Jane Goodall, the famed primatologist and conservationist – among other roles – died earlier this month at the age of 91. She’s perhaps most famous for her work studying chimpanzees in Gombe National Park in Tanzania. Today, that work lives on at Arizona State University.
The Jane Goodall Archive sits in a room filled with filing cabinets at the Institute of Human Origins in the Walton Center for Planetary Health building on the Tempe campus. The archive is owned by the Jane Goodall Institute, which continues to fund data collection in Gombe with some help from ASU.
Ian Gilby is an Associate Professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change and a research scientist in the Institute of Human Origins at ASU; he oversees the archive.
On a recent visit, Gilby sat at a table surrounded by, as he put it, “literally every piece of paper that’s ever come out of Gombe National Park in Tanzania where Jane Goodall did her pioneering chimpanzee work.” He also explained how the archive ended up at ASU.
Full conversation
IAN GILBY: Long story. It’s a typical academic story. But in short, my Ph.D. advisor, Anne Pusey, was a student of Jane’s in the ’70s at Gombe. And she essentially, when Jane famously switched from doing research to focusing on conservation in the ’80s, the data were continuing to be collected by Tanzanian field assistants at Gombe. So literally every day we’ve got field assistants out following chimpanzees, systematically collecting data.
And these data were piling up in Jane’s house in Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, because Jane was off saving the world, essentially. And so Anne asked Jane if she could curate and work with the data. And so it moved first to the University of Minnesota. I came on as a graduate student in 1997 with Anne and did my dissertation using the long-term data as well as my own observations at Gombe. And then I went off for various postdocs, and Anne moved to Duke along with the archive, and then she retired in 2019. And we decided that the archive should come to where I am, which is ASU.
BRODIE: And how is it being used here? Like, how do you use it? How do students who come here use it?
GILBY: We use it for many different things. But the main goal is to conduct research on chimpanzee behavioral ecology. These animals live for 50-60 years. They reproduce really slowly. And you really need decades worth of data in order to answer some of the questions that we have.
BRODIE: And are you still getting updates? Do you still get new data from the field?
GILBY: Every day. They are collecting the data as we speak. And at the moment, what happens is, essentially, the data are still collected on paper. And it builds up. And then when one of us goes to the field, we carry it back with us. But we scan it before we travel with it. And one of the things that I’m working on and I have for a long time is to streamline this process. So right now we’re having some of the data being entered in the field and uploaded to the cloud.
BRODIE: I should note that we are surrounded by a pretty good number of pretty deep filing cabinets. And as you mentioned before we started recording, they are full of paper, all of them. That’s a lot to go through. And I would imagine if you’re continuing to add on to that, digital might be the easier way to do it.
GILBY: Yeah, for sure. I mean, in a perfect world, we’d have our field assistants collect data on tablets in the forest as the behavior is happening. But for various reasons, mainly practical reasons, it’s a tough ask. So what we decided to do was, rather than put our time into that, was to work with AI to extract data from the data sheets themselves.
BRODIE: What appeals to you so much about studying chimpanzees? Why are they so interesting to you?
GILBY: I’m just fundamentally interested in animal behavior. I mean, I didn’t end up here because I have this incredible love for chimps or anything like that. I mean, I do now. But that’s not how it started. It started with just a general interest in animal behavior, and in particular the sort of complicated social relationships that you find in some of these social creatures.
BRODIE: So how did your admiration maybe or appreciation for them evolve? Was it just a matter of doing this kind of work over a certain amount of time?
GILBY: Pretty much, yeah. I had never been to Africa. I had never, I don’t think I’d ever. never even seen a chimp in a zoo. As I said, I was just fascinated with animal behavior, social behavior in general.
And so I had the opportunity to do this as a graduate student. And I went to Gombe first in 1999, and it changed my life. And I’ve gone back basically every year since.
BRODIE: What did you know of Jane Goodall’s work before that first trip to Tanzania?
GILBY: Only as much as the sort of scientifically literate public knew. I’d seen all the documentaries, and I knew the general story. And in particular, her pioneering ideas that animals aren’t sort of robots, that they’re individuals with personalities and variation in their personalities. And which is obviously something now that seems very obvious to us all, but back then, animals were thought to be just sort of reactionary beings that didn’t really have any personality.
BRODIE: Do you see what you’re doing in some ways of continuing her work?
GILBY: As much as anybody can continue. I mean, I’ve been asked that before. She can’t be replaced. There’s no way. But her work recently, since the mid-’80s, had been more conservation-based, essentially saving the planet. And so in that sense, there’s no way we could even begin to continue. So we do our best. We try to build on what she started, essentially.
BRODIE: So why do you think it’s important? Like, what do we learn about maybe ourselves? What do we learn about the planet by studying chimpanzees and their behavior and how they interact with each other and themselves?
GILBY: There are so many reasons why we study chimpanzees. I mean, for me, honestly, it’s because I just find them fascinating. But they are a keystone species. So studying them, saving them saves critical habitat, right? It’s been shown that sites with research stations are much more likely to persist than sites that aren’t protected in any way.
From a planetary perspective, again, understanding how animals interact with their environment and their ecosystem and what’s important to them is, regardless of what species it is, it’s really important to know.
From an anthropological perspective, chimpanzees are one of our two closest living relatives. And so we use them to sort of provide clues to what the behavior of the last common ancestor of humans and apes was like.
BRODIE: What have we learned recently? What kind of research are you and others doing using this data now? And maybe what are some of the things that we’re finding out recently?
GILBY: So some of our recent work, we’ve looked at the form and function and development of male social bonds. So let’s call them friendships. Basically, you have pairs of males who spend a lot of time together, grooming one another all the time, and supporting each other in conflicts with others.
And this was one of the things that Jane witnessed early on and suspected that there was some sort of value to these relationships. And now, 65 years later, we’re able to test that hypothesis. And sure enough, we found that pairs of males who have strong social bonds are more likely to rise higher in the dominance hierarchy. They’re more likely to sire offspring for males of that rank. And these bonds do essentially last for — they can last for decades.
BRODIE: So when you think about what’s in all of these filing cabinets and what’s in the scanned documents that you have, what do you think about sort of the body of work overall? What comes to mind for you about its significance, its importance, its maybe interest to you and other folks who do what you do?
GILBY: I mean, this is literally a unique resource that’s unmatched. There are many other very strong, very good long-term chimpanzee projects, which I’ve actually also worked on as well. But this is sort of the iconic, original one, the longest running one. So it’s symbolic, in a way, as well as being incredibly valuable.
-
On the last day of the Arizona State Fair this fall, Jenna Trybus’ 12-year-old daughter, Lucy, and her dad went — they rode some rides and visited the petting zoo. -
Costa’s hummingbirds are native to the Southwest and northwest Mexico — which meant this little guy was a long way from home. So Jennifer Munson decided to see if she could help him get back to where he came from — and Tucson journalist Henry Brean wrote about what happened next. -
The Arizona Department of Transportation is more than halfway done constructing an overpass that will allow wildlife to safely circumvent I-17. -
Some Arizona animal clinics are raising concerns about a recent increase in parvovirus cases among dogs. The virus targets the immune system of canines and can be life-threatening. -
Bald eagles will soon be nesting in Prescott National Forest, and seasonal closures begin Monday in two locations.
