Weaving between theory and practice in behavioral ecology and conservation with Dr. Karen Strier

The PrimateCast

This episode of The PrimateCast: Origins is taken from CICASP's International Primatology Lecture Series: Past, Present and Future Perspectives of the Field.

The IPLS is dedicated to providing origin stories told by experienced researchers in primatology and related fields. The lectures are conducted via Zoom within our CICASP Seminar in Science Communication for graduate students of our program, but we decided to release the audio right here on The PrimateCast.
For anyone interested in viewing the video versions of these lectures, head over to CICASP's YouTube channel, where you can also watch them live as we stream our Zoom feeds there.
For the 6th international primatology lecture we invited Dr. Karen Strier to share her story with us.
Many of our listeners should be really familiar with Dr. Strier, as she was until recently president of the International Primatological Society and is the author of 6 editions of the famous textbook Primate Behavioral Ecology - which I assume many of you, like me many years ago, were trained on!
I was lucky enough to interview her for the podcast back in 2016 (#53) at the 26th Congress of the International Primatological Society that was held in Chicago and hosted by Lincoln Park Zoo. She had just become president of the IPS, so now I guess we can bookend her tenure with a follow up episode of The PrimateCast - nailed it!
But I thought we had a really great conversation back then, so it was nice to see the bigger picture of Karen’s work in this IPLS event. And, if you stay to the end, you’ll notice that I left in my own question of Dr. Strier, just because I thought her answer to it really helped fill out the story of why their work on muriquis matters so much, and what we still need to look out for.
In her talk, Karen covers how she got into primatology and ended up studying muriquis, also known as woolly monkeys - those rare faces in the forest, which she writes about so elegantly in a book of that name. Northern muriquis, her main study species, are among the most endangered primates, and the work that Karen and her colleagues have been doing is really shedding light on their ups and downs, and the threats they continue to face.
Karen Strier is Vilas Research Professor and Irven Devore Professor of Anthropology at the University of Madison - Wisconsin. For anyone who wants to know more about Dr. Strier, check out her lab's homepage on the University of Wisconsin's website.
The PrimateCast is hosted and produced by Andrew MacIntosh. Artwork by Chris Martin. Music by Andre Goncalves. Credits by Kasia Majewski.

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