Stephanie Poindexter, a biological anthropologist in UB's College of Arts and Sciences, specializes in how primates utilize and navigate their habitats. For the past 10 years, she has focused her research on the slow loris, an adorable yet venomous primate that inhabits Southeast Asia and surrounding areas. In this episode, Poindexter tells host Vicky Santos how she first became interested in primates (it helps to grow up near a zoo), how to track down a slow loris in a Thai forest in the middle of the night, and why we need to understand this little-known creature better if we wish to fully understand ourselves.
Credits:
Host: Vicky Santos
Guest: Stephanie Poindexter
Writer: Laura Silverman
Production and editing by UB Video Production Group
Coming on April 30: More than 750 older Americans are hospitalized every day due to severe side effects from their medications. Many of them will die prematurely as a result. Pharmacy researcher David Jacobs breaks down the systemic failures behind this disturbing trend and explains how Team Alice, a multidisciplinary initiative that he co-leads, is working to reverse it.
Stephanie Poindexter, a biological anthropologist in UB's College of Arts and Sciences, specializes in how primates utilize and navigate their habitats. For the past 10 years, she has focused her research on the slow loris, an adorable yet venomous primate that inhabits Southeast Asia and surrounding areas. In this episode, Poindexter tells host Vicky Santos how she first became interested in primates (it helps to grow up near a zoo), how to track down a slow loris in a Thai forest in the middle of the night, and why we need to understand this little-known creature better if we wish to fully understand ourselves.
Credits:
Host: Vicky Santos
Guest: Stephanie Poindexter
Writer: Laura Silverman
Production and editing by UB Video Production Group
Coming on April 30: More than 750 older Americans are hospitalized every day due to severe side effects from their medications. Many of them will die prematurely as a result. Pharmacy researcher David Jacobs breaks down the systemic failures behind this disturbing trend and explains how Team Alice, a multidisciplinary initiative that he co-leads, is working to reverse it.
Vicky Santos:
When Dr. Stephanie Poindexter was a child, her parents often took her to the Brookfield Zoo just outside her hometown of Chicago. Like many children, she was captivated by the apes. Unlike many children, she would go on to make primates her life's work.
Today, Dr. Poindexter is a primatologist and assistant professor of anthropology at the University at Buffalo. And while she still has a fondness for all primates, she has spent the past decade laser-focused on one species in particular, the little understood and endlessly fascinating creature called the slow loris.
Welcome to Driven to Discover, a University at Buffalo podcast that explores what inspires today's innovators. My name is Vicky Santos, and I will be your host for Episode Two: The Slow Loris.
I'm here with Dr. Poindexter, and would you please tell us about how you first became interested in primates?
Stephanie Poindexter:
Sure. The first thing that got me interested in primates would be visiting the zoo with my dad. We spent, I can't even think of how many weekends at the Brookfield Zoo, and I feel like we always started at the primate house and we probably ended at the primate house, but that's where it started.
Vicky Santos:
What is it about them that intrigued you then or intrigues you now?
Stephanie Poindexter:
It was seeing how similar they were to us. Many of the primates that they have at the Brookfield Zoo are in little family groups or they're housed socially. And so you could see young individuals with older individuals, and the way they cared for each other is pretty similar to how my family cared for me. That has always intrigued me.
Vicky Santos:
Most people get interested in something as a kid and then kind of outgrow it. How did you know that you wanted to study primates when you grew up?
Stephanie Poindexter:
I actually decided to study primates, later in life seems not accurate, but later than my childhood. When I was younger, I knew I wanted to do research, and at the time I think the only way I thought you could do research in the way that it's presented to you typically is in a lab coat, and so I thought I wanted to be a medical doctor. But I did spend a lot of time with little science kits and microscopes and doing experiments in the backyard. But ultimately I decided that when I went to college, I was going to be pre-med and that medical school would be the best way to express my interest in research.
Vicky Santos:
How did you pivot to primates from med school?
Stephanie Poindexter:
When I initially started undergraduate, I knew that I wanted to be an anthropology major. I'd done all of my research about medical school, I knew all of the prerequisites and that I would spend a lot of time in the biology department and chemistry department, the physics department. But I thought being an anthropology major would give me a unique perspective on humans and maybe make me a better doctor in the long run.
The first class I took in the anthropology department was human evolution, and the very first section of that class was on primates, as primates are sort of the root of human evolution. And I realized that people studied primates for a living.
Vicky Santos:
What can you tell us about the slow loris?
Stephanie Poindexter:
Slow lorises are small-bodied. They have really big eyes, they've got very strong grip. They can't jump, and so they have to find lots of connections throughout the forest. And from that perspective, they move in this really agile way, in this really graceful way, when I think about it. But they primarily eat tree gums and so they create holes in tree bark, which makes them produce this resin or this gum that they primarily eat.
Most species live in a dispersed family group where there'll be a male, a female and then the female's offspring. But slow lorises are also venomous. That's always a very fun fact.
They are definitely threatened. Their populations in the wild are steadily declining, and so we need conservation interventions to help repopulate them and to help bolster their wild populations for the future.
Vicky Santos:
How did they become endangered?
Stephanie Poindexter:
They are threatened by many things that are plaguing lots of animals in terms of deforestation. So there's just less forested areas for these wild animals to be in. In addition to that, slow lorises are very cute, they have very big eyes, very round faces, they're small and furry, and so people sometimes collect them as pets. People will have them as photo props. So you could visit a bar within their geographic range and even outside of their geographic range and maybe take a picture with one.
Vicky Santos:
And what happens when these people find out that they are venomous?
Stephanie Poindexter:
People abandon them. Sometimes they bring them to rescue centers, which is sort of the best case scenario, but sometimes people just put them on a tree wherever they find one, which is not great for wild populations, or for those individuals.
Vicky Santos:
How were you introduced to the slow loris?
Stephanie Poindexter:
I have faint memories of learning about slow lorises when I was an undergraduate. So my major was in physical anthropology with a focus in primate studies. And so Wash U [Washington University in St. Louis] had more primatologists than I think I've ever seen in a department today. I took a lot of classes in primate conservation, biology, evolution. So I definitely learned about slow lorises then. But it wasn't until I did my masters in primate conservation at Oxford Brooks University in the UK that I really got a thorough introduction to slow lorises and all there was that we can learn about them and what we didn't know and what we did know. So I definitely attribute that to my time as a master's student.
Vicky Santos:
Why the slow loris?
Stephanie Poindexter:
Why not the slow loris? So there are so many primates, and I think especially being in an anthropology department, the root of why anthropologists were interested in primates was trying to figure out how humans evolved. So we're looking back at different hominin species and you kind of keep stepping backwards. You get to great apes, you keep stepping backwards, you get to diurnal monkeys and then you take another step back and you get to nocturnal strepsirrhines, which are slow lorises. And I realized with the help of my PhD advisor that what we know about slow lorises, it pales in comparison to what we know about other great apes.
And so as kind of a young researcher trying to figure out what route to take and what would be interesting to me, the slow lorises filled a lot of the things that I think are important when you're developing a research project, in that there are so many gaps in our knowledge about them, and I personally find them to be a really interesting species. And so I started studying slow lorises and I haven't looked back really.
Vicky Santos:
What would you say are some of the more important discoveries you've made about the slow loris while researching them?
Stephanie Poindexter:
So a lot of my work is focused on how slow lorises understand their environment. And the way that we do that is by studying their movement and studying their social interactions with other slow lorises. A part of my work has been understanding how they move to different resources. And so one thing that came out of some research I did while I was in graduate school was that slow lorises move to goal locations in a similar way that much larger daytime diurnal primates would move to them. So the idea is that having a larger brain and being more social makes you a more intelligent primate, and what we were seeing is that even in a smaller group with a smaller brain moving at night, you have a pretty clear understanding of your environment and how to get to different locations.
Vicky Santos:
What can we gain from studying them?
Stephanie Poindexter:
When I think about being in an anthropology department and having a lot of interests that are rooted in biological anthropology, a lot of that is focused on studying and understanding humans and how we evolved. Humans are also primates just like slow lorises are. And so we're all in the same order in that what I can extract from observing slow lorises can be really informative about what might be an innate thing within humans. And so I think we spend a lot of time thinking about humans as being distinct and unique and different than other primates, and my perspective on all of that is that we are more similar than we are different in a lot of ways.
Vicky Santos:
Can you walk me through the process of researching and studying the slow loris in their natural environments? What do you have to do to get ready to go and be there, and what is it like once you're there?
Stephanie Poindexter:
Planning to go is a big endeavor. There is lots of ordering equipment, there is a lot of safety precautions. There are permits that you need to get from whatever country or whatever location you plan to go. You need to let people know that you plan to sort of root around in their forested areas at night or else you might surprise someone, and we don't want that to happen.
Once we get there, there's probably a day or two in the city that we fly into. So recently I've been doing some work in Thailand, and so we fly into Bangkok, we're probably there for a day or two gathering some things, doing a little shopping, and then we will head to the field site.
It normally takes a couple hours to get to wherever we want to get to and a few transfers of cars. So one car gets you to this point, and then once we get into the national parks or whatever reserve we're working in, the transportation changes and we might ultimately end in just a few motorbikes and we're all carrying different things to get to where we're actually going to stay.
But each site can be very different. So some places you'll still have running water, Wi-Fi, everything's very connected and it's great. Some places you can only get a signal if you go to this tree or if you get to this elevation. And so it can really vary.
Vicky Santos:
Who do you take with you on these trips?
Stephanie Poindexter:
Studying primates is very attractive to people, but being without Wi-Fi and running water is not very attractive to people. And so there is a bit of, I always have to have this real talk conversation with students who have really expressed an interest in going into the field in that, yes, you will be able to contact people, but it will be inconsistent, it will be unreliable, and there are bugs and snakes. So which one is more important to you? Because you can do it, but if the snakes are going to be a deal breaker, then maybe there are other ways to study primates.
Vicky Santos:
It's not the glamorous camping, the glamping?
Stephanie Poindexter:
No, it's not glamping, but it really does depend on where you are. We're not pitching tents and eating rice and beans every night, but sometimes for entertainment we watch ants.
Vicky Santos:
Can you tell us what it's like to be out there and what it's like, a day in this research trip? Just tell us what a typical day is like.
Stephanie Poindexter:
I actually spend most of the days sleeping because the lorises are nocturnal. And so we switch our schedule to be like a loris. So our days typically start around 5 or 6 p.m. We will head out to the last known location of a slow loris that we're following. So we tend to follow one slow loris per night, and they all are outfitted with a collar that sort of emits a unique signal. And so we're able to find a specific loris when we want to find them for that evening. And we head out to where they are sleeping. And because it's at night, we do also want to be very quiet, and so we keep a pretty slow pace once we get to the loris. We might be very quick as we try to get to the last GPS location, but once we're following the loris, we're somewhat quiet and we're watching them with these red headlamps, which doesn't disturb them nearly as much as a bright white light would.
We take a data point every 15 to five minutes, and we take a GPS point, we note what behavior they're performing, what tree they're in, how tall they are, how high the tree is, how high they are in the tree. And depending on what night it is, we may go out to try and capture some slow lorises, to take their weight, measure their body lengths, measure their hand span, measure how much fat they have deposited on their body.
Vicky Santos:
How do you catch them?
Stephanie Poindexter:
In some places, it's very popular, there's a local tradition for games in which people climb up very thin poles. So we find a lot of really good tree climbers in the various places we’ve worked in Southeast Asia. This isn't like a universal thing, but just in some of the places that we've been, people are very inclined to climbing trees, are very good at climbing trees.
So a lot of the times you can just sort of shimmy up the tree to where the loris is. And as one of their anti-predator defenses, they freeze up and pause and hope that you don't see them. Because a lot of their predators are going to respond to their movement. And so when they freeze, they become invisible to things like cobras and other large snakes. But for us it becomes helpful because then we can just pluck them from where they are and carefully bring them to the ground to measure them, and then we release them back as quickly as we can in the same place that we found them.
Vicky Santos:
Well, you've walked us through a lot about the slow loris. We've learned a lot. Can you talk a little bit more about why it's important to research them and how it might affect humans?
Stephanie Poindexter:
Absolutely. When we think about human evolution, it's really a progression over millions of years. And with all of the different software or formulas we use to reconstruct the past, it's important that we have a good set of baseline data. So slow lorises are farther back in our evolutionary history, but we still don't know as much about them as we do about humans and other great apes.
And so if we want to fill in the gap between what we see in the present-day haplorhines and how we evolved to that place, starting with strepsirrhines and early non-primate mammals, it's important that we understand what happens with these nocturnal strepsirrhines as well. Because a lot of the times they really do reflect our origins. And when we try to reconstruct the past, it's hard to do it when we're missing this big piece of the puzzle.