Interview with Tara Stoinski P.h.D, Primatologist

This weekend affords you the opportunity to see one of the best films of the year and one of the most innovative science fiction film in ages with Rise of the Planet of the Apes. More important than those superlatives though, is that the film is an opportunity to see the spotlight placed on our closest living cousins –the apes– and see them portrayed as narrative protagonists and emotionally resonant beings in a completely unprecedented manner.

This interested us in looking a little deeper into the state of our actual modern relationship with apes, finding out what research is being done, discovering what we can learn by continuing to study these creatures, and maybe just discovering if there’s really something to fear…

I was lucky enough to be granted a few minutes of Dr. Stoinski’s (her bio page is here) time that is usually spent writing grants for ape research and administrating the care of gorillas at the Atlanta Zoo. Here’s our full discussion that covers the film, the science, and the apes.

Renn: To get started, just tell me a little bit about yourself and what you do.

Dr. S: Well, I am a primatologist. My focus is really on gorillas, and I work for the Zoo in Atlanta, GA where I oversee our primate research program. And then I also work for the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund where I am the Chair of research and conservation.

Renn: So how does all of that translate to your day-to-day? 

Dr. S: My day to day is unfortunately a lot of desk work. I spend a lot of time writing papers, writing grants. Ultimately though it’s all in forwarding science– I’m writing out papers from results of studies that we’ve done, I’m writing new grants to support the studies and conservation activities. I am involved in the studying of the gorillas– studying their behavior, studying their hormones and things like that, and then publishing those results.

Renn: How did you become interested in this filed and make your way into it?

Dr. S: I was one of those kids that always wanted to work with animals and thought I was going to do that through vet school, but then ending up going to Africa and really falling in love with it, and with looking at animal behavior and so decided to switch and do behavior instead of medicine. I started programs in psychology, which a lot of people don’t realize is that psychology is actually the study of behavior. Most people happen to do human behavior, I do animal behavior. When I was done with that, I continued on with the work I started when I was doing my doctorate looking at primate behavior, particularly focusing on gorillas.

Renn: So to swing around to the movie — which I understand you haven’t seen the finished film, but are familiar with the script?

Dr. S: Right.

Renn: Well I saw it last night and I’m happy to say it is actually great. I was pleased with it, and its strength is that it’s not afraid to hand the narrative of the movie over to an ape, who is well rendered and emotionally fleshed-out. So if I can jump into that and ask a really heady question right off the bat: Reflecting on your experiences with the apes, what do you consider “sentience”? What line, if any, would you draw between ape and human intelligence and emotional capacity?

Dr. S: It’s a great question and can be answered a lot of different ways. One of the challenges is really figuring out ape intelligence and what we know from studies that have been done is that a lot of the time, it’s been our… not lack of intelligence, but our downfall instead of the apes in terms of when we found negative results and we found they haven’t been capable of something, it’s really been because of the way we’ve asked the question. And when we asked the question to the apes differently, we see that they actually can solve the task. So, it’s very challenging I think, to come up with these cross-species type of experiments. The way we approach things is obviously going to be very different, very human-centric, and the apes may be able to follow the task, they just might approach it in a very different way.

Given that, the challenge is that it’s actually in its infancy. We have so much still to learn about ape cognition that I think it’s really hard at this point to say: “here’s definitively where the line is, here’s what apes do and here’s what humans do.”

You know one of area that’s of a lot of interest right now is the area of culture. Obviously we look at human culture and how incredibly deep it is, and we know now from studies in the field that apes and other animals, even non-apes, have prototypes of human culture– that there are traditions in different ape groups that are dependent on being learned socially, it’s not from the environment. These behavior patterns are passed on generation to generation by observing other individuals, the same way we pass on our culture. But there’s a big difference between ape culture and human culture, so that’s one of those areas that’s been really fruitful to look at how human culture really took off and developed over time.

We have so much still to learn about ape cognition…

Renn: I wanted to ask before it slipped my mind: what kind of numbers are out there in terms of estimating the population of the different kinds of apes?

Dr. S: Well, the sad things for apes– and one of the things about this idea of Planet of the Apes in general is the ape domination of humans, and obviously it’s a science fiction movie of course, but unfortunately the situation is just the opposite. Humans really dominate apes, much to their detriment. There are only six species of great apes on the planet– you see, I think, three of them in the film: chimps, gorillas, and orangutans (well, there’s two types of orang’s and two types of gorillas). But all of these animals are considered to be endangered, or critically endangered, meaning they have a very high likelihood of extinction in the near future. Most scientists put out estimates that within several decades, possibly in my lifetime, we could see some of these species of apes go extinct in the wild. So, the situation for them is extremely grave, unfortunately.

Renn: Right, well without spoiling anything, there is a component to the script that makes it more plausible, the idea of apes taking over the planet. But in a less science fiction-oriented way, what are some of the real-world things being done to combat the dwindling numbers of their populations?

Dr. S: You know, there’s a lot of activity that’s going on, unfortunately a lot of times it just comes down to a matter of funding. We have programs that are working in the field, but it’s always a struggle to find funding. Just last week I was testifying in front of congress to reauthorize a bill for the US government to provide money to the conservation, and it’s one of these things that people wonder “should this be cut?” when we’re facing deficits and all this discussion. But that money is critical for helping these populations in the wild, and it’s such a minuscule amount of our federal budget.

Humans really dominate apes, much to their detriment.

But we have people on the ground, and in the case of mountain gorillas we’re seeing reverses in their decline. When Fossey went there in 1967 it was thought there was about 250 of the mountain gorillas in the area she was working that remained, and now that number is almost up to 500- it’s at 480. But that’s four decades of continued protection, people have been monitoring and working with this population for four decades. That’s one of the challenges with apes is that they reproduce very slowly, they take a long time to reach reproductive maturity. So their populations take a long time to recover, and when you get them down to these small numbers, it’s going to take decades for them to be able to increase their numbers again.

Renn: So looking at the human relationship with apes, especially in an academic environment where these animals clearly are not pets– how does that relationship work in modern research?

Dr. S: That’s a great question, and just to talk to the pet point: they’re not pets, and they make horrible pets. Unfortunately there are people who have chimpanzees as pets, and we’ve seen evidence recently of people that have been severely injured by pet chimpanzees. For me, that’s one of the big kudos of the movie is that they do not use any live apes in this movie at all, it’s all computer-generated. But it’s interesting– when you look at old pictures of Dian Fossey or Jane Goodall, what I think really excited people or attracted them was this very close relationship with the apes, and again, this was forty-something years ago and we didn’t know all that we know now about issues- particularly pertaining to disease transmission. The ape are very susceptible to a lot of our upper-respiratory diseases — what could be a cold or cough in us could be much more serious in them, so for example: When I work with them in the field, we try and stay at least 20 feet away at all times, and try and not interface with them at all. When I’m there I just want to be seen as another part of their environment like a tree or a plant, I don’t want to be engaging with them.

…they’re not pets, and they make horrible pets.

In the zoo setting obviously it’s a little bit different because we have to take care of these animals and that’s part of our job. But we always interface with them with a barrier, we never go in with them. People always ask, do we hold the babies? No, the best individual to hold a baby is a gorilla mom. When we have babies here, the gorilla moms don’t put their babies down for four to six months, and then they will nurse that infant for four years and sleep with them every night. We strive very hard to train them so they can present body parts so we can take care of them: they can show us their teeth, they can show us their feet, but it’s always with a barrier and always the focus is on them being with other members of their species and living in nice, big species-typical groups. That’s our goal.

Renn: So what do you feel there is to learn about these creatures that could then be reflected back on ourselves, be it to improve our lives or how we interact with each other or understand our own intelligence? What are the goals of the research beyond preservation?

Dr. S: I think there’s lots of interesting questions that can be answered about the origins of human intelligence, the origins of human sociology. These are our closest living relatives– obviously there are a lot of steps in between, but those are preserved in the fossil records. But one thing that’s hard to get out of a fossil record is behavior. You might get some ideas– you might find a bowl or a cup so that you know that fossil used tools. But in terms of really understanding the breadth of behavior, the breadth of social interactions, the breadth of intelligence- it’s more challenging to get that out of a fossil record and so these animals really hold the key to understanding where humans came from.

And they’re interesting in their own right– some people look at them to study early human origins, others study them because they just think it’s fascinating to understand them and their species. I think I really fall in that camp, and a few of my favorite days are just sitting with and among the gorilla groups, watching gorillas be gorillas, and seeing the level of social interaction. I think most people would be surprised at how like humans they are– how they care for each other, how mothers care for their infants, how they protect each other and their families, even to the death. You know they have a lot of qualities that we have in humans and I think the movie pulls a little of that out and you see a little of that in Caesar’s behavior, so hopefully people will see that and will gain something from that, even though he’s a science fiction ape.

Renn: Well I have one more question… In any field like this dealing with neurological or evolutionary ideas, they seem like they’re defined as much by what we don’t’ know as what we do know, but are there any overriding theories or commonly accepted ideas, or maybe most tested theories of what might be the difference between ape and human intelligence? As in whatever switch was flipped…

Dr. S: You know, I don’t know at the genetic level because I’m not a geneticist, but one of the things that I think is interesting –and this goes to my earlier point about how little we know– is that barrier keeps moving, or the bar keeps moving. Originally we said, “Oh, it’s tools. Only humans use tools.” Now we know that apes and actually lots of other animals use tools well. And then for a while it was language, “Oh, well only humans use language” and then some studies that have been done with apes have shown that they’re capable of rudimentary forms of communication. Obviously they have very completed systems of communicating with each other. So now culture seems to be one of these areas, we’re seeing this divergence and the question is “how much divergence is there?” and these are areas that still need to be studied. I think we have so much to learn about our own behavior and that much more to learn about the apes. Luckily for me it’s the kind of thing that can keep you in a job, because there are so many interesting and exciting things to have to study. So I think at this point a lot of scientists are focused on culture and what those differences are, but as I was saying, this bar keeps moving because 30 years ago we were convinced it was tool use that differentiated us. The more we learn the more we realize that these lines are a lot blurrier than we originally thought.

…they have a lot of qualities that we have in humans… you see a little of that in Caesar’s behavior.

Renn: Well I have to say, as happy as I am as a film critic that the film is so good, I do hope that it also serves to interest people in your field and maybe make your job getting funding a little easier.

Dr. S: I hope it maybe makes people a little more interested in apes and learning about apes. I’m always shocked by the fact because I sort of eat and breathe apes, that so many people are not aware of their status in the wild, and don’t realize how close we are to losing these populations. And that is really human driven– that’s driven by poverty, and by hunting, habitat loss and if people walk away from this movie and are fascinated by Caesar and want to learn more about chimp behavior… every bit that people learn about these animals is beneficial.

A great website if people want to learn more about gorillas is the Fossey Fund website, which is www.gorillafund.org. It talks a lot about our work and gorillas in general, and the challenges they face. It’s a good resource for people.