than our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents.
We don't realize that, but I think it's super important to realize that nature can provide us with a lot of non-financial happiness or based happiness.
I think that's key. That's part of a long-term reflection, I guess, something that people need to slowly think about whenever they purchase something, whenever they have a behavior thathas a small negative impact on the environment.
[1:12:20] Need to reflect on it and say, okay, do I need to do that? Is there an alternative?
Uh, you know, before we fly around the country to just meet someone we haven't seen in a while, can we just see whether, you know, we can do it less often.
I'm not saying that we should stop everything, but, uh, I think that controlling our behavior a little bit will definitely help the environment.
And when we have the choice to spend $1 on, uh, I don't know, a particular type of food we like, or $10 on the very same food item, but grown locally or sustainably and let's just spend$10.
Yeah. I think this is just, I, I personally, you know, it took me a while to, uh, slowly change my behavior.
You know, it really took me a while, but now I get pleasure from doing it.
I am like, okay, I'm glad I actually spent more dollars to support this local producer or, you know, anything.
And I think that's something that everybody can do.
Now, when it comes to primate conservation specifically, what can people do?
Well, tropical forests are obviously hotspot for biodiversity.
Everybody knows that. We need to protect our tropical forests.
One reason why tropical forests are exploited right now by us in the US and in wealthy countries, quote unquote, is for the precious woods that are present and exploited in those forests.
[1:13:46] A lot of the precious woods that are exploited are exploited under certification that are supposed to limit the impact that logging has on the environment.
It's true to some extent, it's never absolutely true.
[1:14:02] So I would heavily recommend not buying tropical wood.
Period. Yeah. And if you want to have a nice piece of furniture, even if you own a nice piece of furniture made of tropical woods, just get a piece of furniture that is already owned bysomeone and you buy secondhand, uh, and Reno, and you know, we can remodel it or redo it or restain it or whatever.
Great. But don't buy new, uh, pieces of furniture made with tropical woods.
This is really not, uh, not good to do it, I think.
Uh, and, uh, I see the damage caused by deforestation and sustainable certified deforestation all the time.
And even if the tropical forest is likely going to persist, logging through this selective logging, it does affect dramatically the structure of the forest.
The biggest trees that produce seeds that are critical for the forest are cut.
The biggest ones, the ones that actually are like the mothers of all trees, you know, it takes decades to produce such a large tree that produces seeds, right?
Those trees also produce food for the animals, right? So even if the forest is still there and you just get one big tree and from a satellite image, it doesn't look like you've done any damage,the damage is there.
It's real. Also, all those companies, they build roads in the forest to access those trees and extract the massive logs out of the forest.
[1:15:24] People use those roads that are created to access remote places and hunt.
So there is this catalytic, essentially logging catalyzes a lot of other negative activities, such as hunting, bushmeat hunting in particular.
So yeah, we need to think about it and stop using tropical woods. Yeah.
Keller :
[1:15:45] That's all very interesting. I think there's a lot of wisdom in that last statement about it's all connected and you need to be aware of how your actions are impacting people in areasaround the world.
But it's been a wonderful conversation. Thank you very much, Professor Coyo. Thank you.
Damien:
[1:15:59] Thank you.
Brent:
[1:16:00] Thank you.
Keller :
[1:16:00] Thank you.