The full cast of CICASP (circa 2012) on opportunities for international students in our graduate program on primatology and wildlife research

In this edition of The PrimateCast, we welcome Drs. Ikuma Adachi, Fred Bercovitch, and David Hill to the studio to discuss the CICASP program from top to bottom.

In addition to discussing the program itself, we tackle issues surrounding adjusting to life in Japan and conducting research both at PRI and abroad at the many field sites run by researchers at the PRI. 

Our guests also discuss how they came to be affiliated with CICASP, from their own academic origins in graduate school through to the research that they carry out today at PRI and abroad.

The PrimateCast is hosted and produced by Andrew MacIntosh. Artwork by Chris Martin. Music by Andre Goncalves.

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Transcript

0:00

so we're here with scasp you can see it on the banner Now You See It In the Flesh and uh I think we want to start with iuma Dr adachi you've been with sasp kind of the longest so what is sasp yeah okay so sasp for the center for the international cation and Advan studies in py so it's a clear goal for us is international internationalization of The Institute so that's kind of the main goal and for that purpose we got three Professor here and I came for but I mean just on the same year basically it's not so difference when was that when did 2010 April for me in June for and July yeah so it's in the same year and we launch up the new uh course there and we started the exam uh in English so now the old student can take exam in the entrance exam in English so why why is that an important thing I mean we obviously know why but people come on how many of the international people write and read in Japanese so how hard is it I mean to get into Kota University if you were to take the Japanese for even for Japanese of course so one of the most difficult University and then if they have to go through in the Japanese entrance exam there's no chance almost so but of course I mean Japanese is not important cue for the science itself that's why we want to open up to the more International people then the English is of course the one of the necessary language for the science and for the the communication as well so we prepared exam we start launch up the new exam system which can be held on the whole English so that's kind of our fast um things we did very cool yeah and I think for Andrew and I coming to PRI as students before before cycas was around it it's kind of a much more complicated process right and you kind of have to jump through a lot of Hoops and figure a lot of stuff out on your own so ccas is kind of a nice step forward everything simpler for international people that want to come right yeah it seems to have changed quite a bit hope so yeah in that time and I you even more like you know want to listen about those input as well like how much you now feel comfortable to stay in Japan and how things can be change and also how it can be improved later as well so that's kind of things really important for us okay so one of the ways that that PR definitely improved recently is by bringing Professor David Hill and Fred burkovich in so what are you guys doing here okay so I came in February 2010 um and the big attraction for me was to try help to launch a brand new international program for collaboration in research even though it's called advanced studies and primatology I had studied primates um for over 20 years but then had branched out into some non- primates and the opportunity presented itself to work on primates and non-primates in an international atmosphere and a key for me was the fact that the Primate Research Institute and kyota University had a long tradition and a long history of detailed studies on primates um less so on other animals and less so on conservation so I thought this would be a really cool way to bridge conservation and wildlife biology and primates and non- primates in field studies and laboratory studies in the International Community because Japan had a history of being a very insular country and now Japan was opening up they're becoming bigger players in the world in many fields including education and academics so I thought oh this is a great opportunity bring on graduate students from around the world it can train them they can go back to their host countries for conservation um they can do more research on primates in their countries on other animals so I thought it was a great opportunity um and still trying to work on bringing in and recruiting International students and what I have found in the last couple of years is that as Iko was saying um got through a few bumps at the start and like you guys were saying it was a little bit difficult to get used to it but there is a system in place now to make it a lot easier for international students to adjust to life in Japan and to move ahead with their educational careers so just going back to backtrack a little bit here this is not actually coming in 2010 was not the first time that you visited Japan was it no I had actually been here in 1996 there was a conference on um Asian maacs and I had studied Reese's monkeys at Kaa Santiago for about a dozen years before coming here and when I came to that conference I presented a talk on reproductive strategies of Reese's monkeys um took a side trip to arashiyama which was right outside Kyoto um and then the conference is actually held here in inyama was it it was in anama at the Freud Center and it was really it was fry and it was very um interesting for me to come back to a place that I hadn't expected to move to for a while right and even see the same place because then last year there was a seminar meeting held at the same Friday Center just before the IPS come full circle I had come full circle and then what I didn't realize um until after we had come here was I didn't I had been working in kaai Santiago and in Puerto Rico for a while and it turns out that so had David we never overlapped while we were doing our research in Kao Santiago but we knew a lot of the same people and in some had parallel trajectories from primates to non- primates and then David came like a month after I came that's right and just before we I want to move over to David uh that's not the only link that we had so you Mike has told me the story Mike Huffman said that you were one of his first primatology friends so that goes right that goes back before Mike even moved to Japan so oh wow so what happened was before Mike became a graduate student he was kind of checking out places and I was working on my PhD in Kenya on reproductive strategies and baboons and got a letter from this guy Mike Huffman um because he was just coming to visit and we said sure come on out so he spent about a week with us um in Kenya over um in gilgil MH and we' been in contact since then um what happened afterwards was he ended up staying in Japan and working on female choice and mating strategies in Japanese Macs and I ended up finishing my PhD on mating strategies and F in baboons so we even had the same or very similar PhD topics and we just been in touch for years in fact after Kenya and I had moved to Puerto Rico Mike also came to visit us there at one point and we took him out to K Santiago so he could see the rees's monkeys and we'd work together on comparing rees's and Japanese Macs right um so we actually go back quite go back quite a while with Mike and then when this opportunity came up and added bonus was being able to work with Mike yeah there you go that's great probably not something you would have expected even years ago no never could have predicted it or expected it especially back in the days when you're working on your PhD and you have this guy just passing through like wow who could know this well he's passed through a lot of places so so what about you David did you expect to find yourself back in Japan and well I frequently came back to Japan so it wasn't that much of a surprise but I wasn't expecting to find myself working and living in Japan in the same way because um I actually although I did my PhD research in K Santiago ago um I did my post dooc in Japan so um a long time ago I had experience of living here for 6 and a half years and doing research on on Japanese monkeys um but after that I moved back to the UK but I was still coming back to Japan pretty much every year to do field work and that's in Yakima right so that's right yeah also one of my beloved CES in Japan yeah yeah and um gradually moved on to becoming interested in other mammals in yakushima initially dear and monkeys and then in bats and and after that I got hooked on bats and started working on bats but um yeah um the um similar to to uh to Fred I met Mike very early on because um he was I think he was either finishing his PhD or just started a postto right at um in anthrop in the anthropology department at Kyoto when I started my post dog so we met then um but yes I'm surprised to but very very pleased ideal yes yes yes it is and um I think part of the motivation for me a lot of it for me is the fact that I've um enjoyed life in Japan so much as a foreigner coming in and doing research here that I'd really like to help other people to to to facilitate other people to have that experience I mean my own focus and to a large extent friends a sort of field work um focus but um there are lots of opportunities for people to come here and study in laborat atores as well um but to be able to do that in Japan which has its own long scientific tradition and very well developed um SC body of scientists um is just an excellent opportunity I'd like to be able to you know help PE other young people to um to experience it it definitely seems to be a resource the country in general that not a lot of people have exploited I think to come here in primatology or even in other fields from abroad but just to go back to the link with Kyle Santiago so you said you were doing your your PhD research there yes and at the time your PhD adviser was none other than Robert yes somebody that a few primatologists might know yes yes I hope so um yeah Robert took me on as his um I was actually his last nonhuman primate student he'd had a string of of non-human primate are you not a human primate D yeah I have very good disguise um he actually be he he actually began research on chaffing chits and blue tits he began as a bird researcher so I have a nice precedent for shifting Fields completely but when I initially went to um to Cambridge to do my PhD I was going to work on animal communication and my advisor was going to be Mike Simpson because that was something he was interested in but gradually my interest shifted to social relationships and specifically social relationships for adult males um in Reese's maccax and so Robert took over because that was much more his sort of area and it was it was really a great experience being a student under him he had had many students I was very busy but you know when you needed to see him he could always find time and he was had a very sympathetic um ear so and was extremely helpful so yeah very pleased to have been a student of his I don't he didn't stop doing non-human primate students because of me make it very clear I think he wasn't going to take anymore he was going to concentrate on the studies of child behavior human child behavior um because I had a new unit there on um um integration of beh development of integration of behavior which was focusing on child um Behavior but he you know because of my area of Interest he took me on as an additional um primary student very cool and how about you Fred oh sorry so your advisor Jo your PhD yeah that changed changed changed while I was in the field I had I had one of the field it changed I had one of those experiences where um when I began the PHD program and went out to Kenya I had actually gone out to Kenya to help another graduate student did their PHD mhm um then while I was there two of the people who were my advisers and me worked out a dissertation project so I stayed there and my adviser at the time was Donald Lindberg who was at UCLA then he obtained a position at the San Diego Zoo so he moved to the San Diego Zoo while I was in Kenya and Dorothy Cheney and Robert cyar moved to UCLA from their postto with Peter Marler who had worked on communication with Robert hind okay six degrees everybody's just to add to that link Chris also was a student of Chen and safe far that's they teach at upen now and I was an undergraduate at upen so I took all of their classes oh see so we are a nice happy family all link together right so then yeah Dorothy actually became the chair of my PhD committee okay um and then after I um got my PhD I think it was about a year or two later that's when she left to pen her and Robert took up the positions at pen MH and they became much more interested or they kind of shifted from field studies to experimental field work especially with communication soci relationships um which kind of factors into a lot of what people here ATP are doing also right I remember it was because of an anecdote they said during class at upen that got me first interested in PRI they said that they had visited here once and it was really interesting cuz they were staying here I guess in this building that we're in right now in like the the local the dormatory of PRI and they woke up to hearing Gibbons doing yeah I remember listening to that story and thinking wow that must be a cool place I should try and stay in that dormatory too you walk on the G then you should pick up the G Professor yeah Professor matar was at Pennsylvania too he so he has a very close connection with with them because uh they overlapped I think for a year mhm yeah yeah he was at the David premac lab when upen used to have chimps and it was out in the countryside with the the Amish Countryside yeah so not in Philadelphia yeah yeah and so then and Mike's your adviser so you're connected to Mike too and what's your connection to Mata then how do you guys connect well I mean my P supervisor is kind of the brother in Sp of him the pro mwa so it's we we are closely related and we are doing the same kind of topics so I mean other than the fuas lab I mean that's my supervisor in Kyoto uh There is almost no place we can work on primate nonh human primate especially I mean and then I start to collaborate with moza profess M zawa and tomaga also in the same section when I was in graduate school so we we work together for the cognitive development in uh infant maku and that's kind of how we start work together since way 10 years or over 10 years ago so I want to interrupt with a completely different topic you just said something about kind of like a brother yeah of matawa so in the last interview we had matawa here and he was talking about the history of Japan he was talking about the ancestral triplets and spiritual Twins and this kind of thing so what is this with the spiritual siblings well they the kind of pioneer again for the area of the comparative cognitive science which was not so much big at all in Japan before or even the worldwide It's Kind the same situation so most of the people work in Psychology which is more or less uh focusing on universal learning theory what can be the theory behind the learning or the learning the some ability MH but uh the SC that Fu and Prof mat focusing on species difference so what can be a cause for the species difference and how they actually adapt to their environment and how they can relate it to the each commun abilities for each species so it's more like a broad picture and so instead of focusing on the universal they are more focusing on the difference among the species so it's kind of new style of the study on the cognitive abilities in nonhumans so it's kind of pioneer speech Spirit of brother see so and before you came to PR and joined sasp um you you did your post do in the United States right right so uh that was uh from 2006 to 20 8 I was in Atlanta the Georgia uh and was yeah oh yeah y National Primate Research Center and which is University but I was there for two years and work Vis it over Hampton and who is really famous for the uh for the finding of the metacognition or meta memory in re Mar so it's kind of knowledge about knowledge okay or knowledge about yourself whether or not you remember the certain topic right so this kind of new finding was done by him and I joined his laboratory and worked together for two years yeah how did you find going out of Japan and doing some research in the states I mean that's kind of exciting it's really exciting and right after I got PhD I really want to have some experience work on other places and not only I mean in a different laboratory but also in a different culture cuz uh for the science for sure this is international society and for that purpose I mean for that meaning I mean I for me it's really important to get really in those different society and understand the difference between us it's kind of similar to the uh compartive of science we want to focus in difference and then by looking at the difference we more recognize ourselves clearly all right this is a difference which means this is us this is you know I mean this not so clear difference like a species difference but it's kind of help us to understand why people can hit on some difficulties in another country is even though the local people never think about that can be a problem mhm and which kind help me a lot to understand international student here have some problems and I always keep my eyes open like what can be a difficulties for them sure and most of the ja never find it you know but because of this kind of experience I I experience by myself why I cannot do this kind of simple things and why I need to ask the people to help me about this it's really silly but the biggest difference is you probably went to the states with already a good command of the language that they use yeah I mean yeah that's kind even more make me feel here in Japan International since much more tough time compared to even Myan but still even for me it was tough even though I can speak some English sure but of course I mean system system is different and I mean whole structure is different yeah then even though just opening I mean even like opening up the bank account is really such a simple things but that bring me a lot of problem and those kind of experience I mean totally I mean make me change my mind and not my mind in a big way but more my op yeah I make me open the my mind open to the everyone I see anyway it just makes you more sympathetic and conscious about some of the problems that that's good and at least one of us who's uh about to get their PHD here has been an international student at PR for the last five years and you might have come across a few Road bumps yeah it's true there's a lot of paperwork and difficult situations getting a driver's license was difficult so it does help we don't want to talk about that we're not going to talk about that so yeah it's great to have kind of a support system here at PRI and I think scasp is a good um kind of central hub for helping out people in in these types of situations yeah and I mean not only the you know problem is not only for them I mean for them I mean they kind of thinks it's really hard for them to overcome the problem and they need a help but but those difficulty is not only the problem that kind makes people thinks they really you know um how can I say that handicapped or depressed sometime so they feel really kind of I mean in how do you call like um isolated from the others so they kind of more easily depressed even those small things accumulation the small tiny things each of those things not big at all but still those can change their feeling a lot right and I want to change the kind of situation so we always want to keep the open to the international people and try to make a good system to to support them and we are kind do yeah I mean getting through graduate school any place is a challenge no matter where you go um and coming to a foreign country is to get your PhD is even a bigger challenge um for the students for pcast so the best we can do is try to ease it make it for them in a number of ways and this is pretty much what we try to do and most of us have been other places and and try to help adjust to Japanese society and the way the system works and there are some things that um we can help and others as anywhere there are certain brick walls and that's it you just have to learn to deal with the brick wall right um but that's not unique to Japan or to PRI or any place like that it's just sometimes people have different expectations and one of the things that to convince the students here is that we're working with them to help them get the PHD as well as working with them to help adjust them to life in any Yama yeah and um if I one more thing it's even actually the bigger issue but once I overcome the problem or difficulties in the states then I will more enjoy really a lot The Experience here I mean new experience different experience different style of the research or different I mean style of discussion everything kind of so stimulating so that is kind of one really important part of the internationalization like you got more like a broad picture of the style of the research and you're not just focusing on tiny small things and that hit me a lot and for Japan I mean same way if we can support them to overcome this kind difficulties we can provide so many interesting um resources for them that's right so that's kind we want to proceed here and also although um I mean coming to Japan many of the people in PRI are working in other places all over the world so um students coming here um obviously will get the experience of living in Japan but many of them will also get the experience of working in Democratic Republic of Congo or Uganda or one of our students is just coming back on Monday from yeah so it's a kind of a both um a new experience in terms of of living but I think through sast we can give a you know a secure and friendly base for that and help people but also the experience of of living and working doing field work in it another country that's true because one of the um main advantages here is the number of field projects that are going on as well as the financial support to send students to the field that's true and a lot of the students here coming from the International Community haven't traveled much so not only do they get used to Japan but it's true what you're saying is they also a gift to go to another country um and sometimes there are funds available so that they can go there just to see what it's like for a couple of weeks do experience different M and also mean for me it's not only for the international people it's kind of mut and I mean of course I we going mostly focusing on bringing some support for the international Scholars but what what happened later is of course internationalization as a whole in PR then the Japanese student who can get a lot of influence from the international people and even though they just stay in Japan they can kind of feel the same experience and we should be really advantaged for them yeah like I mentioned one of the the advantages here or one of the the areas that Japan's moving in is becoming less insular and attracting the International Community but if Japan's going to be part of the International Community and the students part of that then the Japanese students are also going to be playing in the international game so we do try to encourage Japanese students to show up at our Workshop we have a weekly Workshop in scast that's right um on Wildlife Research and a lot of the Japanese graduate students show up the workshop itself is in English they work on improving their English and we do try to integrate the Japanese students with the international students right an important part of right and it seems to be moving along there's actually quite a few Japanese students who are interested in coming to the international seminars and yeah gather abely I think people appreciate the importance of it yeah yeah go ahead yeah and also they kind of start to think about you having presentation English and talk to the international people as a normal things so it's really good start they kind of feel it's more like you know relaxing relaxed to do things before I mean we have some people just speaking English in the uh in in the um seminar and so on but I mean now they have strong motivation to do it that's right or it's just normal for them right it's be great um Step I think and So speaking speaking of speaking English during presentations and things there's another Link in sasp and that's that both David and myself initially came to Japan not to stud to teach English oh that's true so so can you tell us a little a bit about that how did that come about yes I had um I was just about to complete my PhD and um Wanted was looking for the next step and I had applied for a postdoctoral fellowship in Japan um but the decision was delayed there were various reasons the decision was delayed and because my wife and I knew we wanted to come to Japan as a sort of insurance we' also applied for jobs as English teachers with a British company that that had um schools in in Tokyo and Osaka and signed to contracts with them and just after we' signed the contracts discovered the postto had been successful now of course I could have just walked away from the company and done the postto but my wife was a professional English teacher that was her was her profession at the time and if she'd walked away she might have had trouble getting another job and so um luckily I was able to postpone it and spent two years living in Tokyo which actually was very good experience because Tokyo is it at that time was a relatively easy place for um non-japanese people to live um because there's lots of information in in English or you could find somebody who could speak English fairly easily whereas my field site in yakushima um at that time and still to a large extent you don't find people who speak English so if you don't have any Japanese ability you're in trouble or you depend the whole time on one or two people who Who Um can speak both languages so it's kind of good preparation for that and also allowed me to see Tokyo this huge City you know my first two years of two years of Japan and then moved to yakushima which is rural small population completely the other end of the spectrum um so I got a really nice view of two sides of Japan and then for the last two and a half years lived in Kyoto which is kind of intermediate but but a Char character all of its own so three different um experiences of Japan within the first six and a half years I think speaking Japanese definitely is an advantage for you guys I don't speak much but you've been here for a long time have you found I mean can you dabble in Japanese every once interesting it this is what we when when the interviewee asks the interviewer questions they don't want to be asked bounce it back I think that of course um being able to speak Japanese really helps your quality of life in terms of interacting with people and um of understanding the culture and things like that um I will say that it's not totally necessary at PRI to uh to be able to speak Japanese because English is the public language here and so if research is your focus and you really want to just do research you can do it in English um but yeah it does help to have some Japanese of course sure but that's one of those fun things you can pick up on the side right definitely So speaking of research maybe we should just have a little a little bit of information for people about what we what we do here SOA you started by talking about all these uh this comparative approach to psychology and things so so what specifically is your your major research theme right now okay so the my main research Focus kind of concept in animals which can Rel to the language abilities somehow but the basic idea is kind how they actually perceive the world how they actually organize information in the brain to make a category about the information in the environment and so on and especially these days I focus in the cross model or multi modal integration of the information into those representation like auditory information information and visual information of course come together and then which kind of make a representation of for person individual and so on so I kind of focus on this aspect and the now working chimps and other primate species whether or not they have those kind of representation and how much they can actually and so on and on the side uh research or side topic I also have kind of Closs model basic mapping which is also kind of related to another aspect of language which kind of leveling so if you have like a spontaneously have some how can I say motivation to match certain sound type to the certain shape then it's relatively restrict the combination of the sound and visual information for example so it's going to believe that this kind of basic combination can be a big help when we develop a new language or the we Evol the language cuz it's relatively easy for people to share this information then it's kind of shared in the community it comes a official level for the object so it's kind of how probably people um how can you say acquire the fast language with symbolic language so I also can do this kind of things for the other species yeah it's too specific but nothing is too specific for an audience my research Focus basically hasn't changed in 25 years it's funny I'm stuck in the mud um but when I in one sense but not in another right exactly and so when I began my PhD I was just fascinated and completely blown away um by how animals have evolved living in social groups and I really wanted to understand more about what factors determine social relationships and why do animals differ in their reproductive success so that's where I started my career on my PhD since that time the questions have kind of grown out of that and so have the species but it really does come down to trying to work on the physiology and the genetics and the Ecology of a variety of species to see what makes them tick so what species are we talking about well I'll get to that in a minute so what I was going to say so the main kind of um focus at the moment has grown from that into Huck and understanding the social systems and mating behaviors of animals help their conservation so I'm really trying to push a lot more conservation as well as that is evolutionary biology so having dipped through um baboons and reesus monkeys and koalas and a few other right now um the focus is on giraffe um giraffe are really widespread in Africa they're real popular species in zoos everyone who goes on African as far as want to see giraffe and their feedings Behavior has been studied quite a bit they actually eat over 100 different species even though the the picture of a giraffe is sticking its tongue out and pulling off an AAA Leaf they eat more than that um but there are very few studies of giraffe and the social systems in Africa um so unlike Elephants or hyenas or lions or baboons or gorillas or chimpanzees there aren't any long-term field studies of giraffe so right now I'm working with an individual Phil Barry who's been a safari guide in Zambia um for over 30 years and he's collected a lot of useful data and so we're analyzing that and this is where my focus is now working on giraffe conservation and deciphering the nuances of a giraffe social system they're more complicated than people think we could actually look at their cognition if we had people focusing on that but do you think they can use a touch panel with a long tongue they use their tongue train them to use their tongue on the touch pan we can fit any in pure ey so so even though the giraff right now are kind of the central species um there's a lot I have worked on and still working on some work with the koalas and doing some work on Rec's monkey hormones and behavior and just generally being a huge Darwin buff as well yeah exactly so can you and trying to relate everything to evolutionary biology and Darwin's ideas of natural selection including your recent trip including to Argentina including the recent trip to Argentina so I took um hadn't been well um haven't been on a vacation a long time so it took a long I took a long vacation went to Argentina because it's one of the places I hadn't visited to go down to the Beagle Channel wanted to see tiod Del fuo and managed to get to tiod Del fuo during the summertime and it was windy and bitter cold and icy rain and choppy and the Beagle channel was a complete mess but what was really cool about it being a complete mess and me freezing my butt off in the bagle channel was I was there in January and Charles Daren was there in January although he was there in 1833 and when he was there it was also freezing cold and the Beagle actually when they went out to see the Cape Horn they were stuck for 3 weeks at se cuz the weather was terrible they couldn't get back into the channel and it's hard reading that imagining how difficult it could be on a sailboat to get back into the channel until you've been to the Beagle Channel during the summer months when it's supposed to be con and you're in a modern catamaran and it's just freezing cold and you can see the the white caps and the water all over and you just kind of picture man this guy must have been pretty resilient all the sailors actually pretty resilient and persistent and just doggedly determined yeah to explore there you go well I get my Darwin fixed by going to Argentina one one degree of separation from the place that spurned the most elegant idea in history David yes what do you do here at Z well my research now focuses um pretty much exclusively on bats but I have within that have different research interests and like Fred I'm interested in conservation and particularly in improving methods for surveying bats in Forest habitats because they are quite um quite difficult to survey and Forest habitats but we've developed um a lure which which improves our ability to get measures of diversity in a short period of time but it's been used mainly in temperate forest and now I'm I'm trying to improve it for use in tropical rainforests where obviously diversity of species are much higher but um the way it works is by producing um simulations of social calls communicative calls between bats and I'm also interested in bat um social behavior and particularly their vocal communication and how that what basically what its functions are because the huge challenge of um studying bats compare with primates and probably draft you can't see them I mean you have you can see dra but they disappear easily think vegetation amazing I could lose a bat much lot more easier make it better on yeah um so you have to use you have to use things like radio tracking and you have to use capture and um and recordings in the in the field but using play back experiments and different in different sort of contexts you can begin to get an idea of what the call the functions of the calls are so it's kind of um it's ch very challenging but it's very rewarding when you do actually find things out but I think the the three what the three of us have in common is that we are all very much uh interested in the comparative aspect and so things that I've been finding out like the fact that the species I'm looking at it turns out has matal lineal um groups or you wouldn't imagine it was a group because part of time they're apart and occasionally they're together but it's a matal inal group almost certainly made up of of mothers and daughters and sisters and so on um similar to most primate species and I think the three of us really want to sort of emphasize and and show look at things from a comparative perspective rather than purely primate or purely bat or purely giraffe I think that's probably a good way to sum up the research aspect of whats it's a broad perspective in the sense that we do cover we saying laboratory and field everything from cognition to conservation everything from Evolution to ecology MH um but it's also integrative yeah it is integrative in the sense that we do cover not only different fields but different species that's right MH absolutely so your future prospects for scasp just to finish this up here what is the what are you doing next in terms of research research I'm going to Thailand next week for for 3 weeks to test the autobat in in Thai tropical forest we've just we've just been testing it in in Malaysia quite successfully and we're going to extend to um Thailand and then this coming at the moment it that's a hybernating in Japan but in the coming field season going back to Japan and building on the sort of initial data we got that suggests that these um bats are living in matenal groups try and get some more information on that and start doing playback experiments haven't actually done any on these bats I did some in the UK but not here so far very cool Thailand sounds nice and warm a little different true Guma I just going to stay here cuz I since I'm work on the laboratory setup so everyday basis we just go down for the experimental room and call in chimps or other primate species and train them to do some task and then they once they got some basic skill then we just modify stry to see the certain aspect whether or not they can transfer their knowledge to the new situation and so on so as far as I do this I going to stay here and for the collaboration wise of course I going to go sever places Ro as well sure and recently we may start some collaboration with India yeah you about it yeah I just got invited for a talk uh this month actually two weeks ago or so and then we are talking about some future collaboration and also Germany we have some collaboration and States we have our Dr Brian here who is doing huge comparative study is there and we are kind of joining that program as well so there's several things going on but I by myself most you stay here all right and my next short research Expedition is to New York lot ofes in New York yeah lots of primates in New York but um pretty much it's for two two re two main reasons one is because using the comparative approach I am going to be given a presentation on the evolution of human societies from the perspective that incorporates giraffe social systems um they have something to say about creating models for human societies and the other part is to do library research back on this Charles Darwin um tactic because I am writing a book on how he actually laid the foundations for conservation and is connected to subsequent conservationists both professionally and personally and so heading to New York allows me the opportunity um to read some books and go to some of the libraries which I don't have access to over here in all right Japan well if anybody's listening in that area when and where will you be talking um in March I don't know the um C graduate school um and I forgot the days but it'll be in the middle of March okay well if anybody's listening out there try and get down to see Fred time and we'll definitely have you back on the show when you finish your book until you know as well as everybody else you the next round of scasp interviews yep any final thoughts golden opportunity joining us yes thanks very much for Jo oh thank you