One On One, Part II; No. 4; Searching for Lemurs in the Madagascar Rain Forest with Dr. Allison Jolly

This program is made possible by a grant from Cygnus I, the scientific research society. I'm Faith Middleton, and this is one-on-one. Imagine traveling thousands of miles to wander the floor of a Madagascar rainforest that is strange and unique. This is the life Allison Jolly lives when she's not doing research at Rockefeller University in New York. The Madagascar rainforest is home to the primate Dr. Jolly Watches, the white chiffoc and ring-tailed lemurs that look like small gray house cats. Allison Jolly has spent 20 years watching lemurs, which seems like a long time to us, but she says that lemurs are our distant cousins, and one day they might explain how humans got to be the creatures who run the world for everything else. I met Dr. Jolly at her, New York Laboratory, and right away she pulled out her favorite photograph and tacked it up.

I took one look at the picture, and I had to know who it was. That's curious, George. She's the only chiffoc that ever came down and almost touched me. She sniffed my hand, and then she sneezed and leaped away, I guess she didn't like the smell of soap. Is it unusual for this animal to visit you? In the first place, you have to be in Madagascar, even to see one. They're only half a dozen anywhere in captivity, outside Madagascar. In the second place, even if you see them, there's nothing you can do to tempt them. They're leaf eaters, so even if you offer them a banana and try to tease them down out of the trees, they won't come. They only come from curiosity and from trust. It's not, they don't know enough to be afraid at this point. Well, the play size study, which is very small reserved in the south of Madagascar, has been protected ever since the 1930s.

It belongs to a remarkable family called Duolm, who'd set aside this woods just because it was beautiful, they kept it, they admired the white chiffach like Curious George and the ring-tailed lemurs that promenade it up and down the paths, and they didn't realize it was going to be very important to science. When I had the luck to get there in the early 60s, I looked round and said, this is the one place you can study social behavior without the animals being afraid of you. So I settled in and did one of the first studies. And then since then, the animals have never been heard and more and more people have come to look at them so finally after 20 years, one of the chiffach has got bold enough to come and investigate people in its own turn. Why did you choose lemurs to begin with and primate? Now, I can give you all sorts of good intellectual reasons while they're fascinating. Like most people's career, it was an accident.

I was supposed to be studying sponges, sponges seemed to me a little bit dull. I said to my professor, if I had my brothers, I'd study something with big eyes and little hands that lives a long way from Yale, which is where I was at the time, he said, that's funny, there's a man in the next department who has 50 of them. So I went across to anthropology, there was Professor Butner Yarnish with pothos and galagos and lemurs from Madagascar that hardly been seen in this country before a few in zoos, nothing like that collection. So I was lost, I just worked on them till I finished my thesis, looked at their hands and how they used them, then scooted off to Madagascar. Do you think of them as our relatives? Well, yes, they are.

What's fascinating is to be able to look at the whole battery of them, their 180, 200 species depending whose counting of primates, and some of them are very like us, like the chimpanzees and the gorillas, some like the lemurs are quite distant as mammals go. So you've got a whole wealth of comparison, as Thomas Huxley said, that insensible steps from the crown and summit of creation to the smallest and least intelligent of the placental mammals, you have things that are the smallest primates, a Madagascar lemur, it's the size of a mouse, and it's a cute mouse with a bushy tail and big eyes and a baby face, but it's a tiny little solitary insect-eating beast that lives on trees by itself, and it's almost, it's very difficult to look at that and think it's our relative, but

you can find something almost like that in a little bigger and almost like that in a little bigger, until you get up to something like a chimpanzee that has to be a close cousin. What do you get from studying them? What do we get from knowing everything we can about them? The excitement, knowledge of ourselves, knowledge of the world, some kind of clue how we got to be the kind of creature that runs the world for everything else. I mean, being a primatologist is a great privilege because in other disciplines of biology you're expected to know more and more about less and less, but if your specialty is an animal, you can still get away at studying primates with studying their ecology and how they bring up their babies and their sex life and their intelligence towards objects

and how they solve monkey puzzles, and you can try to put it together into some kind of idea how we got intelligence that reflects back on our own environment where we rule the world because of our intelligence and because our intelligence is social, we work more or less together, we work as groups to impose ourselves on the world, on our environment. So to try to understand how we got that way, you have to look at primates. I know you've brought along the sound of some of the animals that you study and we're going to hear that in just a minute while you're out there in the forest. But let me ask you, how fascinating are they to study? Oh, they're wonderful. The creature's eye study ring-tailed lemos and white shepherds social.

That means they live in troops, they go round in gangs together. The ring-tailed troops are a dozen or two dozen animals with a core of females and their babies and males who migrate in and out. So you've got all the fun of looking at the local gossip of a group of animals, you get to know very well which female is picking on which other who's pulling who's hair because that's what they do, who is grooming who's baby, who's chasing who and they're so beautiful. I mean ring-tails are very beautiful. They're the size of cats, they're grey, they're sort of stylish like a Paris-styled raccoon, a little black face mask of round eye rings and then these wonderful black and white ring-tails out the back that either hang down off trees like big fuzzy caterpillars or if they're

walking on the ground they hold them up in a sort of question mark shape so the whole path full of black and white ring question marks soldering along. When you're watching them, what do you do? Do you hide or do you just sit right out there so that they can see you? In Berenity I just sit right out there in the reserve where I work, they're very used to animals, sorry they're very used to humans is what I'm trying to say, for hours do you sit for hours? Yeah, get up and move when they move, they have very short day ranges so it's not particularly strenuous to watch lemurs and do they know you're following them? Oh yes of course, they glance at you a great deal at the beginning after a while if you neither feed them, they're threatened them, they just ignore you but what's fun is that when they have got thoroughly used you and you get up to go they give their little contact call as though one of the troop was going away and so they get quite used to having their pet primatologist.

Since you mentioned the sound, let's listen to what is this and where did you get the sound? This is the whole of a male ring tail and it's what we've been most recently studying so let me play it to you and then I'll try and tell you what it means. Okay, did you get that Madagascar? Oh yeah, that's recorded in Brantee and it's a male sort of song almost and the problem was that I didn't know what it meant, the animals give it and sometimes several males give it at once and then they can get up and move off or settle down and go to sleep and it didn't seem to do anything.

So you were trying to unravel that mystery. And the way we did it was through a group called Earth Watch. This is an organization that arranges for volunteers to work with a scientist helping with the research and I had a particular problem. I wanted to know what several groups of ring tails were doing at the same time because for 20 years off and on I've been wandering around with ring tails and I really do think I know a good deal of what you can find out as one person unless you're there continuously and there have been many other people who have done intensive PhD thesis in Brantee so that it all builds up to quite a body of information but nobody no matter how qualified can be in two places at once. Even if you put out radio tracking devices they don't tell you as much as a person who is walking along with a notebook and writing down every 10 minutes where he or she is

and whether the ring tails are howling. And so we just spent a month one fall doing this but what it turned up was that the ring tails are much more truly territorial than we thought. They bounce around like ping pong balls inside their home range. They fight at the edges which we did know and they have this long distance howling which other troops don't react to. Now it's funny to think that's a conclusion but what they seem to be is a way of keeping the status quo as long as animals howl from within a given area. The others all know that that troop is still there, still in position, still coping. If they didn't howl they'd probably be invaded in a few days but as long as they howl it's a way of not doing anything about the situation like patrolling your boundaries and

fighting. Now is that considered an important discovery in this field of research? No, to me it's one of the building blocks. It's an interesting discovery but it's a very interesting method because so few people have had the chance to look at different troops at the same time. But the building blocks of how an animal uses its territory, in this case possesses the food supply that it needs but many other animals don't possess their food supply, they share them in all sorts of ways. Where the food comes from that supports its own kind of social life, in this kind of case there's big bouncy troop of males and females together all year but again there are all sorts of kinds of troops.

All of this then builds up to the kind of economic base of society and the society builds up through to how the animals raise their offspring and that gets into the mentality. And it all links up so it seems to me this is just a small piece of what there is to know. Something you're not going to ask questions about but I ought to just tell you is female dominance in lemurs unless you've been reporting to you? Well it's important to them. You see one of the puzzles about ring tails and other lemurs is that the females have priority to food, now in most primates not all but most males have very definite priority if you throw a bit of banana between a male baboon and a female baboon, he either gets it or she makes a placating gesture like presenting her bottom to him and he obviously

lets her have it but he's in control of the situation. Not so for lemurs. You'll throw a bit of banana between a couple of lemurs and the female either takes it with the male doing nothing or the male may take it and the female may march up and cuff him over the nose and take it away from him and this could be the dominant male of the troop too. And they're very similar body size, I mean there's some chivalry involved on the males part too, he could certainly contest the situation but he doesn't and we don't know why one of the guesses may be that the stress of pregnancy is particularly great in this kind of animal in particular, there are food needs for the female or very very crucial perhaps mainly at the season as she's pregnant or feeding the baby and this is one of the things that has to be sort of worked out with season to season studies, Alison Richard at Yale

has been doing very interesting stuff on white shefak which are another species that I've also studied in the same forest and is beginning to sort out some of that. And it's all very preliminary so I can't really discuss results but she's working on basal metabolism and lifespan and what the actual costs of living and bearing children are for male and female shefak. And one thing that both of our data shows is that for the shefak the troops are quite different structure, they don't seem to care how many males and females there are in a true sex ratio can weigh very all over the map, there can be five males and one female or two or the other way around and in some whole forest the sex ratio seems to be male biased so you've got the same female dominance but with a different and rather puzzling

sexual structure, you know as you describe that it really is like looking in on a whole society, you look at every aspect of that society, don't you? Absolutely. If you've just joined us we're talking with Alison Jolly who is a specialist in primates at Rockefeller University. Tell me about the conservation problems, you go to Madagascar and wander around in the forest and study the primates but there's trouble there isn't there. There's all kinds of trouble but I'm just back from two months there and there's a great deal of excitement too. Things seem to be changing, well what was the problem, well I have to go back because the problem is people, oh dear I'll have to give it to you in big stages. The first stage is up to a thousand years ago, I'm going to go way back there. Well not too far back, we're going to go back to the birth of Christ which is about when

people got to Madagascar, it's one of the most recently settled in habitable places in the world. I mean there are a few little islands people didn't get to and that they're the sad art to go that's not very good for farming in but a really habitable continent-sized place to be settled only a couple of thousand years ago is very very strange and when people got there they found all these lemurs, they found rainforest desert, almost desert semi-arid desert that looks like the cactus forests of Mexico. They found a whole world with 90% of everything in it unique to Madagascar, it's just as strange as Australia, it's a whole cut-off continent-sized experiment in evolution and what between the clearing fires, the competition from domestic animals and just playing cutting down the trees, the forest disappeared, the megafauna, the huge end of the fauna

turned into fossils and what we're left with is for instance lemurs going from that little mouse lemur up to an injury which is about the size of a three-year-old child and which sings even louder than the ring tails and they all, all the surviving ones need trees, they're all forest animals. Now people like everything else live off the forest in their appropriate ways, if you live on the wet side of Madagascar you cut it down for a slashing burn cultivation of mountain rice or manioc, if you live on the dry side of Madagascar you burn it down for pastureage for the cattle, actually you cut it first and then you plant a maizefield cornfield but the cornfield will only last for a year or

two on the dry side and then the forest gone totally and then it becomes cattle pasture and if you live in the south where the forest is too dry to burn, it's funny, it's the spiny desert, it's actually so dry that there isn't any leaf litter, they have little tiny leaves that shelter from the sun and there's nothing to carry the fire from one plant to the next and then they have great thick bulbous trunks like cactuses that are too wet to catch fire, so there it's just overgrazed and the cattle stop anything from regenerating and it's cut for charcoal. So the present situation is very desperate and there aren't any villains, these are all actions from necessity. Yes, it would be almost easier if you could say all this horrible Japanese logging company if we once get them

out, everything will be all right, well no it isn't, it's some man who's trying to feed his family and you can't get him out unless you've gotten alternative for it but you say things are looking better, there is real hope, it's a paradox, it's out of the desperation, the governments just had a great big conference on conservation in which they talked about the specter of Ethiopia, they realize that it's possible to destroy one's environment and that their people are doing it and then there isn't anything left but famine for people. So they are trying to make a massive shift in government priorities and policies to safeguard the forest that remains on the watersheds, I mean this is real life, this is safeguarding forest above rice fields so the rice fields won't sell to them and it's very nice that

they're lovely little lemurs in the forest too but we've all got to stay alive including the rice farmers and they are encouraging both the World Wildlife Fund and other outside things like the World Bank to come in and help with conservation oriented projects now. This is a massive change. And your last trip, could you see the effects of it? No, in the last trip I was seeing the rhetoric saying let's change, suddenly it's rhetoric with the basis in action. Why is this effort so important? One is the so-called practical reasons that the Malagasy need forest on their watersheds, they need the water and if there isn't forest there won't be water and there won't be rice, these are the people who live here, yeah. Another practical reason is the riches of chemistry in the forest, the medicinal plants,

many, many medicinal plants exist in Madagascar and are known by local people and are being studied in laboratories but the people in the laboratories are the first to tell you they've hardly begun on the potential for human health and welfare. Not just medicinal plants, there's a tree called the Hajumalan which resists termites, you can find its trunk. 20 years old still intact on the forest floor where everything else would have crumbled into the soil long since from the termites. There is a lady in the Ministry of Scientific Research now working on the defensive chemicals of that tree but it's going to be years before one could simply do that in a test tube. What else? We don't know but it has potential for being a warehouse of things. Absolutely and it's

so stupid to burn down the library before you even read it but then there's a whole other point of view that it is like burning down the library of human history, that it's like burning down the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum full of beauty. There's an aesthetic and emotional and intellectual, I think just bedrock that these things that we couldn't create, we should not destroy. The forests of Madagascar, I said that 9 tenths of all the species are unique. What that means is, is that you've got Evelyn Hutchinson's ecological theatre and evolutionary play with a whole different cast of characters. You've

got the test case for any theory you want to develop about evolution on a continental scale but there is a terrific gap in Madagascar because very few towns people have ever seen it and it's a huge country. I mean if you put it down on the states it would go from Boston to Atlanta and they're very bad roads and very expensive airplanes and no tradition of looking at wildlife. So when you finally get hold of one of these ministers and drag him out to where he can see a troop of lemurs, he says, well this is wonderful. So he's never seen it either. But he's never seen it and there are no picture books that convey it. There are national parks but they are run by the Ministry of Water and Forests and very few people

ever think of going to them. But that again I think is just about to change with this conference. I mean we think of a conference as, oh yes, another meeting people doing more talking but when they're talking about something that's so new and surprising as conservation in Madagascar, I think it's going to make a difference. Allison Jolly, a primate specialist at Rockefeller University in New York. One-on-one is a production of Connecticut Public Radio. The series is made possible by a grant from Sigma's Eye, the Scientific Research Society. For a cassette copy of the conversation you just heard, call 203-527-0905 or this member station of the Public Radio Network. The engineer of one-on-one is J. McDermott, Michelle Press and I are co-producers. I'm Faith Middleton. Thanks for listening.