|
I am currently a Ph.D. student working with Dr. Anne Pusey.
For my dissertation research, I am studying the development,
acquisition, and transmission of tool-use skills in infant to
ten-year-old wild chimpanzees. Each fall for the past three
years, I spent 3 months following wild chimpanzees in Gombe
National Park to collect the data for this project. My interest
in infant development and tool-use skills reflects many of the
past research projects I have been involved in. While an undergraduate
at Duke University, I spent several semesters studying mother-infant
interactions and foraging techniques in a weird and wonderful
primate, the Aye-aye (Daubentonia madagascariensis),
at the Duke Primate Center. I also spent one summer as a research
intern at the Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Laboratory in Honolulu
studying bottlenose dolphin cognition. After graduation, I completed
a research assistantship at the National Zoological Park as
part of the Golden Lion Tamarin Reintroduction Project, and
then returned to working on dolphin cognition as an intern at
the Living Seas, Epcot Center. These diverse interests finally
solidified and resulted in my coming to work under Dr. Pusey
on the wild chimpanzees of Gombe.
Each
year, I spend from October to December at Gombe National Park
following mothers and their offspring and videotaping sessions
of a particular tool-use skill known as termite-fishing. Termite-fishing
involves selecting a piece of vegetation, modifying it into
a long, flexible, wand-shaped tool, inserting it into a termite
mound, and then extracting the termites that attack and cling
to the tool. This tool-use skill is very complex and it may
take young chimpanzees many years to learn. The developmental
and acquisitional processes these individuals go through are
the focus of my dissertation research. I collect video data
each day while at Gombe and then bring it back to Minnesota
to analyze. While in Minnesota, I also use the long-term data
stored at the JGI Center for Primate Studies to supplement the
data I've gathered in the field. I have just completed my final
field season and I have now gathered over 70 hours of video
footage of termite-fishing. Preliminary analyses of this data
has suggested that chimpanzees learn much of their skills socially
and that young females learn faster than young males. I am currently
in the process of watching the video from the final field season
and performing analyses on the full, four-year dataset.
Elizabeth received her Ph.D. in 2003 and now works in Chicago at
Lincoln Park Zoo as Director of LPZ's Lester E. Fisher Center for
the Study and Conservation of Apes and also as a faculty member of the
University of Chicago's Committee on Evolutionary Biology.
Elizabeth and the zoo are now working closely with Dr. Pusey and the Jane Goodall Institute on
collaborative projects involving the Gombe chimpanzees.
Some relevant links:
|
