Change: Primate Populations in an Anthropogenic World with Primatologist and Conservation Biologist Dr. Colin Chapman

In today’s origin story, Dr. Colin Chapman joined us over Zoom from his home on Vancouver Island to talk about, quote, “A Few Fun Things I have Learned Studying Primates". 

Colin Chapman has a whole bunch of titles that are worth a quick once over: he is a Killam Research Fellow, a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a fellow at Humboldt Foundation, a Wilson Fellow, holds an Office of an Academician, Northwest University, Xi’an, China and is a Conservation Fellow with the Wildlife Conservation Society. He’s also received a humanitarian award from the Velan Foundation.

Colin recently moved to Vancouver Island University to spend more time on his conservation efforts in and around Kibale National Park Uganda, where he’s spent so many of his years as one of the world’s most prominent primatologists.

In the lecture to follow, Colin unpacks what he’s learned about primate population dynamics over 34 plus years at Kibale. He talks about deforestation, bushmeat hunting and climate change, and importantly how research can allow us to make predictions about how these anthropogenic threats might affect primates in the future. 

Colin closes with a series of take home messages like how it’s ok to make mistakes along the way, how scientists in more developed nations should use our privilege to focus on capacity building to support researchers in less fortunate circumstances, and why making sure to have fun is the key to longevity as a researcher. 

Other topics that come up include:

• health and conservation and the mobile health clinic he spearheaded to support  local communities in Uganda
• how primate foraging might actually make the food landscape worse for themselves over time
• how colobus biomass is tightly linked to plant food quality
• while at the same time global change can lead to declines in food quality (paywall) for those very same primates
• yet their populations may not suffer the dramatic losses we expect

For anyone interested in hearing more from Colin, he was also on the podcast in Episode 39, where I asked him to reflect on then 26 years of research and conservation at Kibale.

We hope you enjoy this take from one of the world's leading primate scientists!

The PrimateCast is hosted and produced by Andrew MacIntosh. Artwork by Chris Martin. Music by Andre Goncalves. Credits by Kasia Majewski.

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Transcript

Andrew MacIntosh: 0:00

Welcome to the primate caste origins. Today's origin story is all about changes in primate populations, with primatologist, conservation, biologist and humanitarian Dr Colin Chapman. Well hello everyone and once again glad to have you back in the audience for this episode of the primate caste origins, where we hear from experts in the field of primatology and beyond about how they got started and became some of the most influential folks around. I'm your host, andrew McIntosh, from Kyoto University's Wildlife Research Center, and this episode is taken from our International Primatology Lecture Series Past, present and Future Perspectives of the field. This is the brainchild of Dr Michael Huffman and, like our normal programming, is brought to you by PsyCast. The main goal of the lecture series is to share the origin stories of experienced practitioners of primatology and related fields. To do that, mike Huffman's invited a revolving door of renowned scientists to join us on the program and share their own stories with us. The primate caste origins is our way of sharing those stories right here on the podcast. Unlike our normal interview format, these lectures are being done as part of our PsyCast seminar in Science Communication, which is aimed at grad students here in the primatology and wildlife science program at Kyoto University. So what you will hear is a lecture that was recorded in Zoom and generally includes slides, so there may be references to visual aids that are not available in audio only format. But for anyone wishing to see the speakers presenting their talks, we invite you to check those out on the PsyCast TV YouTube channel.

Andrew MacIntosh: 1:56

In today's lecture, dr Colin Chapman joined us over Zoom from his home on Vancouver Island, canada, to talk about I quote A few fun things I have learned studying primates. Colin Chapman has a whole bunch of titles that are worth a quick once over. He's a Kilham Research Fellow, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a Fellow at Humboldt Foundation, a Wilson Fellow, holds an office of an academician at Northwestern University, xi'an, china, and is a conservation fellow with the Wildlife Conservation Society. He's also received a humanitarian award from the Vellan Foundation. Colin recently moved to Vancouver Island University to spend more time on his conservation efforts in and around Kibali National Park, uganda, where he spent so many of his years as one of the most prominent primatologists in the world.

Andrew MacIntosh: 2:45

In the lecture to follow, colin unpacked what he's learned about primate population dynamics over 34-plus years at Kibali. He talks about deforestation, bushmeat hunting and climate change and, importantly, how research can allow us to make predictions about how these anthropogenic threats might affect primates in the future. Colin closes with a series of take-home messages like how it's OK to make mistakes along the way, how scientists in more developed nations should use our privilege to focus on capacity-building to support researchers in less fortunate circumstances, and why making sure to have fun is the key to longevity as a researcher. I'll leave the rest of it to him in a second, but I just want to mention that we also had Colin on the podcast in episode 39, where I asked him to reflect on then 26 years of research and conservation at Kibali. So I think these are nice companion pieces, one just about a decade on from the other. So, as always, here is Mike Huffman introducing our speaker to get us started.

Michael Huffman: 3:43

Colin, welcome. It's always a pleasure to see you, to talk with you and to work with you, as we have many times over the years. The first time I met you, I think, was when we were both in Canada I don't know if it was Edminton, but it was probably in Edmonton. I think you were a master's student of Linda Fetigans and I was collaborating with her on many things. So I would visit often and I still remember that day.

Michael Huffman: 4:14

Linda was very proud to introduce you to me and I was very happy to meet you, of course, and that started things off, which is probably many, many years back now. But as the introduction in the text that you were all sent says all about the different activities Colin is involved in we'll hear a lot about that in his presentation. But he has many fellows, different statuses, in many countries around the world, which really speaks to his international stance and his international standing. But on top of all the fellows and the fellowships he's had, he's a really great fellow and I think that's what's special about this talk today. I'm very happy for all of you to have a chance to get to know Colin Chapman and the work that he's done. With that embarrassment to you. I'll hand it over to you, colin. The show is yours.

Colin Chapman: 5:20

Okay, mike, that wasn't so embarrassing. I knew you had a lot more embarrassing stories you could say so. Thank you very much. So for me it's tonight, it's not night to a lot of people, but I'd like to basically tell you a few fun things I've learned over the years studying privates. So this is a brief kind of outline of what I'm gonna call my journey. I'm gonna give you a very brief history of kind of the journey because I'm not really too interested in myself so I'm not gonna go into detail. Then I'm gonna tell you what motivated my research and what continues to motivate my research, and that's something I think is important. And then I'll tell you about something like my 34 years of trying to understand what determines primary abundance, and obviously that has important conservation implications. And then what I think is the most important part of the talk, I'm gonna talk about some fun lessons I've learned over the years. So if you could think of a city in the world that's furthest from primates, you probably would think of Edmonton, alberta, canada. And that's where I come from and I always liked watching animals and basically my life involved me just following that passion. So when I was in kind of my third year of undergrad I got a summer project to understand what determines spruce grass population size, and that basic question has stuck with me for all my career and that's basically what I'll be talking about throughout kind of the talk today.

Colin Chapman: 6:58

When I finished my undergrad, I got a grant from the Canadian government to travel from Edmonton, alberta, all the way down into Central America, and the idea was to look for possible primary research study sites that I could work on from my degree. There is no way in the world that the Canadian government today gave me such a grant, and nor were they any university allowed me to do that sort of travel, but it was a great adventure. I traveled through Guatemala through the height of its civil war. I survived a number of ventures, which I will not tell you about because a lot of them are embarrassing, but I made it and that was a very formative episode when, basically, I was just finishing an undergrad. That leads to what motivates my research. So during my trips I saw the plight of many priori populations and this is what motivated my research over the next decade.

Colin Chapman: 7:56

So I saw scenes like this throughout Mexico, guatemala, et cetera. Well, in 1962, so basically just after I was born a French researcher said unfortunately, at the very moment when we are becoming aware of the uniqueness of primates, we are also realizing how precarious is the future of the primates and to what point competition with industrial man is threatening their survival. We're not to say can we remain unmoved in this annihilation? And the answer is yes, we were unmoved. Nothing much happened for 20 to 30 years after that statement was made. It was only in the 1980, the journal Conservation Biology started and the field only gained momentum in the 1990s. For many of you that's gonna be hard to believe because there are now so many different journals et cetera, but the field is very young. So what is the situation now? So this is an image of my field site in Kibale National Park in Uganda, and it's a beautiful, pristine rainforest that's wonderful to work in. This is an image that's coming up of another tropical rainforest and this is what forest could look like A great contrast. In general, about 60 million hectares of tropical forest was lost between the year 2000 and 2019. So the millions of hectares is just too abstract for you to be. I can think of a hectare. It's about the size of football field. What this equates to is about the size of the island of Madagascar, or twice the size of Japan. So huge areas are lost. In less than 20 years, this tropical forest would have supported something like 15 million primates. This is a nice Japanese macaque, but those we literally meant the death of 15 million primates. I think a picture is worth a more than a thousand words, so I'll give you a couple pictures of deforestation. This is the Borneo from 1950 to 2020. And, of course, green represents forest, yellow represents deforestation and you can see the picture for yourself. This is an image coming up of Ivory Coast 1990 and just basically, 25 years later, there's almost nothing left. This is Brazil, which is, of course, got the huge Amazon rainforest still mostly left, but I'd like to point out the Atlantic forest, so the forest to the lower half of the slide is basically gone. So this deforestation of the tropics releases that giant number of metric tons of carbon, which is six times the amount of carbon released by all the cars and trucks in Canada in a year. So that really shows you how important these forests are for climate change and carbon recor carbon sequestration.

Colin Chapman: 10:52

These estimates do not involve the loss from bushmeat hunting. This is an image from the back of a truck in Congo. You can see primates kind of lined in the back of the truck. This is an image, basically, that shows a chimpanzee. We tried to get a picture just of the chimpanzee but the kids weren't to get in the way and that chimpanzee was destined for the stoopod.

Colin Chapman: 11:13

This is an image of how you typically buy bushmeat in Africa. It's often smoked, because they have to smoke the meat to get it to the market and this is how you'd often buy it. This does not involve not mention the kind of collateral damage. This is a chimpanzee that's lost her fingers because they were caught on a snare, and this occurs time and time again. The animal steps in the snare, pulls their hand away from it and can lose their fingers.

Colin Chapman: 11:44

Let's put this in perspective, though I always like to think about things in a broader perspective. So the bushmeat harvested from Central Africa represents about two million tons of bushmeat, so this is about five million cattle, so a huge number of cows, or let's put it in terms of hamburgers, who are Lord hamburgers, that's 77 billion hamburgers. But an interesting kind of comparison is the people in the US eat that many hamburgers in just 50 days. So, yes, a lot of meat being harvested, but not a lot of meat compared to what people are taking out of basically eating in the United States. This estimate does not involve the what's going to happen with climate change and you'll get a couple of quick slides in a row. So the earth climate change is worn by about one degree in the past 100 years.

Colin Chapman: 12:37

Some estimates say it'll climate will warm by 4.5 in this century. This year is the hottest year ever recorded to date, so this is predicted warming. So you're going to see four slides quite in a row. This is areas that are predicted to warm.

Colin Chapman: 12:58

So the Himalayas, for example, is going to predicted to warm a lot. So look at the areas and then look at your kind of favorite private area and you can compare it. The next slide will be the number of species found in an area. So you might have noticed that climate change in the Congo is not going to be too bad. So that's great, and there's lots of species there. Great Madagascar, not the same. Climate change is going to be high and there's lots of species. So, again, this is the predicted climate warming. These are the number of endangered species. So, again, madagascar is going to be a critical area for private conservation, as will Southwest China, places like Borneo, I'd like to kind of emphasize that people often talk about climate change in terms of temperature.

Colin Chapman: 13:54

What I predict is probably more important for primates is what's going to happen in terms of precipitation. So areas such as the Eucatain Peninsula, costa Rica, those sorts of areas which are already dry, are predicted to become even drier.

Colin Chapman: 14:08

So this is going to be a particularly severe problem for many primate regions and that leads to a number of scary predictions. So this is one scary prediction and there's so many scary predictions out there, but this is a prediction that was made by some tropical ecologists that I really respect. They suggest that 75% of all tropical forests presented in the year 2001 will experience temperatures that are higher than what presently supports close up canopy forests by the term of the century. So that's a pretty scary prediction. So let's move on to, kind of, my last 30, 34 years trying to understand what's during primary abundance and it's hard to put this in a few slides, but let's go for it.

Colin Chapman: 14:58

So my research has been kind of focused on change and I don't want to just document change or understand and predict it. If you document change, you can say, oh, we lost a bunch of primates. If you understand change, you can say, oh, we lost a bunch of primates because they were hunted or because of climate change. If we can predict it, we can say we will lose a bunch of primates because of this factor and we can then make modifications in whatever we're doing, our conservation and management strategies, to prevent that. So I'm always trying to predict change and I think that's really important. So I'm going to talk about change in terms of forest change, climate change and the impact of primary populations. So in 1989, as a young postdoc, I went to Uganda.

Colin Chapman: 15:52

So that's in East Africa. I went to Kibola National Park, which is in the West, and that's where, basically, I fell in love with the place, that I've been there ever since. During that first year I basically set up a series of vegetation plots and I've been monitoring those vegetation plots ever since ever, a few years until two years ago. With that data I've been able to say how the forest has been changing and I can say that primates themselves are generating change. So this is an image of a black and white colobus eating flowers in a plant. If you eat all the flowers, the plant can't set fruit. And so this is the Marquainia density over time, basically 1989 to 2021. And you can see a general decline. Marquainia is one of the biggest food plants that the colobus like. What's happened is basically they've eaten all the flowers, feed the flowers. The plant doesn't set fruit. If it doesn't set fruit, you basically have no seeds and the plant can slowly decline because adults are not replaced. If you go into the neighboring kind of villages where Marquainia is found in forest fragments and there's no primates, you find Marquainia fruiting, flowering and lots of seedlings, so primates are basically causing the demise of their own forest.

Colin Chapman: 17:20

In Kibali also. The forest is changing because of elephants. Elephants are increasing in abundance. In Africa in general, elephants are declining, but in Kibali this is perfect Elephant numbers are increasing. This is because Kibali's a nicely established national park and we're getting elephant immigration actually. So if elephant numbers increase, what happens is they change the forest. Elephants will eat the bark off of trees, such as the animals doing here. They trample seedlings, they basically damage the tree component of the forest quite significantly and they can shift the forest from being forest to more of a sanitary system. So elephants and primates are changing. What about climate change? So in 1989, I never set out to study climate change, but I studied climate and I studied change, so I can put the two together. We're really talking about climate change back in 1989.

Colin Chapman: 18:29

So Kibali's climate is changing. It's receiving 300 millimeters more rainfall a year than the start of the century. This is an image of the rainfall change over time. Kebally is also experienced less frequent droughts and earlier on since the rainy season, and its temperature has increased by about 1.1 degrees. It's monthly temperature. We've been able to show that it influences plant chemistry. So there's really some elegant greenhouse experiments that basically look at the effect of increasing temperature using rainfall and increasing carbon dioxide on plant chemistry. So in a greenhouse you can change the temperature, you can change the rainfall by adding more water or you can seal the whole greenhouse and increase carbon dioxide and if you do that in a greenhouse, you find that plants decrease the amount of protein they produce, the increase the amount of fiber they produce and the increase the amount of tannins they produce. Tannins are a secondary compound that binds proteins, so it takes basically proteins away from the animals.

Colin Chapman: 19:33

So what collaborate is and I, particularly Jessica Rothman and I demonstrated was that, comparing leaf chemistry from 1994 to 2009, what happened in the fields and not in the green house? Actual trees growing in the field the monkeys are eating, the fiber content were increasing, the protein content were decreasing. This means the quality of the food was declined. So what's the impact of this on primates? So I studied red colobus and black and white colobus and we studied them at a series of locations throughout Kibali and I'm just going to point out one particular location, the Durr site, which is in the middle of the park. It's a beautiful, pristine, riverine forest, not much human intervention. But notice the first two bars. Those are the colobine populations. So I was trying to understand what determined their abundance. So I said, okay, well, let's correlate colobus biomass to the cumulative DbH of food trees. Dbh is diamond and breast type, so cumulative size of the food trees and there's a really nice relationship, except for the Durr river site.

Colin Chapman: 20:43

So it seems like, well, there's lots of food, there's not many monkeys. So I'll come back to this point. And at the end of the talk early on I said oh, maybe it's predation. Population got decimated by predation or a disease came through and I published that in the Journal of Primates in 1999. And then I went yeah, I'm kind of throwing out a data point, but I don't have very many data points.

Colin Chapman: 21:12

Well, colobines have different digestices than most primates. They can basically digest fiber matter. They have a more kind of saturated forest of it. So I went back and I went and I looked at the biomass again. So same data for four of the sites versus the quality of the food. But the food that's available is very low protein and very high fiber. So what I suggested was hey, you know, quality is an added everything and quantity is everything. Quality matters. So I spent the next I can't remember some like 25 years collecting a series of other points and if I was a manager, and I went to them and said I have four data points and you should change your management plan because of these four data points hopefully they're laugh at me. So I collected all these data points and basically I showed that I can explain predict calls by us based on the quality of the food, and I explain it. 87% of the biomass I can explain.

Colin Chapman: 22:16

So also looked at changing fruiting pattern. So the fruit of, or is it going to be, what's happening with climate change? What we showed is that, remember, average rainfall is increasing in Heboly. With average rainfall you get basically more clouds. With more clouds you get less ripe fruit. So the rainfall is getting more, the fruit is getting less. We've also shown that wet conditions are parasite eggs resist longer and thus increase infections. So basically it's becoming a more disease written environment. In many ways, someone independent of climate change. We've also shown that we know that people are increasing coming into contact with primates and this leads to parasite transmission. We've shown this conclusion with E Coli and with other guest or guest parasites.

Colin Chapman: 23:07

Okay, so we have some forest change, climate change. What's the primary population doing? This is kind of a punch line. This is the exciting part. So what's the? What are the primates doing? So forest changing in the way that primates should not like. The climate's changing increasing negative quality foods, more parasites everything's getting worse. What are the primates are doing? They're doing just fine. You know this is the different primary populations from 1996 to almost present, just last year and what you see is basically the primates are oscillating a little bit. That's probably due to partially sampling error, but the primates are doing just fine, so they are being flexible in their responses. What's happening? I need another few years to figure it out, but I'll figure it out. So this is the punch line. The primates population should be declining so that food is getting scarce, less nutritious and they have more diseases, but they're more stable. This kind of leads to the fun part of the thing. We're going to have some of the fun lessons I've learned, I think, in many ways.

Colin Chapman: 24:20

It's the most important part of the talk. So my first kind of take home message is nature is complex, so don't just look for simple correlations. Lots of things are happening If I looked for a simple correlation with rainfall.

Colin Chapman: 24:34

I might get one, but that wouldn't have explained things. So keep it open mind. Look for lots of different things. Lots of different things. Lots of things are going to be changing. Reviewers hate that They'll have a hard time getting things published. You say this changes, that changes, but nature is complex. To understand things, you have to look for lots of things. This is kind of one of my fun things. Mistakes happen, so don't worry. Science is a process of learning. So you're going to make mistakes and you're going to publish mistakes. You're going to make potentially big errors Hopefully not too big, but you're going to make errors.

Colin Chapman: 25:16

Just don't worry about it, just say, hey, I made an error, I got it wrong. So in 1995, wrote a paper that states that these college monkeys are upper canopy specialists. So they only came to the upper canopy. They never came to the ground. They became mid canopy In reality. They're just not habituated yet and so we now see them on the ground all the time. So I was totally wrong in 1995.

Colin Chapman: 25:41

I think one of the most important things I've learned is the value of collaboration and a value of really honest collaboration. So I've looked at things about nutrition, disease, hormones, tree community change, climate change and I could not have done this series of great collaborators who taught me a lot. So collaboration is key and I can emphasize in much. Don't think about competition, thinking about collaboration. If you compete with people, it doesn't help. If you collaborate with people, you'll get much further. One thing I want to kind of emphasize because I don't think researchers understand enough. This is my, that's my bias statement. But we need to build research capacity. For example, much of the profession in Africa have limited training. In Ethiopia only 60% of the music faculty hold PhDs and South Africa only 39% of the back to hold PhDs. So we need to build research capacity. Right now, the starting salaries of professors are pretty low that's the monthly salaries for a number of countries. So this is something that myself in North America, japan, I think can really help with in the future.

Colin Chapman: 27:04

This image illustrates my point actually. So this is the kind of the tears or echelons about the number of publications on conservation published by different countries. You can see the ranking and what we found this is a study done with by pink faith and is that 12% of 193 countries accounted for 90% of publications and United States kind of 42% of the conservation publications. So if you have a country in in pink or sound, whatever it is so Canada, the US, great Britain, germany, china or Australia, you account for 90% of the country publication conservation. You're in Africa.

Colin Chapman: 27:52

There's very few publications on conservation and we all know that we need to have local knowledge contributing to conservation actions, which I think means that the countries in pink have to try to build a capacity and elsewhere, okay, this is kind of something that I just kind of feel myself just keep going. Whenever you kind of start research, just keep going, and if you just keep going you'll have long term research and long term research is valuable. I didn't send out to study climate change. I didn't set out to study forest change, I just kept going. It's a simple statement. Wasn't brilliant back in 1989 and not brilliant now, but I just kept going. So that's kind of a good punch line and this is one else been a little bit more time on. Many small conservation acts make a difference, so this is going to get illustrated some of the conservation things that I do.

Colin Chapman: 28:55

I'm going to start off by saying I do not do law enforcement. If I did law enforcement people wouldn't talk to me, so I do not study law enforcement. But law enforcement is needed. It's a science. So we demonstrated that if you understand the nutritional quality of environment, you can predict calls by max. We use this data to apply it to conservation. So in Kibale, about 140 square kilometers south, was degraded, was cut down for agriculture. This is a banana field adjacent to the forest, so we had 140 square kilometers of degraded forest. We worked with a carbon offset project and we planted in to these degraded for us 1.9 million seedlings. That's a huge number of seedlings, and the local communities paid to do. This was a community project and this is later. The private populations in the restored force equal that, about equal that of the old growth force. It's 8% lower, just 8%, and this is an image of the regenerating force next to the old growth. For us and I can't emphasize enough is the importance of training.

Colin Chapman: 30:06

So I've tried to do much to my my career. But the individual below is Arthur Magicia. He was one of my students. He became the executive director of the again above authority and in action. Just so many wonderful conservation laws, policies of the park service and you know, I think what you do in training can have so many cascading effects. And I think he can work with groups like nationally graphic and I've worked with that's a graph for nine years and it's amazing you know kind of how much information yet across the public and I really believe that's important. So I, as much as I can, I, deal with news agencies. Difficult time for ideal new agencies, groups like National Graphic Public is vital because those public are the people who basically make donations. That's wonderful. They also vote. They vote for conservation actions or not. You work with communities. So this is Joseph bear hug. Joseph is the local kind of village chief and this is the community that we work with. This is Joseph second wife and his will see 123456 children of the second wife, but as you can see, joseph is not very wealthy. Just as actually wearing my jacket for this picture. These are the people that are impacting the forest. They're setting stairs. This is a few minutes there. These are the people that are taking firewood from the forest. So let's think about how we can work with this community. So we've done things like set up eco tourism projects. So early on, with Richard random, we helped set up the chimpanzee tourism in the in the park, and this is a very successful project. Mike and Mike Hoffman can talk about it Bye, kind of pondered on because could we help the health and local community? So 26% of the children under the age of L nurse children are also basically suffering from malaria, which can easily be treated or prevented, and the average distance the nurse has was 10 kilometers. This is a woman who's pregnant, getting in the back of a bicycle. I have no idea what that would be like. I've never been pregnant, I've never gone in the back of a bicycle in that condition, but it can't be fine. So could we help the health and local community? So what we did is we hold a bunch of benefit dinners, a bunch of different types of fundraisers back in North America. We built a clinic, we hired Nurse Dennis who still works with us today, 15 years later and we held, we opened the clinic. You'll notice a bunch of North American students here. Those North American students helped fund the project for 10 years until COVID. They basically ran fundraisers for 10 years to help pay for the clinic After COVID. It's all kind of in my shoulders to get grants to do it. We raised a grant to build, to get a mobile clinic. So send an ambulance from Canada over to Uganda that basically, instead of being in one location, the clinic, the mobile clinic goes all the way around the park giving a healthcare conservation messages to the whole park.

Colin Chapman: 33:30

Okay, so I think this is my most important slide is in your career. If I'm going to make one thing of advice which I guess part of the idea of this whole thing is to get a say what you've learned. I have to say the biggest thing I've learned is to have fun. If you don't have fun and I've seen a lot of academics not have fun you're not going to continue. So make sure in your career you have fun, you enjoy it, you make others have fun. That's the biggest lesson I've learned.