Phi Beta Kappa is the oldest honor society for liberal arts and sciences in the U.S., and their Visiting Scholars Program helps fund visits by leading scholars to institutions across the country. Our department head, Bob Anemone, applied for one of these awards in order to bring Patricia Wright to UNCG. Dr. Wright is a world expert on lemurs and has dedicated her incredible career to conserving this unique group of primates.
Dr. Wright spent a couple days in Greensboro. On Monday, April 10th she had lunch with our anthropology undergraduates and, later that evening, gave a public lecture on her conservation work in Madagascar entitled "Back from the Brink of Extinction: Saving the Lemurs of Madagascar." I couldn't attend this presentation, but those who did said it was incredibly inspiring. The Greensboro Science Center then hosted a showing of her film Island of Lemurs: Madagascar on Tuesday evening. Unfortunately, I couldn't fit this in either, but sandwiched in between was a RISE sponsored lunch with Dr. Wright that I did attend. It was an intimate event in which she discussed her early years in primatology and her recent research with lemurs.
Her early years in primatology are documented in High Moon over the Amazon: My Quest to Understand the Monkeys of the Night, so I'll just touch on a couple of events. Her first encounter with a primate occurred in 1968 when she and her husband Jaime ran into a pet shop during a New York rainstorm. Within, they saw, and fell in love with, an owl monkey. They bought it for $40 and quickly learned that almost nothing was known about this species. (Dr. Wright was very aware of the irony of purchasing a primate as a pet given her later career choices). They learned, too, that monkeys do not make great pets and that perhaps their owl monkey needed a companion. So, they eventually traveled down to Colombia in 1971 to do just that.
Dr. Wright continued to study the owl monkey and discovered that males are heavily involved in infant care, a finding that was very different from what was known among other primates. This led her to wonder: how did parental care evolve? She was determined to study owl monkeys in the wild, and after a great deal of persistence and some encounters with several individuals both within and outside of academia (including one with Mrs. Nancy Mulligan, a wildlife enthusiast whose husband was an early investor in George Eastman's Kodak company--we all know how that turned out), she eventually received funding and an affiliation as an adjunct researcher at the New School for Social Research to work in Peru. The rest, as they say, is history: Dr. Wright completed ground-breaking work with owl monkeys and eventually began studying lemurs.
Among her most intriguing findings is that females rule the roost in lemur societies, and they enforce this dominance over males with violence. Dr. Wright related several rather humorous anecdotes of female lemurs walking up to males and literally beating them away from prime feeding locations. Given that females feed and carry the offspring, it makes sense that they would make every effort to secure priority when it comes to food. Why, then, Dr. Wright asked, keep the males around at all when females are not sexually receptive? After all, they don't help with infant care and compete with females for food. She doesn't know for sure, but one suggestion is that males provide a useful predator alarm and deterrence system. Another interesting issue is the ability of females to exert dominance over males in the absence of strong sexual dimorphism (females are no larger or stronger than males).
A couple of other observations that Dr. Wright and her colleagues have made over the years include "day cares" among black and white ruffed lemurs (females will leave their offspring in communal nests and go off, sometimes for hours at a time, to feed) and the formation of brain plaque among lemurs with heavily processed diets and a sedentary lifestyle (sound familiar?).
I did get a chance during her busy schedule to speak one-on-one with Dr. Wright. As the father of a four-year-old, I was particularly interested to hear that she had brought her then-young daughter into the field. I have begun to think seriously about bringing my son to Armenia or Tanzania in the next year or so, and Dr. Wright reported that the experience with her daughter in the field was wonderful.
Dr. Wright spent a couple days in Greensboro. On Monday, April 10th she had lunch with our anthropology undergraduates and, later that evening, gave a public lecture on her conservation work in Madagascar entitled "Back from the Brink of Extinction: Saving the Lemurs of Madagascar." I couldn't attend this presentation, but those who did said it was incredibly inspiring. The Greensboro Science Center then hosted a showing of her film Island of Lemurs: Madagascar on Tuesday evening. Unfortunately, I couldn't fit this in either, but sandwiched in between was a RISE sponsored lunch with Dr. Wright that I did attend. It was an intimate event in which she discussed her early years in primatology and her recent research with lemurs.
Her early years in primatology are documented in High Moon over the Amazon: My Quest to Understand the Monkeys of the Night, so I'll just touch on a couple of events. Her first encounter with a primate occurred in 1968 when she and her husband Jaime ran into a pet shop during a New York rainstorm. Within, they saw, and fell in love with, an owl monkey. They bought it for $40 and quickly learned that almost nothing was known about this species. (Dr. Wright was very aware of the irony of purchasing a primate as a pet given her later career choices). They learned, too, that monkeys do not make great pets and that perhaps their owl monkey needed a companion. So, they eventually traveled down to Colombia in 1971 to do just that.
Dr. Wright continued to study the owl monkey and discovered that males are heavily involved in infant care, a finding that was very different from what was known among other primates. This led her to wonder: how did parental care evolve? She was determined to study owl monkeys in the wild, and after a great deal of persistence and some encounters with several individuals both within and outside of academia (including one with Mrs. Nancy Mulligan, a wildlife enthusiast whose husband was an early investor in George Eastman's Kodak company--we all know how that turned out), she eventually received funding and an affiliation as an adjunct researcher at the New School for Social Research to work in Peru. The rest, as they say, is history: Dr. Wright completed ground-breaking work with owl monkeys and eventually began studying lemurs.
Among her most intriguing findings is that females rule the roost in lemur societies, and they enforce this dominance over males with violence. Dr. Wright related several rather humorous anecdotes of female lemurs walking up to males and literally beating them away from prime feeding locations. Given that females feed and carry the offspring, it makes sense that they would make every effort to secure priority when it comes to food. Why, then, Dr. Wright asked, keep the males around at all when females are not sexually receptive? After all, they don't help with infant care and compete with females for food. She doesn't know for sure, but one suggestion is that males provide a useful predator alarm and deterrence system. Another interesting issue is the ability of females to exert dominance over males in the absence of strong sexual dimorphism (females are no larger or stronger than males).
A couple of other observations that Dr. Wright and her colleagues have made over the years include "day cares" among black and white ruffed lemurs (females will leave their offspring in communal nests and go off, sometimes for hours at a time, to feed) and the formation of brain plaque among lemurs with heavily processed diets and a sedentary lifestyle (sound familiar?).
I did get a chance during her busy schedule to speak one-on-one with Dr. Wright. As the father of a four-year-old, I was particularly interested to hear that she had brought her then-young daughter into the field. I have begun to think seriously about bringing my son to Armenia or Tanzania in the next year or so, and Dr. Wright reported that the experience with her daughter in the field was wonderful.
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