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01/10/2018 07:30 AMSitting in a warm Madison coffee shop is a long way from living in a tent in the isolated forests of Madagascar or Indonesia, yet Katherine Meier is happily at home in all places—with one notable drawback to life in the wild.
“I do not eat rice anymore!” she laughs. “In Madagascar, every meal is a huge plate of rice. There may be beans or if you’re lucky a small amount of chicken or vegetable, but it’s always rice.”
Katherine will share her fascinating adventures in faraway places, studying lemurs in Madagascar and orangutans in Indonesia, with a talk at the Scranton Memorial Library on Thursday, Jan. 25.
“I’m excited to share the life of a field researcher, the ecology of Indonesia, and the biology of the orangutans we studied. I’ve got videos and stories of the individual orangutans and the experience of living there, as well as information about conservation and how to help,” she says.
Far from these foreign forests, Katherine grew up here in Madison, living with her father Gio, mother Pam, twin sister Eva, and younger sister Danica. She says her mother’s work as a wildlife rehabilitator inspired her interest in animals—and her talk at the Scranton Library.
“I definitely feel that I’ve seen first-hand some terrible environmental problems that many people don’t know about and I want to raise awareness for the disappearing habitat of endangered animals. It’s a very complex problem, but there are ways everyone can help conserve the environment.”
When she graduated from Daniel Hand High School, Katherine sought to discover a new place so she moved to Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
“I wanted to study so many things—French, English, biology, history—so I majored in anthropology because it’s the holistic study of humanity, and pretty much everything I loved to study could be tied back to anthropology, so [it] was the perfect fit,” she says.
Katherine undertook an internship in the primate department at the Como Park Zoo and Conservatory in Saint Paul, where her charges included some very hungry spider monkeys and lemurs.
“I had to chop lots and lots of vegetables for their meals,” she says. “I also worked on development activities to stimulate their minds and enrich their lives, like I would hide treats in dog toys that were challenging for the primates to get out.”
With her new knowledge of primates, Katherine departed for a semester abroad on the African island of Madagascar.
“Madagascar is growing as an ecotourism destination, as 90 percent of their animals are unique to the country and many are endangered. It’s a beautiful place; it’s also very hard to live there because it’s one of the poorest nations in the world,” she says.
In Fort Dauphin, a city in southeast Madagascar, Katherine studied the native language of Malagasy and lived with a local family, before traveling around the island, learning about agricultural practices and natural resource management.
The final month was spent on an independent project of Katherine’s own creation: studying how long it took for the blue-eyed black lemurs to become used to human observation. With local guides, she hiked into the forest with everything they needed for the month including food and tents, spending each day locating a social group of 7 to 12 lemurs and reporting their behavior.
“These lemurs live in a tiny, forest fragment in the middle of nowhere, and they’re not habituated to humans. At first, they were very wary of us and disappeared instantly, but after a few days, they didn’t run away and would watch us instead. We could sit below that tree they were feeding from and they would have the smallest one keep an eye on us while they others slept,” she says.
“Lemurs are the most primitive primates and the research supported the predication that they were habituated to human observation in less than a month.”
Katherine returned to college for her senior year with a life-changing experience behind her and a dedicated enthusiasm to pursuing a career in biological anthropology.
“I had such a unique experience in Madagascar that it took a while to adjust to life back here. Looking back, I believe that it’s forever changed how I see the world, and how I view the things that are really important,” she says. “It greatly affected me and set me on my path.”
In her senior year, Katherine presented her lemur research at the American Association of Physical Anthropologists’ annual meeting in Atlanta, Georgia. She met Rutgers University Associate Professor Dr. Erin Vogel, an expert in primate research, who was looking for new field assistants to collect data on the dietary ecology of orangutans in Indonesia. Katherine and her college friend, Cecelia, signed up immediately and after many months negotiating visas and paperwork, they were off to the Tuanan Orangutan Research Station.
“Orangutans only live in Borneo and Sumatra, and they are critically endangered. They are the only great apes not from Africa; they are arboreal so they live in the trees, and they eat only fruit,” she says.
After settling into life in Indonesia, Katherine took the all-day journey to the research station for her first three-month stay in the forest. The research days began at 3 a.m., trekking into the forest to find an orangutan nest, and following the individual from the time it woke until it went to sleep.
“My fieldwork in Madagascar prepared me somewhat for the experience, but it was intensive. Orangutans are mostly solitary, so we would follow an individual while recording its behavior every two minutes for about 12 hours. We would take data on what they ate and how much, and the social interactions they had. We would try to get urine and fecal samples, too,” she says.
“Over time, you come to know each orangutan really well. The babies are so silly and they were interested in us, though you can’t interact with them; you’re just there to observe. If you had a young, active individual, you would spend 12 hours trekking through the forest, or sometimes they’d just sleep and eat all day,” she says.
Many months in the forest with the great apes strengthened Katherine’s commitment to playing a role in their conservation.
“The orangutans are critically endangered and their habitat is disappearing rapidly as its cleared for more palm oil plantations. It’s happening so quickly that when we traveled back to the city after two months at the station, we passed whole tracts of land that had been forests, but were now cleared,” she says.
In July 2017, Katherine completed her fieldwork assignment in Indonesia and she returned to “normal life” in Madison. In between re-curating an eggs and nest collection in the Vertebrate Zoology Department at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History in New Haven, Katherine is applying to PhD programs in primate research across the country.
“Fieldwork is definitely not for everyone—many people leave and go home because it’s difficult. For me, it’s good to have a break after living in the forest, but I’d happily go back now. I love it,” she says.
“I want to research the behavior of great apes including chimpanzees and gorillas in Uganda and the Congo, so I can do comparative research and better understand their commonalities. I’ve found my passion—and it’s not for many people, but it’s for me. I hope this work will have a positive impact of protecting their habitat and their future.”
Following Great Orange Apes through Indonesian Swamps: Tales for a Year of Orangutan Research in Central Borneo with Katherine Meier is at the Scranton Memorial Library, 801 Boston Post Road, Madison, on Thursday, Jan. 25 at 7 p.m. The event is free; registration is preferred. For more information, call 203-245-7365 or visit www.scrantonlibrary.org.