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

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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!

Pre-Roll Audio: BBC Nature / White Handed Gibbon 91115

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