In January on 2008, National Geographic accompanied Drexel Professor Gail Hearn and her research team on a two-week census of Bioko Island to study drill monkeys. An article stemming from the trip was featured in the August '08 edition of the magazine. In several conversations, including the interview below, Hearn exuded a contagious enthusiasm that showed sides of a woman with grit and patience, humor and sophistication.
ASK: You've said in the past that while your specialty is with primates, you consider yourself a conservation biologist. How did you get into that field?
Gail Hearn: Well actually maybe that's not fair because my training was in protein biochemistry—cell biology, the field that would now be called epigenetics. So I started out in a very different field, but I became interested tangentially in the fact that certain monkeys did not breed well in captivity…[You] see gorillas breeding and chimpanzees breeding [in captivity]…and then you realize that there are a lot of species that don't breed in captivity often and for reasons we just don't know. So it was through a student project that I got interested in this particular kind of monkey that wasn't breeding. It was here at the Philadelphia Zoo, and it was the drill monkey. And as I started to pursue that more as a secondary project to the work I was doing with cell biology that had to do with the scent glands of mammals, this was just a fun project. But I ended up going to Bioko Island [in 1990] to see if there might be a place to study drills in the wild and get some insight as to why they bred relatively poorly in zoos and yet, obviously, did fine in the wild so long as there weren't people shooting them. And that was how I ended up in monkeys. And then, of course, I went to Bioko Island and saw the situation in West Africa and it became especially important to keep these species existent on the planet Earth. And that's how I moved into conservation biology.
ASK: What was that first trip to Bioko like in 1990?
GH: Well, the first trip to Bioko followed a trip [to Cameroon] three years earlier with the same basic group of people. I went with the then curator of mammals at the Philadelphia Zoo, Dietrich Schaaf, and we had gone to Cameroon in the hopes of seeing drills in the wild because he too was interested in following why they weren't breeding. At this point, I had my students studying drill monkeys in European zoos where they did do a little better; one zoo, in particular, had been able to get them to breed pretty well. So we felt that we really were making great progress with this one zoo to what the answer was in getting them to breed. We didn't know what the answer was, but we knew at least it was possible, so we thought we'd go study them in West Africa where they live and so we could make a complete circle here. And, again, it wasn't my main research [but] just something I wanted to do on the side. We didn't find much in Cameroon. The best we did was see the leaves moved by drills, but I never actually saw the drills. And we were with the best researcher, a guy named Steve Gartlen, whose specialty was primates and he did conservation work and we were with his best guide. But after three weeks we hadn't seen any drills, and we all felt that that wouldn't be the best research site. That was the same time that this other fellow who now works with us, Tom Butynski, and who had just come back from Bioko Island, told us that the drill monkeys had done wonderfully during the reign of this [one] dictator, because the dictator was so busy killing people that wildlife sort of got ignored and as a result the wildlife was doing fine. He, Tom Butynski, had seen plenty of drills, so in 1990 Dietrich Schaaf, Tom Butynski, and I went to Bioko Island to find a study site for drill monkeys. And when we got there it was such a spectacularly beautiful island with so much wildlife and spectacular scenery, beautiful mountains, beautiful beaches with sea turtles coming in—just a fantastic place to be. I kind of felt that it needed to be saved and that's really when I turned into a conservation biologist because it wasn't just saving the monkeys or the sea turtles, it was saving the habitat that they were in. And that came behind this background that they weren't going to make it in captivity, that we humans couldn't recreate that environment and that if we wanted to save those species we were going to have to save all of it. And that's basically how conservation biologists think. In other words, you don't just save a species, you save everything. You save the ecosystem.
ASK: In a previous conversation, we were talking about your fondest memories from Bioko and one memory in particular concerning one of your students taking one of the best pictures of a drill monkey ever taken in the wild came up. Would you mind relaying that story?
GH: I guess to me, and I think this is the teacher or whatever it is that lurks in people, the most exciting moment was seeing…that it was an undergraduate who provided that great moment and not this real experienced scientist and not even duplicated by four highly trained National Geographic photographers who were with us last January. The fact that made it exciting was that it was a kid, an undergraduate at Williams College. She'd come with me once and she felt that if she'd come again she'd be better prepared. For her Christmas present, she had received a 300mm lens for her camera. That was her only Christmas present from her parents of rather modest means. She kept that camera out all the time. She was always ready to take a picture. And it happened when we had finished a census. It was a very long day, we were going up a very steep hill, and I heard something in the big, tall, fern-like things that we were walking through and I decided that I just really didn't care what it was, that I would just walk on past, that probably nobody else heard it. She was following about ten feet behind, which is the way we do it, we kind of stand apart. And as I trudged on up the hill past the noise, I heard click-click-click, a single lens reflex camera taking three pictures and thought, "Oh, I wonder what that is." And I turned around and she was pointing at her camera and she had just seen a big male drill and she had just gotten his picture.
ASK: What is the nature of your relationship with the natives of Bioko, specifically the hunters?
GH: I think people often worry or express concern that my students, or me, or the people who work with me might be in danger because we are asking hunters to not hunt, at least not monkeys. It's hard to explain how a particular culture treats particular events, but Equatorial Guinea is not a violent country; it's a fairly peaceful country. So there is a feeling that we're doing our work and the hunters or even the women who sell the meat at the bush market, everybody's doing their job and that there's respect for the fact that everybody's doing their job. So when we encounter hunters, I don't think that anybody's [afraid] that there's this guy with a gun that could kill me if he wanted to. They would never point there gun at you or threaten you because they know that you have to do your job and they hope you understand that they have to do theirs. Now, of course, we'd like for them to limit their hunting to things that aren't endangered species. We do encounter hunters who are very pleased that what they have is not an endangered species. They might have forest antelope or maybe some of the rats that live in the forest, not endangered species. It's a kind of understanding that when we encounter them in the forest that everyone's polite to each other; you might shake hands, you might say hello and discuss the weather, things like that. We haven't, so far, felt any personal threat to the fact that, in the end, we are doing something that probably does endanger their livelihood. On the other hand, we have had evidence where people try to tell the hunters in too aggressive a way not to hunt monkeys and they sometimes respond by hunting more monkeys. It's sensitive ground. But we don't feel that it's dangerous, just a lot of politics going on behind the scenes. It's not just about us with the hunting of monkeys, it's also a little bit of a game as to do we dare tell them not to hunt monkeys and to what extend do they want to comply with the laws of their country and our requests not to hunt monkeys.
ASK: Just before, you mentioned the National Geographic photographers. What was it like to work with National Geographic?
GH: They were great. They were wonderful with the students. They shared their time. I had an employee at the time who was hoping to also become a wildlife photographer and they gave all sorts of time and attention to her to try and help her develop her photographic skills. They used the students to help set things up. One student helped them build an aquarium to put fish and baby sea turtles in, so that they could do underwater—or at least through glass underwater—photography. They were wonderfully good natured. In fact, this was only the second time they, National Geographic, sent more than one photographer on a photographic shoot because, usually, you send one expert for six weeks. We didn't have six weeks, so they sent four experts for two weeks. So these guys had never worked with each other before; I mean they knew each other, they'd met at wherever it is that nature photographers meet, but they had never worked with each other. Later, we had discovered that [the magazine] had picked out for us four of their friendliest, nicest, and easiest to get along with [people]. These guys really cared about conservation. They really cared about their photography… they enjoyed each other, they enjoyed the students, they were very generous with their time. A lot of people warned me that National Geographic can be a pain on your research trip because you have to make way for the photographers, and we did have to. But in our case, we think that the conservation benefits, that is, the wildlife that will be saved as a result of these beautiful images that bring the wildlife alive for people who can't be there, will more than compensate for the minor inconvenience.
ASK: You're originally from Arcadia University. What brought you here to Drexel?
GH: This program that we have on Bioko Island kept growing bigger and bigger. In other words, it started as just a research project on how drill monkeys lived and why they didn't reproduce in zoos and why maybe they were more comfortable in the wild, then we started direct conservation. We decided to hire local census takers to kind of double as forest guards, [and kept] the animals protected. We started to run a study abroad program with a local university over there. We started bringing their faculty over here and we started to get more and more people involved. The program was growing considerably. I thought about forming some sort of consortium which would include particularly Drexel because of Jim Spotila and his work on sea turtles. So that was really my reason to come to look at Drexel or at least to come down and talk to people. It was purely, "Can we form a consortium?" Then I realized the many benefits of being at a larger university, particularly when your project is getting large…[The size] becomes too much of a factor at a small university, whereas at Drexel I'm just one of a lot of good projects. So when I realized that I'd have graduate students at Drexel, I'd have more colleagues to talk to at Drexel, that Drexel was just starting to think about international programs [and] about expanding, it just seemed like a very good fit. So I moved here.
ASK: How would you say your time in Bioko and your experiences as a conservationist affect your teaching style?
GH: Well, I'm afraid that my students would say that I drag in Bioko Island examples more frequently than I need to. But I think that one of the things that students hope to encounter, as undergraduates particularly, is the opportunity to have people who are actually working in the field talk about what they're doing. It's fine to read about stuff in text books, but it's much more interesting to hear from somebody who's doing it and get some of the things that aren't going to be put in text books, [like personally] dealing with being in Third World parts of the planet…So, yes, I use [real life] examples. I'm lucky in that in a course say like ecology, I can contrast the climates and the seasons and the plants and animals we have around here in the temperate zone in Philadelphia with what you see in the tropics. So, it's a way to say, "This is the way it is, see, but there are other parts of the planet where it's much different and then here's how it is at my research site." And I think that that's helpful to them. I think it makes it a little more exciting than just reading a book.
ASK: How would you say your life in the forests of Bioko and your life in a big city like Philadelphia balance you as a person?
GH: I'm not sure anybody would call me balanced. I think maybe that's not quite right. That's a personal thing in the sense that every human being has different likes and dislikes, things that make them happy. I love being out in pristine wilderness and that's something that probably started when I was a youngster and my father would take me for walks in the woods because, though he was an electrical engineer, he really loved the woods. That was back in the days where we didn't have a lot of things like television and stuff and so you had time on Saturday to take four hours and go on a walk with your kid or longer and just hike the hiking trails or the roads, just walk the roads, around where you lived and get to know the plants and animals. So I think that, probably, the interest in the natural world started back then. It wasn't until I was in my thirties that I realized that I liked living in a tent. I get a great deal of pleasure out of camping and being in the wilderness. It doesn't have to be in Africa; I also like the American West. Dry places are nice, particularly when most of your research camping is done in a very wet place. The eastern slopes of the Sierras, which have very little rain fall, can look really good because you can enjoy camping in the mountains there and not get rained on. I think there are a lot of people who have different interests and for me it makes a nice balance. I love living in Center City, Philadelphia in an old house. I mean it's a lot of the good things that I think about humans. I like going to the opera, the orchestra, the Art Museum. I like First Fridays. I mean, these are all things that you can do in a big city that reflect, I think, some of the best things about human beings and I have no desire to be living my whole year in the rain forest. I really look forward to coming back and seeing what you would call the cultural side of humans and I wouldn't want to give that up…I don't have a high opinion of the suburbs where you have to drive around in your car a lot. The advantage of the city is that I could take walks, take the subway to work, and I can walk to my grocery store in under sixty seconds…If you want a quart of milk you can be back in five minutes, really in five minutes with your quart of milk whereas you can't do that in the suburbs. So, I know for me, being so near cultural stuff and not having to spend a lot of time driving around or parking cars is a nice way of life.
ASK: The National Geographic article ends with sort of conflicting views on the future of the drills in Bioko. You, specifically, say that while they are making great first steps, there needs to be more done. What needs to be done and do you think it'll actually get done?
GH: We can see now that the ban on hunting, owning, and eating primates has not worked out very well. They're now hunting them again. Obviously, we need enforcement and that would have to come from [the Bioko] government and they have to have the will to enforce it. That's a problem because, of course, the same people that are eating the monkey are also in cahoots with the hunters who are killing the monkeys and it's also the government. They have the money to buy the monkeys to eat. So it's a tight circle and we have to get them to decide to break that circle and to tell the hunters that they're not allowed to hunt and tell people who are buying that they're not allowed to buy it anymore. So they're going to have to enforce it if we're ever going to see any real, long-lasting change. That means you have to keep leaning on them and we're trying to do that. I'm about to work on getting some new posters and things that we're going to ship over there so that when you go around to the various companies or when you go to a hotel or something you'll see these posters on the wall that remind you not to eat the monkeys. I'm sure the tourists will wonder about them, but there aren't too many tourists. You don't normally see signs saying "Please don't eat monkeys" but they'll be seeing that. It's interesting that the one luxury hotel on the island is celebrating Earth Day this month and they will be celebrating Earth Day with a very fancy cocktail reception for all the important people in Equatorial Guinea – all the government ministers, the President himself has been invited, all the heads of the petroleum companies, all the diplomatic corps from France and the French Embassy, the Spanish Embassy, Chinese Embassy, and the American Embassy. They've all been invited to come to this wonderful reception, which is probably the only one the hotel will have this year, in honor of Earth Day. And the whole focus of this lovely reception will be our new field station, the one that's funded by the ExxonMobil Foundation and the work we're doing on the island and, of course, all the posters will say "Don't eat the monkeys." So exposure like that reminds their government in front of all these other important entities like the diplomatic corps and the oil companies and the other industries that eating monkeys really isn't very good and maybe they should not do it. And it's that social pressure with a little international pressure thrown in that, in the end, will probably be the best way to get them to stop.
