From Gorillas to Elephants: Dr. Ian Redmond on Wildlife Conservation in Africa

Episode Transcript
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Andrew MacIntosh (00:00):
Welcome to the PrimiCast Origins.
Today's origin story comes fromthe self-described reluctant
conservationist, dr Ian Redmond.
Well, hello everyone, and onceagain, glad to have you back in

(00:36):
the audience for this, anepisode of the PrimiCast Origins
, where we hear from experts inthe field of primatology and
beyond about how they gotstarted and became some of the
most influential folks around.
I'm your host, andrew McIntosh,from Kyoto University's
Wildlife Research Center, andthis episode is taken from our
International PrimatologyLecture Series Past, present and

(00:56):
Future Perspectives of theField.
This is the brainchild of DrMichael Huffman and, like our
normal programming, is broughtto you by PsyCASP.
The main goal of the lectureseries is to share the origin
stories of experiencedpractitioners of primatology and
related fields.
To do that, mike Huffman hasinvited a revolving door of
renowned scientists to join uson the program and share their

(01:17):
stories with us.
The PrimiCast Origins is ourway of sharing those stories
right here on the podcast.
Unlike our normal interviewformat, these lectures are being
done as part of the PsyCASPSeminar in Science Communication
, which aims at graduatestudents here in the Primatology
and Wildlife Science program atKyoto University.
So what you're going to hear isa lecture that was recorded in
Zoom and generally includesslides, so there may be some

(01:39):
references to visual aids thatare not available in audio or
only format.
But for anyone wishing to seethe speakers presenting their
talks, we invite you to checkthose out on the PsyCASP TV
YouTube channel.
That's CICASP TV.
Now, in this episode of thePrimiCast Origins, we're sharing
a lecture given by wildlifebiologist and conservationist,

(02:00):
dr Ian Redmond.
Ian is renowned for his workwith gorillas and elephants in
Africa Through research, filming, ecotourism, conservation,
science and activism.
He spent over 40 yearscultivating the wisdom and the
network needed to inspire andincite real change.
In his lecture, ian weaves anengaging tale around his
experiences.
His wonderful storytellingmight make you feel, as I did,

(02:22):
like you're part of the story,and I think that's one of Ian's
main points.
But all of us are part ofnature's story and, importantly,
can be part of its protector inlots of different ways.
His stories move effortlesslyfrom African villagers to
conservation icons, to worldleaders, and you kind of get the
sense that Ian's at homeamongst all of them, never
losing sight of that ultimategoal of protecting the planet in

(02:45):
all its diverse inhabitants.
He jokes about how he gothimself to Karasoki Research
Station to study gorillas byoffering to fix Diane Fosse's
leaky roof, and he even has somefun stories about Sir David
Attenborough during his filmingfor the iconic BBC series Life
on Earth.
But it's his descriptions of histime in the forests with the
gorillas, the elephants, withthe local people that live

(03:07):
alongside them, which reallysparks in us that sense of what
might be lost if we fail to acton behalf of the Earth.
And, to that end, ian leaves uswith some ways to support
conservation efforts, includingsome of the initiatives he's
been directly involved in overthe years.
Here's where you might besurprised to learn about
blockchains for elephants, forexample, but it all seems to be

(03:27):
part of a bigger picture offinding ways and finding ways to
connect people to the idea thatit's really important to assess
the economic value of theecosystem's services that
species like elephants andgorillas provide.
They're not just thesewonderful things to look at
which they are, but they're anincredibly important part of the
ecosystems in which they live,and they provide a lot of

(03:49):
services as well to the forestsand to the people that use them
the true gardeners of theforests, as Ian says.
So I've posted links to some ofthe organizations that Ian
mentions in this lecture thatcan help you learn more about
biodiversity and ways to protectit, like his virtual ecotourism
venture, vecotourism, theNature Credits firm Rebalance

(04:09):
Earth, as well as a nonprofitNature Documentary platform,
ecoflix.
It's easy to get swept away byIan's easy nature, engaging
rhetoric and just this plain olddude with interesting stories,
vibe.
But you're going to learn a lotduring this lecture as well.
So, without further ado, and asalways with these origin story
lectures, here's Dr MichaelHuffman introducing Dr Ian

(04:32):
Redmond to get us started.

Michael Huffman (04:34):
Ian, welcome.
It's a great pleasure to haveyou joining us.
We've had some very interestingtalks over this series, but I
think we can all expect somereally interesting stories from
you today.
Ian has spent a lot of time inAfrica, traveled around the
world a lot, as he's alwaysattending different conservation

(04:55):
meetings and on the ground aswell, trying to outrun elephants
and rhinos and gorillas andwhatnot.
But he's a very dynamicresearcher, conservationist,
very dedicated to his field, andhe's no stranger to Japan.
He's been here and he has manyclose friendships with some

(05:18):
primatologists here in Japanhe's worked with over in Africa
and I'm sure we'll be hearingabout some of those stories as
well.
But it's really a greatpleasure to welcome you to the
series, Ian, and without furtherado I'll let you have at it.

Ian Redmond (05:36):
Thank you, Michael, and thank you for inviting me
to speak in this lecture series.
I'm now going to Well.
First of all, I regret that I'mnot in Japan and that we're not
all in a room together and goout afterwards for a glass of
sake.
But given that we're all in ourlittle boxes watching this on
technology, you have to bearwith me while I press the share

(06:00):
screen thingy.
Click that go to share, and canyou just confirm that you're
now seeing?

Michael Huffman (06:08):
You're good to go.

Ian Redmond (06:09):
My opening slide.
Woohoo, I see that works.
It's always so much moregratifying than technology that
it doesn't.
Yes, so I'd like to do a littlebit of a retrospective of the
past 45 years or so that I havebeen involved in conservation,

(06:29):
which was not my intention and Ithink I was pushed into it out
of necessity.
I describe myself as anaturalist by birth because I
think naturalists are just bornthat way.
It's fascinated with all lifeforms.
A biologist by training,because it's hard to just make a
living as a naturalist.

(06:50):
You need to have anologisttitle to you and I sometimes get
called a primatologist or azoologist or an ecologist and I
also get called aconservationist.
But I'm a conservationist bynecessity because of the things
that have happened to me, so letme summarize, I want to set the
talk in the context of what'shappening this week in Bonn,

(07:12):
where the Ip Bessrepresentatives of 139 countries
are joined together to discusswhat is designed to be the
influential body to directpolicy on biodiversity, in the
same way that the IPCC, theIntergovernmental Panel on

(07:36):
Climate Change, has influencedthe discussions at the Climate
Conference.
Climate Convention talks.
So all these UN bodies areendeavoring to improve the way
we govern ourselves and ourinteraction with nature, and the

(07:59):
UN has a number of conventionsrelating to nature.
I'm sure you're familiar withCITES, the Convention on
International Trade andEndangered Species, the CMS, the
Convention on Migratory Species, the CBD, the Convention on
Biodiversity, and the CBD wassupposed to have its big meeting

(08:21):
in 2020, where it was going toagree.
It being the parties the 180countries that are parties to
that convention were going toagree on the post-2020 global
biodiversity framework.
The UN is very good at snappytitles and easily forgettable

(08:42):
acronyms, but Ip Bess, if youhaven't come across it before,
is in the right-hand corner theIntergovernmental Platform on
Policy for Biodiversity andEcosystem Services, and those
are the key words biodiversityand ecosystem services.
Why does that matter toprimatologists?
Because primates in theirhabitat are keystone species.

(09:05):
They play an important role.
Many other species areecologically dependent on them
and if you lose the primatesfrom that habitat, then that
habitat, that ecosystem, islikely to collapse or certainly
see significant changes, notnecessarily the next day, but
the next decade or the nextcentury.
And that's often tied to seeddispersal, which we'll talk

(09:27):
about as we come along.
So this is this morning'sTwitter feed.
This week this is happening inBonn.
The UK has a new Chancellor ofthe Exchequer, resignations,
political stuff and thepolitical backdrop to these UN
negotiations is importantbecause politicians for example

(09:51):
form the legislative frameworkin which companies operate and
which we all live, and we're alllaw abiding citizens and we
want to obey the law.
But sometimes the laws are notgood for nature.
They do not protect nature in away that allows the biosphere
to continue to function, andwe're seeing the results of poor

(10:16):
planning and bad laws with theinterlocking crises we're facing
.
The three big ones are climatechange as a result of global
warming, biodiversity lossleading to ecosystem collapse
and the loss of the processesthat keep us all alive.

(10:36):
And pollution, plastic,petrochemicals, whatever kind of
pollution but those three arelikely to so transform life on
earth that our future as aspecies, and certainly our
civilization, as we like to callit, is in question.

(10:58):
And these big internationalmeetings are set against the
backdrop of each one of those.
139 countries meeting in Bonnhave the same sort of political
turmoil going on at home, withministers changing and elections
, and MPs that design the lawsto govern a country are fixed on

(11:21):
their political cycle when isthe next election and are they
going to get in, and they don'twant to take bad decisions that
will affect that outcome.
And yet what we need forbiodiversity planning is long
term planning, not short termthinking for political reasons.
So that's kind of the backdropof what I'm talking about.

(11:43):
And people can protest.
I have been on protest.
Here we are outside parliamentdoing an interview for a
journalist at an extinctionrebellion.
Protests were around me,incredibly courageous people
were gluing themselves to thepavement, and what an
extraordinary thing to do.
Just stop and think from whatit feels like to say, ok, today

(12:06):
I'm going to super glue myselfto a building or to a road and
cause disruption.
Why am I going to do that?
Because I think the normal wayof just standing there with the
banner saying please stopdestroying nature hasn't worked,
and I've been involved, as youhave gathered by now, for 40
something years trying to changethe course of this series of

(12:32):
events that humans areresponsible for.
That is leading to thedestruction of the ecosystems
that sustain us all and I thinkthat primatology is one of the
most important sciences withinthat debate, but I don't see
enough primatologists engagingwith this.
So part of what I'm hoping todo today is to encourage you,

(12:57):
not necessarily to glue yourselfto the pavement outside of your
respective parliament or somecompany headquarters to ask them
to stop destroying nature, butto engage.
So requires leadership frompoliticians and corporate
leaders to turn around theclimate crisis.

(13:17):
That was what ExtinctionRebellion was focused on.
But notice the name they choseit wasn't climate rebellion, it
was Extinction Rebellion,because tied to the climate
crisis is this loss ofbiodiversity and we're
potentially facing our ownextinction or at least a drastic
change in our situation on theplanet.

(13:38):
So that's, that's a seriousstuff.
Now about elephants I have tobring elephants into this
picture.
There have been primatologicalconferences where people have
presented papers on elephants,so they're almost honorary
primates because their societyis so similar to some primates
similar to ours in some respectsand in terms of their role in

(14:03):
the ecosystems where they live,across Africa, south Asia and
Southeast Asia.
They are where they've beendescribed as super keystone
species by the late HezziShoshani.
And whereas I talk a lot aboutprimates being the gardeners of
the forest, elephants have beendubbed the mega gardeners of the
forest Just because of theirsize, their appetite.

(14:25):
They obviously have a hugeimpact on the ecosystem in which
they live and which they are acritical part of.
So we will talk about elephants.
These are forest elephants.
These are actually in theBirongas, and this group of
forest elephants are justinteracted with a group of
gorillas that I was sittingobserving and I hadn't seen this

(14:49):
group of gorillas for someyears.
So the young silverback who Iknew as a child, pablo, had
looked around and was looking atme and then he was staring at
me.
I'm sure he's pleased to see mehe hasn't seen me for a while,
but why is he staring?
And I realized that behind methere was a herd of elephants
and he was staring at theelephants and I was just in the
way.
So he came past me andinteracted with the elephants.

(15:12):
He approached them and beat hischest.
Now I should mention that thenumber of forest elephants in
the Bironga volcanoes is afraction of what it was in the
60s and early 70s.
I arrived at Karisoki in 1976,just after the last of the
resident herd of elephants hadbeen killed by ivory poachers,

(15:34):
and this was 20 years later.
And these were probably thefirst elephants that many of the
younger gorillas had seen.
And they were literally theywere climbing trees to get a
better look Fascinated.
And I contend that gorillas arethemselves naturalists.
They are fascinated by otherlife forms and if they're not

(15:55):
scared and running away, thenthey are curious and want to
observe.
And Pablo did more than observe.
He came forward and beat hischest in front of the elephants
and a young male elephantstepped forward and stuck his
ears out and these two youngmales of their respective
species did a face-off and thenthe elephants moved away and

(16:17):
Pablo strutted past me.
He'd seen them off.
Then he decided to go andinvestigate further and followed
the elephants and I followedPablo following the elephants
and I climbed a tree to see whatwas going on and again I saw
him chest beat.
I saw the young male elephantears out.
I have a picture of that, butthey just dots in the foliage.

(16:39):
You can't really see what'sgoing on.
And then the elephants movedoff again and he moved on again
and I followed again and then hewas coming back.
So at least two, possibly threetimes he interacted with the
elephants and the elephants backdown and he came back and he
was obviously really tensebecause he grabbed my colleague
by the rucksack and dragged heracross the clearing, just

(17:03):
releasing that tension in anentirely harmless but quite
entertaining way.
So that's.
You said you wanted some stories.
There's one that, in my mind,one of the very few observations
of interactions between gurusand elephants and these turned
out to be my two main studyspecies.
But I started with gurus, notbecause I was particularly well

(17:24):
qualified to do so.
I wrote to Diane Fosse, havingheard that things were often
breaking up at Carisocchi Atuniversity.
As an undergraduate I organizedspeakers for the Biology
Society.
So just as this lecture seriesif you're doing that job it's
really nice because you lookthrough the literature and oh,

(17:44):
there's an interesting study.
I'll write to that person andinvite them to speak and they
come and they give a talk.
And in that instance SandyHarcourt, who had just done his
PhD fieldwork and was writing uphis dissertation at Cambridge,
came and talked about his workwith gurus and I put him up in

(18:06):
my flat overnight and I pickedhis brain.
I got Diane Fosse's address andanyway I wrote to Diane and
said my academic tutors don'trate me very highly but I love
nature and if I can help, I canmend the roof or make the tea.
I'd be happy to do so.
And I mentioned the mending theroof because Sandy had said
this is a remote research center.

(18:27):
When something breaks, it staysbroken.
So if you have any aptitude forfixing things, you should
mention it, and I am somethingof a compulsive fixer.
So I'm sure that I thought oh,here's someone who can do their
jobs around camp.
And that's how, in 1976, Ifound myself sitting amongst a
family of gurus taking notes,which was the then standard

(18:48):
practice.
Notice, the distance between meand the gurus is much less than
we aim for today.
There was little concern fordisease transmission in those
days.
We were sort of in self-imposedquarantine, living in the
mountains for months on end andnot seeing many other humans,

(19:09):
and I guess it wasn't an issueas much then.
Of course, since the COVIDpandemic, the distance has been
increased.
It used to be seven meters thatwe tried to maintain, and now
it's 10 meters.
Mask wearing is now mandatoryin all ape research and tourism
sites.
So just bear in mind that theseare historical photos and when

(19:32):
you see close contact, it iswhat was happening then, four
and a half decades ago, andisn't what's happening today.
Now, the story of Diana Fosseand her book Gurus and the Mist
famously was made into a movie,starring Sigourney Weaver in the

(19:56):
title role, and for many peoplethat was their introduction to
primatology, people who wouldn'tnecessarily sit and watch a
documentary, and there hadn'tbeen many documentaries about
Diana at that time, only acouple really.
So she wasn't the world famousprimatologist she became and of
course, her life was endedtragically when she was murdered

(20:19):
in Christmas 1985.
And that was just before theproducers of this film were
coming to Rwanda to talk to herabout the film and they were
literally on the way and theyheard that the person they were
going to meet had just beenmurdered.
So it's a horrible story and itbecame part of the movie and

(20:43):
the movie itself made historybecause for the first time there
were two studios WarnerBrothers and Universal wanted to
make a film about Gurus and theMist, about Diana Fosse's life,
and for the first time inHollywood history they worked
together Extraordinary they hadtwo directors, two producers.
They managed to woodlick down toone actress to play the title

(21:03):
role, which is good, and it is avery powerful film.
It is a drama, not adocumentary, but there are
elements in there which are veryaccurate in their presentation
of field work.
There are other elements whichare not, and the scene where
Diana is touching the Gurus,where there was one scene where

(21:24):
a silverback did, struck by herand she cowered appropriately
and that was real, it wasn'tacting.
But there are other sceneswhere people in gorilla suits
were doing the action to get thenecessary close-up shots, the
real story of Gurus and Mist.
You should read the book if youhaven't.
It is an extraordinary storybecause this woman, who was sort

(21:47):
of 36 when she came to Rwandashe wasn't a new graduate, she'd
been working as aphysiotherapist in a children's
hospital, an occupationaltherapist in Louisville,
kentucky, and saved up andborrowed money to go on a safari
in the early 60s.
And it was so and transpiredwhat she glimpsed in the

(22:09):
Virungas when the filmmaker AlanRoot helped her to see Gurus,
that she convinced the lategreat Louis Leakey to take her
on as his next study of greatapes.
He'd already initiated JaneGoodall's study of chimpanzees

(22:29):
at Gombe in 1960.
And in 1967, diane Fosse beganher work.
I got there in 1976 and nearly10 years later and it was not a
happy time for Karyosoki becausethey were still poaching and
during the time that I was theresome of our study animals were

(22:50):
killed by poachers, not fortraditional purposes but because
for us would pay good money fora gorilla skull or a baby
gorilla.
Those are the two main reasonsskulls and hands to sell from
gurus that have been killed andbaby gorillas to sell if they
were captured alive.
And these two photographsillustrate how Diane responded

(23:13):
to that.
She had learned how to win thetrust of wild gorillas.
So the picture on the rightshows Poppy, then an infant, for
about 18 months, investigatingDiane in a way which now we do
not encourage and try to avoidbecause obviously droplet
infection and even aerosolinfection, that proximity is a

(23:36):
possibility and gorillas aresusceptible to the same viruses
and other pathogens as we are.
But at the time that was anextraordinary situation because
just sitting a few yards awaywith a mother and father of
Poppy who didn't mind that theirchild was approaching a human,
that was the level of trust thatDiane had won over 10 years.

(24:00):
So these gorillas were seeingsome humans as friendly, but
other humans in the forest had avery different agenda, and the
other picture shows Diane'sresponse to that.
She hired additional trackersto not track the gorillas but to
track poachers and cut snares.
And eventually she got them towork with the park guards whose

(24:21):
job it was to do that but whowere not motivated or paid or
trained or equipped to do that.
And it was a turbulent time,with a loss of some of our study
animals, the setting of snaresfor antelope that would
sometimes name or injure younggorillas, and in the midst of
all that, film crews coming tofilm, one of which was the BBC,

(24:45):
then David Attenborough now.
So David Attenborough turned upin January 1978, literally days
after the death of the gorillawho's portrayed as behind me in
my office, that's Digit.
Digit was killed by poachers,decapitated hands and cut off
and body mutilated in what musthave been a very dramatic scene.

(25:07):
And while he was fighting offthe poachers, as the young male,
the peripheral male dealingwith the external threat, the
lead.
So about the alpha male, uncleBurt and his females and young
fled.
So in human terms, digit gavehis life so that his family
would survive, and that was themost dramatic thing.

(25:31):
It was a sort of a turningpoint in gorilla conservation.
And just a few days later DavidAttenborough turned up to make a
seven minute sequence on theuse of the opposable thumb for
his landmark series Life onEarth, which I think can still
find online.
You can certainly find thissequence because it has become

(25:52):
television history.
It's one of the most watchedand most loved sequences.
And no one was expecting Pablothe then a juvenile, to come and
sit on our esteemed presenter.
No one was expecting Puck, thegorilla sitting behind Pablo, to
lean forward, take hold of hishead and look into his eyes
upside down.
And the producer and thecameraman are thinking a

(26:15):
gorilla's got the head of ourpresenter.
We haven't finished the seriesyet, but Puck was very polite
and put David's head back ontohis shoulders and Pablo just
played and Poppy came and didhis shoelace.
And it was a wonderful sequenceand it wasn't planned to be
filmed Because David was tryingto talk about the importance of
the opposable thumb in primateevolution, how it gives you that

(26:36):
manipulative grasp, and I'veoften said to him well, you
should have talked about thefact that Poppy is using her
opposable thumb to undo yourshoelace, david, come on.
Anyway, it was a wonderfulmoment and it has gone down in
history.
And yet this was 10 days afterdigital being killed and
decapitated, so that there'shighs and lows.

(26:58):
Of fieldwork are extraordinaryand as a scientist you're
supposed to remain objective.
Study animal killed by poachersIs that what you do, or do you
get involved If you see it aboutto happen?
Do you step forward and saystop and hope that the poachers
run away and don't attack you?
It puts you into very difficultsituations when your study

(27:19):
animals are the subject ofsomeone else's route out of
poverty, because it's often thepoverty stricken villager who's
either supplying an outsidemarket with a gorilla skull or
hands or a baby, or just wantsto meet if there are other
culture that eat gorillas.
People in Rwanda don't eatgorillas, so they don't face
that threat, but Western Mellongorillas and Cross River

(27:41):
gorillas and some Eastern Mellongorillas do live alongside
people who see them as not justmeat but special meat.
We'll come on to that later.
So, for those who aren'tfamiliar with the Virunga
volcanoes, here's an image thatshows you the two gorilla
habitats and I think you can seemy cursor.
So you've got the VirungaMassif here and you've got

(28:02):
Bwindi, which does actuallyextend over into the Sarambwe
reserve.
So both are transboundarypockets of forest surrounded by
human habitation, except forthis little link here which goes
on because the Virunga NationalPark goes all the way up to the
ruins or is off this map, butonly this bit is gorilla habitat
.
Oh, and a little bit MountChabarimu, where Eastern Mellon

(28:25):
gorillas live.
So fragmented, isolated pocketsof forest in which there are
small populations.
The numbers on this map arerather out of date Now.
The combined population ofthese two areas of forest is
just over a thousand.
Just over a thousand.
The mountain rulers are backinto four figures and when I

(28:49):
started there were around 250,280, and on a downward
trajectory.
So the last census that I tookpart in in 1981, it was 242,
counted and probably aligned fora few that we might have missed
around 250 in the verungas andwe'd never counted windy.
But gradually the numbers arepicking up.

(29:11):
What an amazing success story.
Mountain gorillas have more atthe end of each year than they
had at the beginning of eachyear.
They are the only species ofgreat ape, apart from humans,
whose numbers are increasingyear on year, and that's as a
result of the intensiveconservation work that has
continued through genocide andwar and civil unrest.

(29:34):
And right now in the DRC thereare armed militias occupying
gorilla habitat with whatevertheir political or economic
objectives are.
Sometimes they just bandits,sometimes they have political
objectives and that's where youdo mountain gorilla conservation
.
You can't wait till it'speaceful and come and see what's
happened.
You have to be there throughoutand that has led to some

(29:55):
extraordinary experiences forcolleagues of all nationalities
who have worked there, but mostespecially for the Rwandan and
Ugandan and Congoleseconservationists, for whom that
is their working environment andstill they do it.
They are inspirations to therest of us because they used to

(30:16):
live there and carry onprotecting the habitat and the
gorillas.
The first gorilla I met, thefirst gorilla on the screen when
I started my lecture andcouldn't get the slides in
advance, was Titus, and Tituswas one of the gorillas who was
behind David Attenborough whenhe did his.
There is more meaning andmutual understanding in

(30:37):
exchanging a glance with agorilla than any other animal I
know, and he was doing that offthe cuff.
I'm sure he thought it through,but he didn't have a script or
an autocue, he was just speakingfrom the heart and while he
said that behind him Titus andQualey were peering at the
camera and he turns around andsays I'm sure he was going to do

(30:58):
that because he was reassuringthe gorillas with a contact call
that Diane had started to useto reassure the gorillas when
habituating them and whenever itseemed appropriate you would
just let the gorillas know thatyou were there and everything
was fine.
And so we were winning of thetrust of these free, living wild
gorillas, with no persuasion onour part to come to us, no

(31:21):
provisioning.
Diane felt that the Jane'smethod of putting out bananas to
bring the chimps to camps soshe could observe them would
change their behavior.
So she was proud not toprovision the gorillas but
simply to find them each day andobserve them.
And we learned about their dailyroutine.
They get up in the morning andfeed, and each item of food is

(31:42):
carefully selected and prepared,different preparation for each
species of plant.
This is Titus eating thistles.
He stripped off the foliagefrom the midrib of each leaf,
folding them over to tuck mostof the spines away, and then
he's biting through that wadgeof vegetation, twisting the
wrist with each mouthful, andthe other female is is plucking

(32:07):
sedge flowers.
Now they also eat the base ofthe leaves of sedge, but the
flowers.
When you get a bunch of flowers,you're a gorilla, you pop it in
your mouth, and there are manyedible flowers that some of you
may know.
It's always fun, if you're in arestaurant and you spot an
edible flower, to stop pluckingthe flower, eating them, maybe

(32:28):
making a few gorilla contentmentwhile you're doing it.
And that clip ended on the babygorilla who, of course, is
sitting in his mum's lap beingshowered by bits of the inedible
parts of plants.
It must be like living underthe waste disposal shoot for
vegetarian kitchen as bits ofpeel and root and so on, that
the bits that the mother doesn'twant to read are showering down

(32:50):
.
And young gorillas, of course,are curious and will pick up
bits of the food plant and chewthem and get the taste and
watching, observing their motherand what they're doing.
They're learning botany, how toidentify the food plants from
the other species and culinarytechniques, how to prepare the
edible parts of each plant anddispose of the inedible part.

(33:10):
And you can learn a lot,obviously by looking at the will
of dumb.
Even if they're unhabituatedand you can't get close to
observe them, you can examine,done, and I'm particularly
interested in the parasites ofgirls.
So I spend a lot of timesifting through kilo after kilo
of gorilla dumb, not always withas interesting seeds in as this
.

(33:31):
The large round seeds arepiegeum species.
They're sometimes called theAfrican plumber, african cherry
piegeum, after color, and it isseed dispersed by gorillas, but
also by ruins or turcos.
The seeds can be swallowed bylarger birds and on the right of

(33:53):
the picture you can see ablackberry.
Blackberries are a favoritefruit of gorillas.
They don't always wait for themto go black and you can see
that it's a green blackberrythat is not ripe.
But when they're sitting infront of a thicket plucking
blackberries a black ones, thatred ones, that green ones they
all go down, and the ones thatdon't get digested and of course

(34:15):
the seeds are the ones that doget digested come out in the
dumb and are deposited in alittle package of fertilizer,
because of course the dumb rocksdown to manure and miles from
the parent plant and that roleof seed dispersal agent is
important.
It's also important on apersonal level that when you're

(34:36):
studying animals that are solike yourself that you cannot
help but care about them we aresocial species.
We have empathy.
I think gorillas also haveempathy.
They form friendships.
This is Pablo, 10 years after Ifirst met him, where he's grown
up into a splendid youngsilverback, not yet with any

(34:58):
responsibilities, so he's like asilverback without portfolio.
He was hanging around on theedge of the group.
He's got the muscles in thebulk is lost.
The hair in his chest, hischest beat is coming on.
It's starting to sound like asilverback.
But he hasn't got any femalesand he hasn't yet got any
responsibilities.
And he hadn't seen me for someyears.

(35:18):
So he came over and sat next tome and clearly recognize me
from his childhood, when he usedto be the bane of my existence.
When I was trying to film thegirls.
He would steal cans of film anditems to play with.
And he came over and sat andreached around and started to
invite me to solve a play tussleand that's against the rules.
Historical photograph.

(35:39):
I'm not suggesting anyone triesto emulate this.
I didn't ask for this to happen, but because I was interested
in gorilla parasites.
This is my first opportunity togroom a silverback, because
normally they're a bit morestandoffish.
They don't come and sit next toyou, so I'm grooming his
shoulder.
I didn't find any lice becausehe was a very well groomed young
silverback.
He's got friends to keep thelice population down.

(35:59):
But gorillas have a species oflice louse that is is the only
other species in the genus,theorus, and theorus pubis the
human pubic louse and theorusgorilla the gorilla louse are
closely related species.
What does that tell us aboutthe evolution of humans and
gorillas?
That we have not justparticulars the head louse that

(36:22):
chimpanzees have an equivalentspecies of, but gorillas have an
equivalent species of louseevolved to cope with thick,
widely spaced hairs which covershuman pubic hair and armpit
hair, and gorilla pubic andarmpit hair.
That's where they tend tocongregate the most.
So lots of lessons to learn.

(36:43):
But in this instance it wasjust wonderful that he
recognized me and came over andsaid, said hello, but not to be
to attempt to be emulated, andhe can't emulate that because it
was at the gorillas instigationand I put his hand back.
I probably know this againstthe rules.
So Diane's response to beingsurrounded by illegal activities

(37:05):
in the Africa's first NationalPark, created in 1925 by the
Belgian colonial authorities,was to hire men and send them
out on patrols and cut stairs.
And we had unofficial patrolsand we had no authority to
arrest people, they might make acitizens arrest.

(37:27):
I was a visiting researcher, sokind of breaking the rules to
enforce the law doesn't soundlike a good strategy.
And indeed, after the death ofdigit and David Attenborough
taking word of that killing backto London, to what was then the
form of preservation society,now for on the national, an

(37:50):
appeal was launched and thenother organizations joined and a
coalition was formed called themountain gorilla project, which
later evolved into the IGCP,the International Gorilla
Conservation Program.
Meanwhile, diane was justpaying local guys to go out and
cut stairs and try to catchapproaches and when the ranges
turned up the park guards.
They would work together Ifthey didn't turn up and they

(38:14):
went out.
So it's like being a backstopuntil such time as all the money
that was raised off the killingof digit and then Uncle Bert
and Macho and other members ofour study groups raised funds
that could properly equip andtrain the park guards.
Now it is a totally differentsituation.
I think the volcanoes NationalPark in Rwanda, the Brunger
National Park in Congo andMugahinga and windy in Uganda

(38:36):
are among the best protected andthe best run National Park in
the world, and so we're going tomake it up as you go along, try
and hold back the forces thatare destroying the species and
the habitat until such time as amore orderly and organized
protection system could beintroduced.

(38:58):
And although the murder of Dianefalsely has not been solved she
died effectively in action andshe was killed in her cabin but
as a result of her activitiesand whether you approve or
disapprove of the way Dianeresponded to that crisis, she

(39:19):
has for many people served as anexample of someone who's
prepared to dedicate their lifeand in the end, give their life
to conservation, and sadly, Ihave so many colleagues who have
done the same.
We've died in the field and asa result of the political
turmoil that surrounds some ofthese areas, to the genocide it
is.
It is not in that sense a happyplace, and yet it is such a

(39:42):
wonderful place.
If you have time, at the end ofthis talk will look at a
website called Vico tourism andyou can take a tour to Diane's
to in virtual reality and sitthere and contemplate that
beautiful spot which is buried.
Diane was killed.
Many people feared that thatwould be it, for mountain
gorillas have lost theirchampion, but fortunately, diane

(40:04):
had inspired so many people,sometimes in a positive way.
People wanted to emulate hercourage, sometimes in a she's
doing it all wrong, we can do itbetter way, but she, she blew
the whistle and out of that grewgorilla tourism and better or
organized conservation andsharing of revenues with local

(40:26):
communities or the local peoplehave a stake in the conservation
of the mountain gorillas and,as I mentioned earlier, their
numbers are now increasing everyyear and thousands of people
every year.
Normally, when there isn't apandemic or there isn't a civil
war, genocide.
It has proved to be a veryresilient form of tourism
because you don't need manypeople, and so many people have

(40:47):
been inspired by seeingdocumentaries about those that
they want to go and do a DavidAsenberg, sit near the girls and
take their photographs thateven in times of terrible strife
of the surrounding humancommunities, there are a few
people who are prepared to goand pay the money to go see the
girls, and in Rwanda that moneyis now $1,500.

(41:09):
In Uganda and DRC it's less,but it's still a substantial
amount of money, and the resultof that is that the gorilla
groups that are habituated andvisited by either researchers or
tourists, or now both, havemore babies and a higher infant
survival rate than the wildgrowers that still flee from

(41:29):
people.
And the reason for that is thegorilla doctors, the team of
vets who will intervene if agorilla infant gets caught in a
snare.
In the habituated groups it'sseen, and they have now got
methods with again incrediblycourageous ranges who stand
between the silverback and theinjured animal so that the vet

(41:50):
can dart it and remove the snareand give it some antibiotics
and then release it.
It's not taken out of theforest, it has a much better
chance of survival, justrecuperating naturally.
So here you see a wonderfulscene of a new infant and the
older juveniles now displacedfrom the maternal nest, having
to cope with a sibling and allthe sibling rivalry that we're

(42:11):
used to in human families, yousee play out in gorilla families
.
So the signs of success morebabies being born, more babies
surviving to adulthood iswonderful.
But the limited size of the parkis a real constraint to
recovering the gorilla numbersto what they were before the

(42:34):
park was reduced in the early70s, late 60s, early 70s.
So the fact that the zoo rounder has taken this
extraordinary decision the mostdensely populated country,
africa has decided to restoresome of the part that was taken
to natural habitat.
And there's the plan, which isit's wonderful, but the fact is

(42:56):
that if those areas are occupiedby the families, the success of
the tourism means that theywill.
That land will earn more moneythan it could earn growing crops
.
So it is an extraordinarysuccess story.
And so the other apes, andindeed most other primates, are
declining in numbers.

(43:17):
So in 1996, I convened ameeting of NGOs that care about
primates of the realorganization, the around 10
foundation, ippl, internationalprivate protection, we and many
others born free around a tablein the Royal Geographical
Society in London and we agreedwe should work together in a

(43:39):
sort of loose coalition and wewondered what we might call
ourselves.
This grew out of the UKelephant group, which had
coordinated efforts to get theivory trade to the land, and UK
ape group now, and a politelines was the name that was
chosen and that's still thewebsite.
And we were gifted that websitefor apescom and if you go there

(44:01):
you'll find a link to all thenow nearly 100 organizations
that are in the world, allworking in their own way for
apes and occasionallycollaborating in shared
campaigns and issues.
So it's rather sad.
What are the threats facing apes?
Bushmeat is one of them andmost of the countries where

(44:23):
primates live naturally, theyare seen by traditional hunters
as another prey item and as moreand more people live in cities
but have their cultural valuesinformed by either their
childhood or their grandparentschildhood in a village where
they eat wild meat, this isnormal.

(44:44):
This is a bushmeat market inPointe Noir in Congo, brazil,
and the traders will say well,these are all legally traded
species and there is a big signput up by the Jane Goodall
Institute saying that it'sillegal to buy or sell, kill
apes or elephants or otherprotected species.

(45:06):
A few days after I spoke to thebushmeat traders there, there
was an expose of how manygorillas per week were passing
through that market under thecounter.
So the Apalines produced asignificant report called

(45:29):
African Bushmeat Trade Recipefor Extinction and then, nearly
10 years later, the secondreport, recipe for Survival, and
you can find those on theforagecom website.
And bushmeat if you're aprimatologist and it's your
study animals that have beenkilled is clearly a horrible

(45:50):
thing, but when you meet thehunters and the families this
lady is married to a bushmeathunter.
The future of her child dependson how many animals he kills
and I wouldn't want that childnot to have shoes and not to be
able to pay school fees.
So how do you employ a bushmeathunter?
Well, if you're doing researchand there isn't an established

(46:10):
research centre, you cantransform the history of that
village by hiring the hunters.
So a leaky weapon behind willgo into the forest and they
won't like that.
I've done that and this guy thehusband of this lady didn't
want to leave his gun behind.
I said but I'm going to pay youto take me into the forest and
I'm going to look for gorillasin chimpanzees and we're not

(46:31):
going to kill them and that'shis security.
You're walking in a forest andthey're big, dangerous wild
animals.
Having a gun is your security,unless you have the knowledge of
those animals behaviour and canbehave in a way that reduces
their fear of you.
And so you can influence theminds of hunters and see that

(46:52):
there is another way of making aliving from wildlife, by taking
researchers or tourists out tosee them.
And that was the case here.
Not that it grew into a project, but it could, and you're
opening people's minds to thatpossibility.
Otherwise, it's the traditionaluses and with gorillas in
particular and chimpanzees,people who live in their habitat

(47:13):
know that they're really cleveranimals and the gorillas are
really powerful animals and thatis a belief that if you eat or
use bits of their anatomy, youcan gain some of those
properties.
So you eat gorilla meat andthat's mainly for big, powerful
men.
You get something of thestrength of the gorilla.
You use gorilla hands like this.

(47:33):
The reason this hand on theleft is missing some things is
that someone has brought them tomake a charm to make themselves
or their child better.
If you're sick and your localmedicine provider says go to the
market by a gorilla finger.
If it's a youth, he might saygrind it, burn it black, grind
it into a powder and then cutthe boys arm and rub it in and

(47:57):
I've heard the phrase usedyou're vaccinating the child
with the power of the gorilla.
If you believe that and that'swhat you're told to do by the
person that you turn to formedical advice that's what
you'll do, unless you have analternative person saying
actually no, take the aspirin ortake this and your child will
get better.
So improved medical health isan important part of stopping

(48:18):
people using these traditionalremedies.
And for people like that, ifthey've never seen a gorilla
using their hand, never seen howcurious other gorillas are
about what one gorilla is eating.
They're eating a sanctuary inCameroon and it's fascinating to
watch these interactionswithout the foliage obscuring it
, and we hope one day thesegorillas in Cameroon will find

(48:39):
their way back into thereintroduce to natural habitat.
But at the moment you can getsome really good insights into
gorilla behavior in a seminatural setting where you can
actually see what's going on,and it's also an important
educational tool because schoolparties come into Limbe and
other sanctuaries.
There's a Pan African SanctuaryAlliance, pasa, which has

(49:01):
raised the standards about, Ithink, now 22 private
sanctuaries across Africa toboth care for the animals
confiscated from the illegalwildlife trade and rescued from
the bush meat trade and, wherepossible, return them to the
wild and where not possible, usethem as educational tools and
the the T shirt this child iswearing Wouldn't know chop this

(49:24):
kind of bush beef for them.
To finish all small time you canwork out what that means if you
speak English.
Is pigeon English saying don'tkill these kind of animals
because they're going to beextinct?
We finished in a very shorttime.
How do you reach out to peopleand change opinion?
That's very much whatconservation is about and when I

(49:45):
tried this before this talkthis film played and it is of
Jeremy, a Cameroonian footballerwho plays for clubs in the UK
and is seen as a kind of anational hero because he's made
it out into is a star.
He kindly did a little publicservice ad, which isn't playing,
but you can find it on theApple eyes website under the

(50:05):
bush meat section, because weneed to convince people that
it's in their own interest notto kill the wildlife, certainly
not to kill it unsustainably.
And with apes in particular andelephants, their reproductive
cycle is so slow that theycannot stand even a low level of
hunting.
And still one or 2% of usslowly reproducing apes, species

(50:28):
and and you'll see thepopulation decline.
One or 2% a year is enough tosee that population decline, but
often it's it's species thatit's legal to hunt and that's
what the diker killed by someonewho settled on the side of a
road, and that pictureencapsulates a lot of the
problems that are facing whatused to be remote areas where
there wasn't access to market soyou couldn't, as a hunter, get

(50:51):
the animals you killed to makemoney in the city.
You've got thousands of peopleliving in a city who want to buy
meat.
That is part of their culturalbackground.
So what happens?
You put a road through andyou're taking out logs and the
drivers of these trucks knowthat if they buy this for $50 on
the side of the road, they cansell it in town for $100.
And they provide the transportand it's hard not to do that.

(51:14):
I saw a car lemon interview todrive and he said well, if you
were walking along and you saw a$50 bill on the floor, you'd
pick it up.
It's essentially a season money.
I've got wheels, I'm going totown.
There's somebody who can onlyget a small price here because
there are other hunters withanti look to sell.
But if you, if that anti lookgets to town.

(51:34):
It's a red diker forest speciesand one of the species that
possibly can cope with a bluedike is a particularly good at
coping with the level of huntingthat you get.
And most of the larger speciesare quickly wiped out.
And that happens because humaninfluence is spreading into the

(51:55):
remote areas.
The Congo basin that used to beneeded major expedition to cross
is becoming divided up by road,roads and railways and
pipelines, and that littleanimation was part of a report
that grasp produced grasp is aUnited Nations great ape
survival partnership operated.
The secretariat is shared byUNEP and UNESCO, but much of the

(52:18):
planning is done in UNEP inNairobi and in 2002, they did
this report great apes the roadahead.
You can find it online.
The animation just shows howape habitat is being impacted by
human infrastructuraldevelopment.
And once you've built a road,ribbon development follows.

(52:39):
People cleared on either sideof the road and narrow road
suddenly becomes a strip,perhaps one or two kilometers
wide, of agriculture and apesthat used to just live there are
now crop raiding pests and willbe killed if they raid
plantations.
So that was the prediction by2030, only 10% of great ape

(52:59):
habitats will remain free ofthose impacts.
In Southeast Asia only 1%, andin fact, five years after that
they redid the calculation forSoutheast Asia and decided it
would be by 2020, and prettymuch we're on target.
We are opening up a habitat tohuman activities.
And who's to blame?
Is it the man with the chainsaw?

(53:20):
I mean, he's got a skill, hecan feed his family, and this
particular man with the chainsawwas actually clearing a tree
that had fallen over the road,keeping open those channels to
get the products of therainforest to the cities and to
ports so that they can then betaken to the rest of the world.
And I would say, well, it's notthe man with the chainsaw that
is at fault, it's a man who paysthe wages of the chainsaw, and

(53:42):
that's essentially us, becausewe in the developed world are
buying the paper, the palm oil,the other products, the rubber,
and we're going to deforestation.
And whilst there has been a hugepush in recent years to end
deforestation, it hasn't stopped, which is scary because we're

(54:03):
getting to the point now wherethese globally important
ecosystems are so fragmentedthat the function they provide
in maintaining the health of thebiosphere is being eroded away,
and this in ecosystem collapseon top of the changes being
wrought by climate change.

(54:23):
So we're in a very criticalperiod of our evolution and of
our planet's evolution.
We're now in the beginning ofthe sixth mass extinction, but,
unlike previous mass extinctions, which are asteroids or
volcanic eruptions, this is asentient being which is causing

(54:44):
it, and you'd think, havingcalled ourselves homo sapiens,
we might actually use thatsapient ability to change that
course of events, and that's whyit better meeting in bond now.
That's why the CBD, whichshould have meant met in 2020
and now, instead of meeting inChina, is meeting in Canada
later this year to develop apolicy framework which would

(55:06):
prevent this from happening, andwhy that's happening at the
policy level, at the highestlevel of government and
international negotiations.
People on the ground are juststruggling to get by, and one of
the ways they can get by is toturn trees and bushes into
charcoal and then plonker backon the side of the road.
The people who do that haven'tgot transport, but people
driving by have.
So just like the bushmeat, ifwheels are going by, the driver

(55:29):
think, oh, I could charcoal, Icould use that for myself or I
can take it into town and sellit for twice when I buy it for
here, because I'm providing thetransport and all over Africa
that's happening.
In my other study site we'removing on now from gorillas to
elephants.
Just briefly, I'll get back toprimates shortly.
This is on Mount Elgin where afew years ago I was out with a

(55:50):
team of Rangers and we werefinding charcoal kilns in the
forest.
This pile of earth was just sodamp down the flames, so the
wood isn't consumed, just turnedinto charcoal, and what the
Rangers have to do is to openthat up and let the wood burn so
that the people who made thecharcoal kiln don't profit from
it.
But it's such a waste becausethis is El Gontique, it's a

(56:12):
tropical hardwood.
If this is more logical, thepoachers, the illegal
woodcutters, would be cuttingdown the teak and selling it as
hardwood.
But that's not what they'rebeing asked to do, the only
thing that has to make charcoal,because that's what the demand
is, so valuable hardwoods havebeen turned into charcoal.
I mean, it's just ludicrous,but those gangs of workers are

(56:32):
faced with elephants and theychase them away, and sometimes
the elephants are killed forivory Not so much for meat in
Kenya, but sometimes also formeat.
And so, which are the ones thatI studied, starting in 1980, are
unusual in that most of themdon't have very big tusks, and

(56:53):
yet they're normal Africanelephants.
They're not even forestelephants, I learned after I
first got there.
They're Savannah elephants thatlive in forests of forest,
dwelling elephants.
But the reason they've gotshort, stumpy little tusks is
that these are the only saltmining elephants in the world
that go deep underground intocaves.
That's how extraordinary.
Look at this.

(57:14):
This mother keeping a trunk ona calf so it doesn't get lost in
the dark.
This is taking with a flash,with elephants that had become
habituated to my presence,observing them with a torchlight
and taking photographs.
But seeing elephants deepunderground, hearing them rumble
, feeling them rumble iselephants speak to each other
using infrasound, which travelsfor miles through the forest and

(57:37):
you probably don't hear itbecause you haven't got the
capability to hear thatfrequency of sound.
But if you're in a cave andthat sound is reverberating
around, you feel it with yourskin.
Just talking about it gives mebut goosebumps because that
memory is so sharp.
Oh, I am vibrating to elephantrumbles in a cave 160 meters
underground in total darkness.

(57:57):
So it's wonderful to seephenomena like this and to study
them and the dependence of theelephants on on the sodium ions
in the mineral rich layer ofrock and the fact that this
normal elephant behavior ofgeophagy not just elephants.
I've photographed black andwhite colobus monkeys in the
same cave chewing a rock becausethey're fully of walls, and

(58:21):
these plants on top of themountain are growing in soils
that have been leached by therainfall that the mountain
generates, so they're low insodium salts and we all need our
dose of sodium ions.
We like to put salt on our foodand the reason that tastes good
is because we've evolved to say, yes, eat that, your body needs
that.

(58:41):
This isn't sodium chloride, soit doesn't taste salted to the
tongue, but it's sodium sulfatewhich, once digested, it
produces sodium ions, so thatyour physiology gets what it
needs and the elephants feelbetter.
But how extraordinary to havean African elephant 150 meters
underground tusking in darkness,feeling the surface of the rock

(59:05):
for bumps, leaning on the pointof the tusk.
Imagine three or four elephantson a point that size and
there's a huge amount ofpressure.
That's why the rock here iscovered in stripes which are
tuskings where tusks havescraped across the surface.
It's just amazing.
So I encourage you to go to theVico tourism website and click
on the salt money elephants andtake the virtual tour and learn

(59:27):
about this.
And it doesn't always go assmoothly as as that last picture
where the elephant in the cavetolerated me taking photographs
in the dark.
This was a crash course inconservation when a very strong
elephant, not this one.
This was a really niceencounter with a slightly
nervous but not more curiousthan frightened elephant, and I

(59:52):
think it's a really goodfieldwork, especially if you're
an elephant habitat, becauseelephants, as you will know, are
very large, and that makes themvery heavy, and it's really not
a good idea to get under theirfeet.
Sadly, though, far moreelephants are killed by people
than people are killed by otherthings.
It's sad in both cases and inboth species.
The surviving members of afamily mourn the loss of the

(01:00:13):
individual who's died and itremains of adult male elephant
called Big Tempo.
For those of us why?
He's not very imaginative name,but it's what the, the Rangers,
call him because he was thebiggest and maybe he didn't do
so much mining.
He picked up rock off the floorand didn't do the tusking, so

(01:00:33):
his tusks had grown quite big,as a result of which he was
killed by every coaches, and theirony is he was killed just
days after China closed itsivory markets.
So we've been campaigning since1918 or since before 1989, but
1989 is when cities listedAfrican elephants on appendix
one, which preventsinternational trade for

(01:00:55):
primarily commercial purposes.
But the illegal traderscontinued, and every time
there's some limited legalizedsale of ivory, it opens the
floodgates to purchase.
I think, oh good, back inbusiness.
And Big Tempo was killed, andthese are his remains.
And these men who?
I'm with?
David Kipparenke, who wasactually born in Kitsum Cave

(01:01:17):
when it was not a national parkand people live there and spent
his life in conservation.
He was in tears and othermembers of the team an elephant
they had been monitoring foryears killed like this and I'm
sad that it was just at the tailend of the ivory trade, but
it's still happening and it canstill be killed by poachers and

(01:01:39):
everyone thinks oh the poorelephants and all the poor
members of the family who aregrieving the loss of that member
of their community.
Not so many think oh the poorforest.
Big Tempo was probably 45.
He had 15 years of life.
Big Tempo would have beenproducing roughly one metric
tonne of dung every week, 52weeks a year, spreading around

(01:02:02):
the forest, and that dung, whenhe's been feeding on fruit, will
be full of seeds.
This is actually not in aMandel and this is in northern
Congo, near the border with CARand Central African Republic.
Thank you very much for yourtime.
And what you see is seeddispersal.
These are seedlings and wedidn't really understand the ins

(01:02:27):
and outs of this process,except that elephants disperse
more seeds, more individualseeds of more species, and take
them further than any otheranimal.
So they are really important inthe maintaining the health of
the forest.
But most of these seedlingsthey're dispersing thousands of
seeds every week.
Most of them are not gonna growinto mighty trees or there

(01:02:49):
wouldn't be any room in theforest.
They, of course, feed theantelope.
The animals that feed at groundlevel are eating these small
seedlings.
A few of them will survive toadulthood, but most of them
won't, and all the animals thatare feeding on those.
So these, including elephantswhen these get big enough for an
elephant to eat, they'll eatthe seedlings and saplings and
produce dung, and the dung isfertilizing the soils and the

(01:03:12):
competition for nutrients in arainforest is intense.
So when a tree falls like thislong here, very quickly it's
broken down by wood-bornebeetles and fungi and the
nutrients are returned.
And rainforest soil is verypoor quality soil because
there's so much demand for thenutrients.
Nothing stays there long.
So these dollops of fertilizerare seized upon, metaphorically

(01:03:35):
speaking, figuratively speaking,by the big trees that are
already established, and theyget bigger.
We'll come to that later.
So apes, elephants and all theother species have a role to
play in the ecology.
They're big, they're impressive.
This is not a chargingsilverback, this is a yawning
silverback, and you can see thatone of his canine teeth is

(01:03:57):
missing, because in fights withother silverbacks sometimes they
slash with their teeth and snapoff their canine tooth.
Really exciting to watch hiskind of behavior.
But their response to a threatto stand up and go wah very
loudly.
If that threat is someone witha projectile, either spear or
bone arrow or gun, that's justthe wrong threat.

(01:04:19):
It's like a hedgehog rolling upin the face of oncoming traffic
.
It works for predators you'vegot prickles.
Doesn't work for lorries you'rekilled.
So gorillas, if you have a gun,enough courage to face a
charging gorilla and use the gun, are easy to kill.
And if there's a demand fortheir meat because officers in

(01:04:43):
the army or chiefs in villageswant to impress their friends
and invite them around for ameal of gorilla meat which
happens then silverbacks will bekilled.
And when there's a breakdown inlaw and order, as happens when
there's a civil war this wasduring the Congo's Civil War,
the Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire, then even
known named gorillas are killedby poachers and there's a great

(01:05:06):
fear.
If you habituated gorilla forresearch or tourism, you are
lowering his or her guard.
Next time a poacher comes, theywon't be so afraid and they're
more likely to die.
So you cannot habituate animalsunless you can guarantee their
safety.
That means that somepopulations of gorillas have not
been habituated.
Cross river gorillas, the mostendangered subspecies of gorilla

(01:05:28):
, have not been habituated.
The people studying them followthem the day after and they're
using camera traps and dunganalysis and studying their
nests.
But they don't want tohabituate them until all the
hunting communities have come onside to conservation and they
won't be in danger because youdon't want to lower their guard.

(01:05:48):
No one predicts that a civil waris going to break out and that
there will be a breakdown in lawand order and that militias
will hire hunters to feed thetroops and kill all the large
mammals.
That's what happened inKahuzibiega National Park.
What can NGOs do?
They can help provide vehicles.
They don't provide the weapons.
That's the government's job.
But you're helping peopleeffectively defend nature and

(01:06:11):
every year I'm a trustee of theThin Green Line, which is a
charity that helps rangers andhelps the widows and orphans of
rangers killed in the line ofduty.
It's a very precarious job andliterally hundreds are killed in
the line of duty, giving theirlife to protect nature, just as
effectively dying forcians andmany other foreign researchers

(01:06:34):
and conservations have done?
And is it enough that NGOs willhave a fundraising campaign and
raise a few tens or maybe evenhundreds of thousands of pounds
or dollars and put it intoconservation, when what you're
pushing back against is bigindustry that wants to build a
pipeline or a road and extractthe timber or the minerals and
they're prepared to spendbillions of dollars to prospect

(01:06:58):
Africa to find places to put amine, because they'll know
they'll make many more billionsof dollars from extracting from
that mine and there's nopushback against that.
But if there wasn't, we'll cometo that in a minute.
There's some good news to thisbleak story.
Unfortunately, we were allimplicated in the death of some
of those gorillas.
Now these are teenage lads downa mine mining not for mineral

(01:07:23):
salts to eat, but mineral saltsto be made into mobile phones
and laptops.
We are talking to each otheracross continents because of
tantalum capacitors.
Tantalum is a heavy metal.
It's heavier than lead.
So when you find a rock whichis tantalum, all you think whoa.

(01:07:43):
That's surprisingly heavy.
And the people in Eastern DRCwere surprised to find that
foreigners with briefcases fullof dollars would come and buy
bags of these heavy rocks.
Okay, let's go and find heavyrocks and then digging holes and
eventually making mines, withno knowledge of pit props and
mining safety.
So a couple of lads,flashlights strapped to the head

(01:08:05):
with a bit of material, lump,hammer and chisel, chipping away
for hour after hour after hourunderground.
These guys said they were doingit in the summer holidays to
earn a bit of money, and Ibelieve them.
This was in a mine that wassafe for me to visit.
Other mines that are in occupiedterritory with militias.
People are forced to work downthe mines.
Terrorism is used to terrifyvillages to provide labor to dig

(01:08:28):
out the minerals.
But it all gets into our mobilephones because, despite the
fact that phone manufacturersand computer manufacturers are
among the wealthiest businessesin the world, they haven't
sorted their supply chain andthere is no certification system
that can reliably say I knowthe tantalum in my phone has not
come from forced child labor.
I don't mind kids earning moneyfor pocket money on their

(01:08:53):
summer holidays, but this isorganized crime of the worst
kind, involving rape and murderand child labor and all kinds of
human rights abuses exercisedby criminal gangs who somehow
get their bags of minerals notjust tantalum, also tin and

(01:09:14):
wolframite and we're buying itand we're not taking care, which
is why UNEP, grasp and Interpolproduce history report.
Again, you can find it online,last Stand at the Graveller
environmental crime and conflict, because the crime is feeding
the conflict.
Criminals don't care if theirpurchase of minerals leads to

(01:09:37):
arms purchases, which leads tofurther instability.
It's probably easier for themto operate in that environment
than it is in a well-orderedcountry where there's rule of
law and the police are on side.
So it's a serious stuff and itinvolves primatology, because
the primates that we want tostudy are in this kind of
habitat.
In many parts of the world,civil unrest, civil wars affect

(01:10:00):
conservation and research andyou have to say well, who's to
blame?
And you see where the mineralsand the timber is going, and
it's going to Europe, australiaand Far East China and then it's
exported as products,especially to China.
And the timber which used tomostly go to Europe is now going
mostly to China.
And China has this incrediblyambitious scheme called the Belt

(01:10:25):
and Road Initiative, which isbuilding railways and roads and
ports all over the world toeffectively make it easy for raw
materials to come to China'sfactories where they make stuff
to provide gizmos for the world,furniture and computers and
what you name it.
It's likely to be made in Chinawith raw materials that have
come from Africa or LatinAmerica or Southeast Asia and,

(01:10:49):
sadly, not always responsiblysourced, although China, as host
to the next conference onConvention of Biodiversity, has
a lot of political leverage todo the right thing, and they are
cleaning up their act.
They then current five yearplan, talks about creating an
ecological civilization.
That's the high level policy.

(01:11:11):
The guys driving the bulldozers, who were paid by the
entrepreneurs, have notnecessarily bought into that yet
, so we have to persuade them.
So this is Bakken Kauhisi, biegeNational Park, where the gurus
have been killed.
This is Mugurukauh, who justrecently died of natural causes,
but he lived a long life eatingMarie-Anthe's fruit.

(01:11:31):
Marie-anthe's fruit is eaten bypeople too.
It's very tasty.
It looks like it's sort of minipineapple and quite tangy, but
tasty.
We don't tend to swallow theseeds Gurus do, and chimpanzees
do and elephants do and that'swhy when you look at their dung
the next day, you'll find it'sfull of seeds the next
generation of Marie-Anthe'strees.

(01:11:52):
At the launch of Grasp, the UNGreat Ape Survival Partnership
or project as it started out in2001 in September, the Rwandan
ambassador who attended thelaunch, saw that video and said,
ah, I remember that fruit whenI was a girl.
She'd grown up near Nyingweiforest and she had that as part
of her childhood.

(01:12:13):
Oh yeah, she'd find theMarie-Anthe's fruit, see them,
but not anymore because thetrees have all been cut down and
there are no elephants andchimpanzees that never were
gorillas in Nyingwei to dispersethe seeds.
So it's a living example of howour generation is seeing the
last of certain things happening.
These are cross river gorilladroppings with seedlings growing

(01:12:35):
out of it.
I still haven't seen a crossriver gorilla.
I've seen the camera trapfootage and I know they're there
and I've tracked them with theWCS trackers and Nigeria is
trying to protect these last andCameroon are trying to protect
these last gorillas, but somemembers of the communities
living around there are still onthe poverty line and see a
gorilla as potential meat andthey're not thinking but if I

(01:12:59):
kill the gorilla, he won't spendthe next 20, 30 years
dispersing seeds for the treesof tomorrow.
He's thinking I need money nowand food now.
So how can we push back?
Well, there was greatexcitement when the UN developed
red RE-DWD reducing emissionsfrom deforestation and
degradation of forests, and theplus is supposed to represent

(01:13:20):
the co-benefit biodiversity andlivelihoods, and rainfall, et
cetera.
Can the carbon markets helpprotect forests?
And the answer is well, theycould, and there was great
optimism that this was to see ahuge transfer of wealth from the
wealthy North to the developingSouth in a way that protects

(01:13:40):
rather than destroys forests.
And in places it has worked.
But it has been rife withcorruption, because once you
start talking about billions ofdollars, it attracts the
attention of people who arereally interested in billions of
dollars and not necessarilyinterested in primates in their
habitat.
And that's the world we live in.
We have to deal with that.
And what can we do?
As citizens in the global North, we can demonstrate and

(01:14:04):
persuade our politicians thatthis really is a matter.
This is on a climate march inLondon and orangutans are
important because they are seeddispersal agents in Southeast
Asian forests or borne inSumatra.
Well, some forests, tinyfragments of forests of borne in
Sumatra, and bees are importantbecause, of course, they
pollinate, and that sort ofimagery is really good to

(01:14:24):
persuade the general public thatthis matter is not just all the
nice animals are going extinct.
What a shame.
It's the ecosystems thatsustain us all are being
destroyed.
And just briefly touching onorangutans, I haven't studied
orangutans but I am a trustee ofthe orangutan foundation UK and
I have visited and made filmsabout them and you can do a
virtual tour of Sumatra andorangutan habitat on the Vico

(01:14:47):
tourism site.
And they are extraordinaryanimals, the largest arboreal
animal on the planet, and yetthey're losing their habitat.
I visited the TRIPA swamp on theNorthwest coast of Sumatra
because I wanted to see thisdestruction in action.
And it's a low lying area which, because it's Pete's swamp,

(01:15:08):
it's illegal to convert toplantations.
And yet and this is in thelittle plane that flew us up to
the nearby town, mulibo andlooking at the window, you can
see beautiful rivers meandering,a bit of rainforest and then a
grid of plantation, and theseare drainage canals because they

(01:15:31):
need to lower the water tableto expose the Pete to plant the
palms, and so when you get thereit's no forest.
When that orangutan was a child, this was all forest.
And what Indonesia and Malaysiahave done in the past few
decades is what we in Britainand most of Europe have done

(01:15:53):
over the past few hundred years.
It's taken us hundreds of yearsto convert a wooded island into
an island of agriculture withhedges and corpses, and that's
what's happening in Borneo andSumatra and Peninsula and
Malaysia, but in decades, notcenturies, because we have the
machinery to do it fast now.
And this is replacing rich,biodiverse habitat with what

(01:16:17):
I've been described as greendeserts single species
plantations, in this case of oilpalm, an African species, which
is actually a food plant forAfrican apes, but here, if
orangutans feed them, they'reseen as a crop pest and they are
often killed.
And yet Grasp commissioned thisreport, which looked at the

(01:16:39):
economics of sustainable forestmanagement in Sumatra and
concluded that, per unit area,you can make more money from the
carbon markets and tourism thanyou can from cutting down the
forest and growing palm oil andselling the timber.
But different people would makethat money and the people who
are making this money are notpart of that solution.
So how do you get the bad guysinto the room and say look, I

(01:17:01):
know you want to make money, butthis is how you do it more
effectively and we still have aforest with orangutans and
conveying that the importance ofthat to people on the other
side of the world who arefunding it by their purchases of
items like lipstick and icecream and biscuits that contain
palm oil is difficult.
That's why we did this virtualtour.

(01:17:22):
This is me up in an orangutansnest in a little pocket sized
patch of forest in Sumatra,looking out over the oil palm
plantations, and the nest wasbuilt in this last remaining
tree, and the adult male whobuilt the nest would, as a child
, have learned about his habitatand where the females live and

(01:17:43):
where the fruit trees are duringthe long orangutan childhood of
eight years, and all thatknowledge is now lost.
It's irrelevant because he'sclinging on in little pockets of
forest and his kids might wellbe entertaining people in
circuses and shows in SoutheastAsia, which tourists visit and
think what a giggle, andorangutans wearing clothes and

(01:18:05):
doing daft things.
Or oh, we can have a picturetaken with the family and an
orangutan not realizing that theorangutan is forced to do this
and leads a miserable life anddoesn't have a future, whereas
he should have been spending thenext 40 years dispersing seas
in a rainforest.
And this question of stolenapes keeps coming up and the

(01:18:27):
site is a conventionalinternational trade in
endangered species does not yetreally grasp the importance of
this pun intended.
So this is another report youcan find online stolen apes just
looking at my not going to gothrough it now and look at
global primary distribution, andyou're familiar with it and
you're in the most northerlycountry that has indigenous

(01:18:47):
primates, so you're veryfortunate that you have and
that's why Japanese culture isso respectful of primates very
different from the the JudeoChristian attitude to other
primates.
But where there are primates,there are rainforests, and this
is not an accident, and whethera rainforest there is change.

(01:19:08):
There's an interactive mapproduced by the UK Met Office
meteorological office where youcan see what the predictions are
for the changes in temperaturesaround the world as average
global temperatures rise, theimpact it has on rainfall, and
what it shows is that where thetropical rainforests were or

(01:19:31):
still are, are going to becomearid zones.
So all our efforts to protectthe species that live in
rainforest primates and nonprimates will be to no avail if
we cannot prevent this rise inaverage global temperatures.
The good news is, though, thatthose forests are so critical to

(01:19:52):
the stability of the climatethat, if we protect them, that
won't happen.
So what you're looking at nowand I encourage you to look this
up, not necessarily this one,but if you're making notes,
write down T341, t341,.
This is T170, the top of thescreen, and that's actually
maybe you like this one becauseJapan's near the middle.

(01:20:14):
This has Australia and thePacific at the center of the map
.
The T341 version has a moreconventional world map with
Africa in the middle, but whatyou can see on the left of the
screen here, look this is Africaand look at the clock.
So the days are ticking by aboutone a second and that pulsing

(01:20:37):
that you see in orange orangerepresents rainfall or
precipitation, snowfall in thenorth and south, so the daily
precipitation looks like a pumpand in the Congo basin the pump
sets up weather systems that youcan watch travel west across
Atlantic to join the bigger pumpof Amazonia, which then every

(01:20:59):
day rain, rain weather systemsbuild up and they sweep up and
get and water the Midwest inNorth America, where the corn
belt is, and sweep acrossAtlantic and water Britain and
Europe and some of the ones herewill see systems bouncing off
the Andes and sweeping acrossand watering South Africa and

(01:21:20):
Australia and New Zealand.
It's extraordinary seeing theinterconnectedness of global
weather systems.
The white represents watervapor which, of course, is
invisible.
Only becomes visible when itcondenses and you see the clouds
and the oranges are rainfalland you can see how this daily
rainfall in the three tropicalforest blocks Africa, amazonia

(01:21:40):
and the Southeast Asian ForestryIslands are driving these
weather systems that water ourcrops and fill our aquifers and
power our hydroelectric schemes.
So if you turn off the pumps,what's going to happen to global
weather patterns?
Well, we're seeing extremeweather events, changes in
seasons, so we have to protectthose pumps.

(01:22:02):
They are integral to the futureof life on earth.
I believe that now is fun towatch, but I'm supposed to be
talking for an hour and I thinkwe've gone away beyond that, so
let's try and wrap up.
What can we do as individuals?
But we can direct our worktowards solutions.
So, if you're studying primatesin Africa, talk to the local
people.
Go into schools and talk tothem, get them excited, because

(01:22:24):
these kids here the words of theforest are in the local
language or chimpanzee, ormonkey, and sometimes they see
them as food, but they don'tnecessarily see them as gardens
of the forest that provide therainfall that water their crops,
and yet you can see rainfallpatterns changing locally as far
as so clear.
So what Rwanda is doing inrestoring some of that forest to

(01:22:44):
the vermin is it's actuallyensuring a better future for the
agriculture in the surroundingarea where so much of Rwanda's
food is grown.
So you have to have thatecological understanding.
How can you get kids who live ina village where they don't even
have electricity to understandthis?
For one method that we've beenusing through the Apple Ions is
pedal power cinemas.

(01:23:05):
You can see up at the top ofthis hall is a guy on a bike and
he's one of the students who'speddling to produce the
electricity to show the screen.
And most of these kids live sofar from a town with the
electricity that they've neverseen moving images.
Imagine you're going to schooland instead of just paper and
books and a teacher and ablackboard, you're taken into
the church hall.

(01:23:25):
They've covered up the windowsas far as they can with cloth
and you've got an impromptucinema and for the first time in
your life you see moving imagesand what you see is gorillas.
And a good friend of mine, thedirector of the gorilla
organization, was standing atthe back of a hall one of these
presentations, and one of themothers have come in to watch
and she said eh, that is mysister looking at a gorilla

(01:23:48):
breastfeeding her baby.
And she's right.
They are our cousins and weshould respect them.
And when you see that thatpenny dropping is not to do with
all, you mustn't do this.
It's just turning on the lightand people understand their
similarity and once again theyget the idea that oh, wait a
minute.
Gorillas is perceived seedsgoing to trees, trees, bridges,

(01:24:09):
rainfall and timber and fruit,and they all benefit from those.
Don't kill the gorillas.
They're the gardeners of theforest.
So getting that message across,people who live a long way from
those ecosystems that do haveelectricity can use the internet
, and that's why we developedthis website, vika tourism, the
V for virtual Go to it, vikatourismorg.
Click on the taker tour.

(01:24:30):
This isn't live, so it doesn'twork.
If you click on taker tour, youcan choose a destination and
you can go and visit primates inthe wild, and I've said this
before at primatologicalconferences.
This is a great way of teachingprimatologists to spend time in
the field as if they're lookingat behavior and the kind of
counting the number ofinteractions or or feeding food

(01:24:51):
items consumed, and test thestudents who have watched the
videos in a virtual setting andthen done their their homework.
Most mainstream TV channelsthink natural history is an
entertainment.
They don't necessarily see itas an education, and if it gets
difficult because it'sdepressing or involves subjects

(01:25:15):
that are not popular, it's veryhard to get those subjects on TV
.
It's changing a bit because ofthe pressure that the campaigns
for climate change andbiodiversity loss are having.
We've been trying for years toget a channel that is dedicated
to the planet and, thanks to anAmerican philanthropist called
David Castleman, we now havethat.
It's called ecoflicks.
Have a look ecoflickscom andyou subscribe.

(01:25:39):
It's a charity, so yoursubscription is actually a
donation to charity and it'll beused to rescue animals and
protect habitat.
But you can learn aboutbehavior in this way, and this
is more for the general publicthan for the scientists.
But if you're in the field andyou're using camera traps or
you're shooting video forresearch purposes, we will
provide a platform for thatmaterial, so you can get your

(01:25:59):
material onto ecoflicks and geta global audience, as well as
publishing your papers, and thatway you inform people who don't
necessarily read the scientificpapers.
The message is getting out there.
This is a guardian in 2015, sonot a new story.
Loss of monkeys and birds intropical forests are driving up
carbon emissions, because forestdegradation isn't just hacking

(01:26:22):
down small trees, it's actuallykilling animals, and forest
degradation is destroying partsof the ecosystem.
So word is getting out, but noone had valued that until 2019.
Literally three years ago, anItalian biologist called Fabio
Bazzaghi his name is the lastauthor on this paper he studied

(01:26:44):
two areas of Congolbation forestone with a population of forest
elephants, one where they'vebeen extirpated years ago,
decades ago and he found theabove ground biomass where there
were elephants was 7% more, andhe attributed that to the fact
that elephants are feeding andtrampling on many of the small
plants and turning those smallplants into manure that feeds

(01:27:06):
the big, mature trees.
So if you look at estimates ofcarbon in the tropical
rainforest, you'll find that asurprisingly large percentage is
in the big trees.
But if you look at the volumeof the forest, most of it is air
and then some of it is leavesand twigs and stems, and then
every so often you hit a cubicmeter of carbon which is wood.
So what elephants do is they dothe weeding.

(01:27:29):
They weed out the small plantsand turn them into compost,
which are into manure, whichfeeds the big plants, and that
results in that 7% difference.
And what Ralph Charme did, theleader of the PC assistant
director at the InternationalMonetary Fund.
He calculated the value of that7% difference and attributed it
to the work done by eachelephant over the course of his

(01:27:51):
or her life.
And it turns out that eachelephant is responsible for the
additional sequestration andstorage of $1.75 million worth
of carbon per elephant, as longas they're allowed to live their
full life Now roughly 60 years.
Let's say 1.75 million dividedby 60 is 30,000 a year.

(01:28:11):
If each elephant can earn30,000 a year for a community,
they're going to protect thoseelephants.
That's $80 a day.
So we are setting up a systemcalled Rebalance Earth.
Rebalance Earth is a websitewhere companies that want to
offset their unavoidablegreenhouse gas emissions.
We all want to hit real zero,but in the interim we have to

(01:28:33):
offset those that we can't avoid.
But as well as just offsettingthe carbon, they're getting
biodiversity value, they'regetting lifting rural
communities out of poverty.
They're hitting several of theUN's sustainable development
goals in one credit.
So it's not just a carboncredit, it's a biodiversity
carbon poverty reduction creditand the companies we're talking

(01:28:54):
to.
Last night, I was at a bigevent in London talking about
this and the way this is goingto be done.
Better than than red, which wassubject to so much corruption
money just disappeared intoother bank accounts and turned
into villas in France or newMercedes Benz.
Isn't going to happen herebecause of the magic of
blockchain.

(01:29:15):
Now you may have heard ofblockchain in the context of
cryptocurrency.
This is a very different use ofblockchain, one that doesn't
use huge amounts of power.
So it is a green way oftransferring money in a digital
way that is transparent andtraceable.
So the villager has access tothe blockchain, as does the
company that putting in amillion dollars to offset its
greenhouse gas emissions, andit's done per day's work, per

(01:29:39):
elephant starting with elephants, because that's what the
calculations have been done for,but I want you, as
primatologists, to start lookingat working out the difference
that primates make in habitat.
I reckon that a family of 20 to30 gorillas equals one elephant
, and that 1.75 million wasbased on the price of carbon in
2019 on the European exchange,which was then about $24 per

(01:30:01):
tonne.
Now it's more than tripled.
So actually now we're talkingabout upwards of $5 million per
elephant, or per big group ofgorillas, or perhaps a bigger
community of chimpanzees, but ifa community of 18 chimpanzees
equals one elephant in terms ofthe nutrient cycling and role in

(01:30:23):
the ecosystem.
And, of course, apes do thingsthat elephants are, I hope, as
they're climbing trees andbuilding nests, but apes do that
, and that creates a light gapwhich allows light down to the
floor.
And what apes do in a nest is,of course, poo when they get up,
so they drop the seed filleddroppings beneath the nest,
which is like a folded umbrella,because it's created a nice,

(01:30:44):
comfortable platform to sleep onand that opens up a gap in the
canopy, so those seedlings havelight.
It's wonderful the way thatthese ecosystems work, but we
have underappreciated it, andwhen we have appreciated it,
we've been told.
Well, that's nice, but it's ofacademic interest.
Thanks to Ralph's work, he'sdeveloped this new economic

(01:31:06):
paradigm where living nature isworth money and at the moment,
to make money out of nature,you've got to cut down the tree
or kill the animal.
And with Ralph's new economicparadigm we have an alternative
that can push back against thosedestructive forces, and we're
hoping that's going to reallyhelp.
And we're hoping also that thecalculations will work for

(01:31:27):
Savannah elephants and otherhabitats which, in their own way
, are sequestering and storingcarbon.
So that's the message from thistalk to value the forest,
protect the gardeners and now wehave a valuation of the daily
work done by each gardener andit's going to transform

(01:31:48):
conservation.
And it's exciting to be tellingyou this, because you may not
have heard any of this.
But go to rebalanceearth.
You can read how the ideas haveevolved If you click on that.
And and and please get involvedwhen you're designing or a
search projects.
Have a mind to how that mighthave a practical application,
because it's wonderful tosatisfy our curiosity about

(01:32:11):
primates just because we'recurious, but we do actually need
to ensure that they're aroundin the future for their sake and
for ours.

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