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| Study break:
Lonsdorf, left, and colleague amid savanna grasses in
Tanzania |
| photo:Ian
Gilby |
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trip to Gombe Stream National Park begins with a flight to Dar es
Salaam. From there, you take the train some 700 miles, a journey
punctuated by stops in every small town and sometimes halted altogether
by a derailed car or engine breakdown. After forty-plus hours, you
arrive in the fishing port of Kigoma and step aboard a water taxi
outfitted with a small outboard motor. Often, it is brimming with
chickens and goats, oil drums, luggage, and people. If all goes
well, just three to four hours later you disembark at a small compound
on Lake Tanganyika's eastern shore. Welcome to the home of Frodo,
Fifi, Glitter, and Golden--members of the world's most celebrated
clan of chimpanzees.
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It's a journey Elizabeth Vinson Lonsdorf '96 has made many times.
And when the events of September 11 forced her to cancel her fourth
and final research trip to Tanzania last fall, the twenty-seven-year-old
animal behaviorist was sorely disappointed.
"I miss the chimps," says Lonsdorf, a North Carolina
native who now lives in Minnesota. "I miss swimming in the
lake. And I miss my friends. But I don't miss the rain. Or the snakes.
Or the malaria."
Encompassing a mere twenty square miles, Gombe Stream is both
the smallest of Tanzania's national parks and its most famous. Its
renown, of course, is due to Jane Goodall, the field researcher
who, at age twenty-six, was sent there by anthropologist Louis Leakey
to study wild chimpanzees. Her subsequent discoveries rocked the
scientific world--forever changing the way we think about animals,
evolution, and human culture. Four decades later, Goodall now travels
the global ecture circuit roughly 300 days a year, talking about
her beloved chimps and spreading the gospel of ecological conservation.
She returns to her adopted home only three times a year.
Thankfully, Lonsdorf, who is pursuing a Ph.D. in animal behavior
at the University of Minnesota, and other researchers have taken
up where Goodall's research left off. Though Gombe is the site of
one of the world's longest-running wild animal studies, there's
much yet to learn about chimpanzees, their habits, and their social
behaviors. Lonsdorf is one of a cadre of young researchers from
Harvard University, Minnesota, and the University of Bristol currently
engaged in specialized field research at Gombe. Native Tanzanians
have been trained to follow the chimps and record their behaviors
year-round.
Lonsdorf is studying how skills, such as tool use, are passed
down from mothers to infants. Two months before she began her work,
a pair of twins, Glitter and Golden, were born to one of the chimps.
It was an animal behaviorist's dream come true. "I think [Lonsdorf]
has got the perfect study subjects with the twins," says Goodall,
now sixty-eight, who has long had an interest in the interactions
between mothers and infant chimps. "They have the same mother
and [have had] exactly the same environment right from the beginning.
Yet they have these very different personalities. Golden is the
tomboy--she always wants to go off and play. Glitter, the more cautious
one, is always watching everything. How does that relate to their
development and tool use?"
That question has fueled much of Lonsdorf's research at Gombe,
and drawn attention from outsiders as well. When an IMAX production
team working on a film about Goodall and the chimps heard about
Lonsdorf's work, they sought her out. Impressed by her scientific
scholarship and bright personality, they offered to finance some
of her work in exchange for the chance to capture her interactions
with chimps on film. She agreed. Her star turn can be seen in Jane
Goodall's Wild Chimpanzees, due for release next October.
Animals have always held a certain fascination for Lonsdorf. As
a kid, she read books about Dian Fossey and other primatologists.
She watched National Geographic television specials, including several
featuring Goodall. Her family was forever taking in stray cats and
abandoned wildlife. "We rescued squirrels and birds. We always
had a lot of pets," she recalls. "In high school, one
of my friends found a cat on the side of the road. He was going
to take it to a shelter, until somebody said, 'No, just take it
to Elizabeth's house.' "
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It was her passion for sports, however, that led her to Duke. "In
1991, the Final Four was in Indianapolis," the lifelong basketball
fan recalls. Her father, an administrator at a small Indiana university,
obtained tickets and took his daughter. "That was the first
year Duke won. We were in the stands and I looked over at the Duke
student section. They reminded me of my high school--sports-crazy.
I said, 'Dad, what school is that? Who are they? What's the deal?'"
Within a few months, she had applied for early-decision admission.
Arriving at Duke in 1992, she quickly developed an interest in
psychology. "Elizabeth was one of my all-time favorite students,"
says Duke psychology professor Carl Erickson. "She was wonderful
to have around because she's full of good humor and enthusiastic,
about animals and life in general." Lonsdorf took two classes
taught by Erickson and, at his urging, she and a friend signed on
to help him with behavioral observations of the famed aye-aye population
at Duke's Primate Center--nocturnal creatures Lonsdorf describes
as "straight out of the movie Gremlins."
"I thought we'd be watching the aye-aye through some glass,"
she says. "But Professor Erickson gave us a clipboard and showed
us how to mark their behaviors, and then he opened the door to the
enclosure and shoved us in for two hours. We were right in there
with the animals."
In fact, Lonsdorf went on to pursue a double major in psychology
and biology, completing a senior thesis on aye-aye behaviors. Her
thesis adviser, Duke biology professor Peter Klopfer, remembers
her as a student who often politely disagreed with her instructors,
choosing to go her own way when it came to accepted methods and
procedures for scientific studies. "She accepted criticism
and advice," Klopfer says, "but she was not cowed in any
way if she had a better idea."
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