The Fascinating Lives of Bleeding Heart Monkeys (Part 3) | Nat Geo Live

Geladas aren't afraid of all predators. You're looking at the Ethiopian wolf. This occurs on the Guassa, and it's the rarest canid in the world. There's only about 400 remaining in Ethiopia, and 40 of them are at Guassa. They're social, but during the day, you see them mostly alone out hunting for rodents. Back in 2008, Jeff and I would often see scenes like this. Ethiopian wolves stalking for rodents in the middle of herds of geladas. We didn't really think much about it at the time, because we saw it so often.

[Jeff] We didn't have very good cameras back then either. (laughter)

Clearly. Years later, after reading some literature, we realized that this was a really weird thing to observe. To observe this carnivore in the middle of a herd of monkeys and they're basically just ignoring each other. Why isn't the wolf going and grabbing a baby gelada as a snack? Why isn't it getting chased off by these monkeys? So it seemed like a phenomenon worthy of more study. So I wrote a grant to National Geographic, a Young Explorers Grant, and in 2011, we had a reason and some money to go back to Guassa. So Jeff and I teamed up again.

On this trip, we followed wolves around all day. Walking dozens of kilometers a day. And we watched the behavior of these wolves when they were with geladas, and when they were alone, so we could make a comparison. What we found is that these wolves gain an important benefit by the presence of the monkeys. So they spend more of their effort foraging when they're near monkeys, and they also catch more rodents per unit time.

But they can't do anything when they're among the monkeys. They have to adhere to certain rules of engagement. So they can't move too fast. They're not allowed to run. And if they get within two or three meters of a monkey, they get chased off. As far as we can tell, the monkeys don't get anything really positive or negative out of this.

But this is a very rare kind of mixed species interaction. To have a predator stalking among a potential prey species, peacefully ignoring each other. So we wrote up a scientific paper about this, submitted it. It was published in a journal of mammalogy. And when the paper came out, we also got some press that really surprised us. Are monkeys domesticating wolves?

Now this was really surprising because we hadn't mentioned the D word anywhere, and I can tell you for a fact that this is not occurring. There we go. So as far as we know, this kind of interaction is actually unique to the Guassa, it only happens at the Guassa. This is because of the fragmented species ranges of Ethiopian wolves and geladas.

But we can suppose that in the past, maybe this interaction was more widespread. And some supporting evidence for this comes from a mosaic that's 2000 years old that you actually saw earlier. This mosaic depicts the Nile. And toward the top, we have the origin of the Nile in the Ethiopian highlands. I'll direct your attention to two sets of archers on the left, and then near the rocky outcropping in the middle there.

So we see on the left, the sphingia. The sphinx monkey of earlier. And on the right, the Ethiopian wolf. So I think it's striking that 2000 years ago, artists were portraying these species in the same frame, just like in Jeff's photographs. This highlights to me what's really special about the Guassa. It preserves not only species diversity and genetic diversity, but a different kind of diversity, which is behavioral diversity.

This is what allows animals to adapt to changing conditions, and that's really important going into the 21st century.

I was always frustrated coming back from some of these trips, trying to talk about concepts like behavioral diversity, or just describing the scenes that I saw. And I dealt with this by turning towards photography. Since 2008 and our crappy camera technology, we got some newer cameras and we had a lot of time in the field.

And I found this was a nice way to intersect my scientific work with communicating this work to other people. And it's been a very fruitful kind of collaboration between these two ideas. It's a great way to improve the messaging of science, but many of the photos that you've seen today are end products. They don't start out like this.

A photo for me often starts off as an idea. I see something, I'm like I wanna capture the essence of that. And we can just kind of explore this in a very simple example. I like watching geladas jump across streams. To me, it's interesting, it's a cool dynamic behavior, and I wanted to take a picture of it that just captured the way I felt.

And I tried and tried and tried, and some of these are interesting pictures perhaps, but they didn't quite connect. And I ran through trying an infrared camera, long exposures, cutting geladas heads off. But when it comes to this, to get a nice picture, it requires persistence. And for all of these, it's just trial and trial and trial, and mostly failure. Eventually, I end up with a picture like this.

Which is not a perfect picture by any means, but it's much closer to the feeling that I wanted to capture with the monkey jumping across the stream. So I've learned an immense amount about photography by partnering with other photographers. I remember I first came back from the monkey-wolf project. Vivek and I were doing solely as researchers, and had this huge collection of photographs, and I was showing them to a couple of people.

And I met this guy, Trevor Frost. And he took a look at the pictures, like oh that seems like a pretty interesting place. Have you thought about trying to do a photo essay of that? To kind of describe the place in more detail. I was like I have thousands of pictures. Like it's already a photo essay, just pick a couple.

He's like I don't think you understand how this works. Why don't we write a grant and we can go back together and try to tell this story professionally? I was like wait, they give you grants for photography? I had this very biologist-centric view of the world and so this was illuminating for me. So Trevor and I wrote a grant, and we were funded by National Geographic to go try to capture this environment.

So with Vivek, we headed back to the field and Trevor started teaching me some new techniques, like this camera trap set up. Where you have a DSLR, one of these big fancy cameras with an infrared beam, and you have to practice walking through triggering the infrared beam to get it just right so you can get a spectacular photo.

I struggled at first initially, even with opening the camera trap box. I think I stabbed my hand with my Leatherman pretty good. I was worried that was gonna get infected, but it wasn't so bad. And after just setting it up, and waiting and tweaking and tweaking, eventually we ended up with a photo like this.

Which was our camp staff bringing their kids to work, and they knew that we set up an automatic camera machine, and they're like oh we can trigger this camera anytime we want? This is great. So they had their kids walk through it all the time. And then they would borrow AK-47s from their neighbors (laughter) and pull that out, so we'll have a couple of printouts for those guys when we head back.

But the real intention of this is to get up close and personal with wildlife that you couldn't otherwise. To give you a sense of their space and their environment. And this is the type of picture that we were looking for. An Ethiopian wolf, the rarest canid on the planet in the Guassa.

So one day I had a happy intersection of science and photography. I was following a wolf around, trying to see if it would have one of these monkey-wolf interactions to try to get a picture of it. When I saw a female walk off from the gelada herd. And this is bizarre behavior. It sets off all sorts of alarm bells in my biologist's brain being like something's happening, what's going on, all right bailing on a wolf.

I went over and I watched her. She started arching her back, lying down and standing up, and I realized oh my god, this monkey is about to give birth. So I gave her her space, took my telephoto lens, I stood back and with shaking hands captured this image sequence.

So it's incredibly rare to see a primate give birth in the wild. I was very excited about these images for aesthetic purposes, I thought it really spoke visually to a process that most people don't get to see. But I also sensed that there was great scientific value in these images, having talked to other researchers that have worked at this site before.

So I was kind of equally excited about what this means to kind of our broader understanding. Over the past ten years, scientists at Guassa have witnessed 15 live births. Which is the largest, or one of the largest catalogs of live births in wild primates from anywhere on the planet. We recently wrote up a paper kind of describing this process and it's now a part of the scientific literature looking at comparative birth processes in primates.

Vivek and I are always trying to think of ways to combine our photography with science. Here's another National Geographic funded project that we came up with. It's a 3D imaging system that allows you to capture the dimensions of wild living primates, without having to resort to any invasive procedures.

Basically, you can reconstruct a 3D version of what you're looking at by taking multiple pictures of the same thing from different angles at the same time. This is one of our earlier versions, we have a more complex one built now.

And this is an active project that we're still working on at the moment. But we have some promising preliminary results and we're looking forward to taking these kinds of remote measurements of morphology and combining them with the long-term behavioral data set that we have at Guassa. It's a really exciting intersection of photography and science.

But this brings us towards the end of our day on the high plateau. The sun is starting to set in the west, and it casts a huge shadow onto the Rift Valley below and the farms that are down there. We'll walk with the geladas back towards their sleeping cliffs, and we'll leave them there. It's a routine that we do every day, we'll pick them up again in the morning.

And they don't seem to really care whether we're with them or not. They just go about their typical business. And we can hear this happening even long after we've walked away. Hundreds of meters back towards our camp, you can still hear them going about their transition from day into night. (monkeys chattering)

So tonight we've walked you through a day in the life of a gelada and the people who study them. We've shown you some science, and some intimate portraits of behaviors that seem to appear nowhere else on Earth. Over the past few years, I've grown very appreciative of integrating science and photography together to not only discover something, but then tell a story about it, whether it's through data and statistics or through pictures.

Jeff and I always love returning to the Guassa. Cause in a lot of ways, everything is kind of the same. We see some of the same individuals, the routine is more or less the same year to year. But the Guassa is also changing. And it's changing rapidly. Today there's power lines and roads that go through part of it. Connecting the people living near the Guassa with the outside world.

And it's not only the landscape that's changing, but also the perceptions of the local community members. Take Taso here. He's worked for our staff for seven or eight years now, and the truth is, when he was a young kid, he hated geladas. They raided his crops and he would run after them with stones and try to hit them.

But over the years, his perspective has changed. He's spent a lot of hours with the monkeys, and he's watched their individual personalities develop, and these bonds between mothers and infants develop as well. And he even tells us that now when I see monkeys, I see what makes us human basically.

We've also talked about the factors that affect species and their ability to persist in the 21st century. Geography, climate, and the local community of plants and animals. And to that, we can add another element which is the human community. The Guassa has persisted for 400 years across revolutions, and famines, all because of local engagement of the people with their land.

And of course, today we're facing a major conservation crisis. Humans are shaping the natural world like never before. And a lot of these problems have global solutions, like climate change. But for others, perhaps the Guassa provides a lesson. I think the Guassa shows us that going into the 21st century, local small scale conservation has a major role to play.

Thank you.