Patricia Wright
Patricia Wright
Patricia Chapple Wright is an American primatologist, anthropologist, and conservationist. Wright is best known for her extensive study of social and family interactions of wild lemurs in Madagascar. She established the Institute for the Conservation of Tropical Environments at Stony Brook University. She worked extensively on conservation and contributed to the establishment of the Ranomafana National Park in Madagascar...
mother baby dad
The black and white lemur, the one that relaxes on that branch, they actually have day care, like kindergartens; where all the mothers come together and they put all the babies into this one nest and they let dad watch it while they go out and have food and have a good time and then they come back in a few hours. We've never seen that in other primates.
baby dad nice
Lemurs are good parents but they do it in different ways. I originally studied father care. I was very interested in that and we saw that a lot of these animals that lived in pairs and the father wasn't doing anything at all for the first month. But then suddenly, when the baby got to be a certain weight then the dads chipped in and started carrying the babies which was very nice. And then if there was twins or triplets then they helped.
jobs goal together
My first job was actually as a social worker. And then later, I got my PhD in anthropology. And I've always been interested in humans as well as primates. We are all kind of have the same emotions, the same goals and lives really. But to me, when I first got to Madagascar I realized that the lemurs lives are very closely related to what the humans are doing; partially because they've got both looking for natural resources. And if we can make some way that both humans and lemurs can live together peaceably and happily, that would be my goal for Madagascar.
moving leader lemurs
There's over 100 species of lemurs. Each is a little bit different in their social structure except for one thing: they are all female dominant. The females are the leaders. They are the ones that call the shots. When you watch a group, you can see the females are the first one to say "We're going to move." Then she moves off and everybody just follows.