Patricia Wright

Richard Leakey: Wildlife warrior, conservation hero

Patricia Wright, Distinguished Service Professor, Herrnstein Professor of Conservation Biology, and the Founder and Executive Director of Centre ValBio, talks about how she was inspired by Richard Leakey.

FULL TRANSCRIPT 

Hello everybody. I wasn't expecting to be here today, but it's the most great pleasure. I'm going to talk about one of the people that influenced me too. I'm a primatologist and I work in Madagascar, but Richard Leakey has been quite an inspiration for a lot of the things that I've done. The first time that I met with Richard was by phone. I was in Madagascar. I get this phone call and it was from Richard saying, “This is Richard Leakey, I said, “Yes”. “Do you know who I am?” he said, I said, “Yes, yes”. He said, “I have a problem right now I'm in Washington DC, I'm driving in my car. I have a problem and I am hoping you can solve it”. I said, “Okay, what's your problem?”
“My daughter”, he said, “My daughter, I just don't know what to do with her. She wants to learn French, but she won't go to France. So instead, she wants to come to Madagascar to learn French.”

I said, “She's welcome to come to Madagascar, just tell me when”. And Samira arrived, and it was the old days. We only had this really old broken-down car, and we were bringing her down to Ranomafana, which takes two days to get there. And then we had two flat tires, and then we were almost at the place where we're going to have to stay overnight before we go the next day. And it got dark because we were late. And suddenly my driver tells me, “We don't have any headlights”. This is a steep, windy road and I've got Richard Leakey's youngest daughter with me, and I smiled, and I said, “Samira, I think we're going to have a picnic”. And we got on a tarp, and we laid it out by the side of the road, and we got out the food because we had done bad food shopping, and we had a dinner by the side of the road, we camped by the side of the road.

And when dawn finally came, we got on the road again to get to get to Ranomafana but so Samira survived. I think she's been doing quite well, but that was the first time that Richard and I were acquainted. Now, I knew Richard, and I know that we haven't been talking about the fact that what he's does and has done what he has done for conservation is extraordinary. He is really an amazing wildlife warrior. As he once said in the book, I mean, he worked for the Kenya Wildlife Service and he burned all that ivory. He got the publicity, he had the guts to stand up for conservation in a way that nobody else has ever done, put his life on the line to save those elephants. And he did an amazing job, and I'm very grateful to him for that. But then also, he's done much more than that, and he's continued to think about conservation and the effects of conservation. 

Madagascar, where I work is on the brink of extinction, on the brink of extinction. Everything I'm studying now is probably just going to be in the fossil record. So, I don't ever forget that, but Richard never does either. So he works very closely with conservation. Now, he was the founder of this extraordinary NGO called Wildlife Direct that Paula is now in charge of. But he founded it because he realized that he had to do things to help nature stay in this world, and Wildlife Directive, set small grants and does a lot of things on the ground in Kenya today. He also believes, as I did and do that you can't have conservation without communities. Working together with the local people is an important part of making conservation work for the long term. He also believes, as we just heard, training Africans as scientists, as valid scientists is so important, so important. And I can't emphasize that enough. These are some of my Malagasy students. 

Also, this fact that the modern facilities have to be in Africa. We have to invest in Africa. We have to get those labs there. All this DNA stuff, we've got to get it going on in Africa. We're trying our best in Madagascar. This is my lab in Madagascar at the edge of the rainforest, but there's got to be much more done. And he and I would talk for hours about it. I mean, when it came to Stony Brook, I, it was so much fun because we could talk about what is going on, what is the future? We could strategize together. He would come and teach my class, and I have rather large classes, my primate conservation classes running the 150, 200 people. And Richard would walk into my class, and he'd sit at the edge of the desk, and he said, “The first thing I want to tell you is I know you have this wonderful Patricia Wright who's teaching your class, but I don't agree with a lot of the things that she tells you”. 

And that got their attention. And then he would go on with great stories and great really conservation activism and I loved it, and they loved it, and they were greatly inspired. So he's made a big effect on the Stony Brook students here. A great effect on my life but I want to talk about Madagascar just for a minute because he's been influencing me on Madagascar. You think that Madagascar is small because you always see it next to Africa, the largest continent but Madagascar is actually quite large. It goes from Maine all the way down to Florida. Madagascar has unbelievable wildlife we all know that you haven't seen it yet because a lot of you don't go those two and a half hours or three hours across the waters. But it's amazing for its endangered lemurs. But the thing that is so devastating about Madagascar is almost 90%, 87% of Madagascar's wildlife is gone. I mean, gone, gone, gone, extinct it's wasteland. It's not like there's lots of people running around. It's wasteland now because of things that happened in the past, and we don't really know and understand those things. But right there is, right there are the protected areas in green. There were none. We created the fourth protected area in Madagascar, in Ranomafana National Park. 

I got to tell you about those lemurs. There's 137 species, but many of them have gone extinct, all ready. The biggest ones some of them were as big as gorillas, and some of them were as big as chimpanzees, and all of them had like curved fingers so they were in forests, amazing and they're extinct last 500 years ago. We could have seen them; we could have seen them. I'm always hopeful that we could see them. Every day that I go out exploring, there's had ticus and Megaladapis and Paleopropithecus, amazing creatures that live just across the water from Kenya a while ago, Mesopithecus. There were also other things that consisted of that fauna it's big birds. The world's largest bird that ever walked earth came and was there in Madagascar maybe 500 years ago and it's like 10 feet tall, 3 meters tall. 

There Are crocodiles, the horned crocodile that's supposedly the grandfather of all was there, the giant tortoises, amazing fauna, just to show how big that Aepyornis was, that's a hen’s egg standing next to it. Okay, so one day I heard that somebody had three tons of dinosaurs. Now we know from David Kraus and his extraordinary work up in the northwest, that there are dinosaurs on Madagascar. There were 80, 88 million years ago, but this was coming for the south, this person that called me up. And so I said, okay. I didn't believe a word he said, but I'll check it out. And that's how it got to Christmas River way in the south. And we dug there, we dug there, took 15 men, 15 days. We don't have a lot of machinery in Madagascar. 15 men, 15 days to dig 15 meters deep. I had Ellen Simons as my paleontologist and Professor Armand from Tana and when we got it looked like that and then suddenly, we got to this layer, like really a gray layer. There it is, dirt's flying, and we're digging. And then we got to the gray layer and it smelled like swamp. And it looked like it was very distinctive. And that's where we found all the fossils. We found the turtles, we found a horn crocodile, we found five species of lemurs. It was an amazing experience and then because the hole was so big, it started to collapse. So that was the end of that expedition. 

We've got 351 hippo bones, 555 crocodile bones, about 600 turtles, 12 giant bird bones. Those are the Aepyornis and Malus and nine giant lemur bones, three species. And we got them dated. We've got them dated at three places. When the University of Helsinki, we got them in Sweden, and we got them dated also here. One of our partners was the University of Helsinki, and they all were coming out with approximately the same date. And I was so excited because if you know anything about Madagascar, people came over for the first time 2,500 years ago from Polynesia from Borneo, actually. That's what the genetic data tells us and that’s where the story is. And then there was a second wave of people 1,500 years ago from Africa. That's what the genetic data tells us. That's what the story is. And this is way before that. This is almost 10,000 years ago. So, I have found, I'm an ecologist, I have found a whole ecosystem in Madagascar before humans and I was very, very excited until this guy showed up. 

He's a graduate student, he's really excited, he's from UK and he wants to look at my bird bones because he's doing his PhD dissertation on Aepyornis, the world's largest bird. And so, I said, “Come see mine. You can just come down to the center of Ohio they're all there”. He came down, I reached in the cabinet to bring them out these bird boats are huge, and he took it and he said, “Do you know what you have here?”, and I said, “Yeah”, I was so proud. “Aepyornis maximus”, I said, and he said, “No, no, no, no. That's not what I mean”. And he pointed to the bone, and I said, “No, no, no, no, no”, he was pointing at cut marks, and they were what he thought human cut marks. 

So of course, holes on bones can mean anything, but I went to Richard, and I said, “Look at this bone, tell me, do you think that it actually has human cut marks?” and he looked at it for a long time and then said, “Yeah, I think so Pat, I think you got it”. Okay, so the paper came out in 2018, but we know what predators look like. This is a living that's a once living Propithecus sifaka with a fossa canine marks in it. That's how they kill. Anyway, that's what I study, is the shifakas. We know that there were crocodiles there we know what crocodile looks like, but this was not either. 

Who were those people that came? This site is in the middle of Madagascar. It's not like somebody came for lunch from Africa to, no, now these people were there for a long time. And then Sonia said, “Okay, where are the stone tools?”, and I said, “Oh, we weren't looking for tools, I don't know”. And then she said, “Also, where did those people go to?” Because I don’t know, it's just amazing to me, having worked at Madagascar 35 years to think that there were people. Now we had a press conference in Madagascar, and do you know what the response was? The response was, “We know about those people, we’ve been talking about the Vazimba. Our grandparents told us about the Vazimba. Everybody's told us about the Vazimba, the people that came before us” Really? So, it wasn't so much news to the Malagasy. So, and then there was that dinner, one was the last dinner that I actually had with Richard. It was at Richard's house and Lawrence was there, a lot of people that were in this room were there, Sonia and me. And he took me aside after that dinner, and he said, “Patricia, you have a responsibility. You have to find out who those people were. It's important. It's important for science, but it's important for the Malagasy people to know about this, who were their ancestors?”.

And then I said, “Okay”. And he said, “No, Patricia, I am serious about this. You have to find them”. And I said, “Yes, I will”. And now I have to. So we're going to organize a trip to Christmas River, and we're going to take some of the people in this room, and we're going to do it properly, because we kind of just dug and we weren't doing any archeology, and we weren't doing a very good job, I don't think, after listening to all these talks. But Richard, we're going to go back. We're going to find out who those people were. Thank you!