if you've ever been in close proximity to a monkey, you know that they are not to be taken lightly over the years. There have been many cases of the common primates being running riot near us? You may have seen viral videos of monkeys slipping into HDB homes and making out like bandits for others of a secondary school boy negotiating with monkeys to return his school bag.
Well, I'm a golfer and close encounters with monkeys have become part and parcel of the game personally have had monkeys steal my food right out of my buggy while I'm taking a shot and they'll grab anything they can find. I'm just glad they haven't taken my car keys or my hand phone. These are just some examples of increasing human wildlife encounters in Singapore, while other parts of the world may struggle
with conflicts involving leopards, elephants and even lions. City dwellers aren't used to living with wild animals, much less those who willfully intrude into private spaces. But the solution can be down to just get rid of them. How can we learn to coexist with wildlife? This is where Dr. Andy Yang, president of the Jane Goodall Institute in Singapore comes in. She's a primatologist and has been involved in the work for more than 10 years.
Welcome Andy, thanks for joining us in the climate conversations.
Thank you for having me.
I want to start with your childhood. Most kids want a cat, a dog, a hamster as a pet. But you had a pet monkey when you were 10 years old. How did you end up with one and what was it like
When I was 10 years old? Family relatives who were sailors to Africa, they brought back this juvenile small monkey brown colour, which is actually quite common in Africa. So to us we just felt like it's a more animal that needs to be taken care of. So for a few years I would say I didn't see anything wrong with that. Nobody told me it was wrong to. I even brought my monkey down on my bicycle and my neighbors would just be curious to say, oh, you
have a cute monkey. I guess when I was in secondary school, just a couple of years later, a few hours that I have at home before going home will be playing with it. But then most of time it would be alone. So you could see that it's walking up and down within a small space that was confined to like how stress animals would be behaving. So that was the first sign to me that it's not very happy.
And so it was after contacting a few organizations and individuals that we managed to send it back to Africa
and had a name
A boy, not very creative, but for 10 years I think that's the best I could do. I think that's
endearing. What would you say was the fondest memory with a boy?
Maybe the most memorable one would be that it would like to sit next to me to groom my hair. You know how monkeys, if you observe them in a while they would pick apart the hair to take out parasites or any particles. Right? So he was doing it to me on my hair. I didn't know what it was. So I just mimic their behavior their back to him. And so I think from him, I learned a lot about animal behavior too.
And our boy was the reason why you got into primatologist. E I suppose your earliest in kind of with a monkey must have taught you that there's something special, something different about primates
because of the few years ahead with my pet monkey. I also got to realize the threats that they're facing. Why did I get this monkey all the way from africa. It's kind of like an illegal wildlife trade. So I got really interested to learn more about the different varieties and species of monkeys and how I could help them, which is by in university I enrolled into Biology.
So you became an expert who does research and monkeys and your work work on primates have taken you all across asia. How many kinds have you come up close and personal with.
There are about 600 species of primates in the world, but I've only seen about 45, not even 10%, but I'm trying my best. So a few examples of this within ASia outside Singapore, in japan, the japanese macaques in san the background the snow was amazing and then also in Indonesia, the Gibbons, they're calling early in the morning and imagine you're sitting in this house watching the forest, sipping coffee, listening to the given cause it's really quite amazing the rainforest experience.
So you work revolves around raffles, banded langurs which are critically endangered primates. How many of them are here in Singapore?
In Singapore, we have 70, so 70 and in Malaysia we have about 200-300, Nowhere else in the world, just in Singapore and Malaysia. So we're talking about a global population size of maybe just under 400 to 400.
I hear they're extremely shy. They're very fast here that you had a bit of a shoulder injury trying to track them down. Can you tell me what happened? I'm
not meant to be a monkey, but I tried very hard to be. So besides the fewer where you go to the jungle, you track to look for the animals. We want to come up with methods in order to collect information more efficiently. And so we started to climb trees to put motion sensor cameras on the trees in order to detect animal presence.
But that would involve of course being professionally trained certified, getting permission from National Park support and then during the actual climbing, it requires a lot of strength and I'm scared of heights, a lot of problems and
your work depends heavily on collecting fecal samples that sounds like
fun. If I were to tell my parents that I'm actually collecting poop for my work. I'm not sure what they would think. Yeah. So another way to collect more information is through their fecal samples because in feces it actually contains a lot of information. It has the D. N. A. Of the animal which can tell us a lot more about the genetics, whether it's healthy or not. What's the relationship with the other individual monkeys in the population? Are they
experiencing any inbreeding problems in the feces? It also contains the D. N. A. Of the plants that they have consumed. So by examining the plant DNA, we can also obtain information on the species of plants they have eaten for the past two days compared to checking the forest, observing them through binoculars and camera maybe there's one species of plants that they were eating. We have to collect the specimens get identified takes a long time. That's
fascinating. And the primate environments that are affected by climate change, as you said, are hundreds of primate species around the world. But then three quarters of them are actually facing population declines. Which is really sad. How concerned are you that the effects of climate change are pushing many of them towards extinction
on top of climate change. There's also of course the associated activities like the divorce station that's really clearing the forest, forcing them to lose their homes and poached from the wild for the trade. For example, of course, then you have the climate change that would come in because with the changing temperatures and conditions, different plant species will be
affected as well. So they're losing their food source, losing their home severely affecting their population size with changing temperatures. The animals in areas where they have extreme drought condition or hot temperatures, the streams might be drying up, they might not be rain. And so in that case finding water is of essence for those animals.
So your main research is geared towards the protection of primates, but you're also invested in the question, how can we humans coexist peacefully with nature and wildlife? And the friction between man and nature has been inevitable like otters eating up very expensive fish or wild boar attacking a passer by or monkey stealing food and try to enter our homes. Why are we seeing some of these incidences? Should we be concerned?
I think there could be various factors during covid when people are not allowed to maybe go outdoors to certain areas, they can't go overseas as well. And then there is the easing of the restrictions, you could go out to nature areas. And so that's when people started to maybe see more of this wildlife that they previously might not have encountered. Then they realized that hey, we have this wildlife and then also with social media, right?
Taking photos and putting online the drones, flying to take images and to record the biodiverse in Singapore. And then also with Singapore's aim to transform from a garden city to a city in nature. That also means that we want to integrate more of nature into our lives into our surroundings. And so with that, it also means that
there will be more chances to encounter animals. But if we are not equipped with the knowledge to know how to interact or not interact with wildlife, that's when we might inevitably or accidentally attract them into urban areas or our homes. That's when news articles might say monkey attack, pick attack after attack, But news articles usually would be reporting incidents or accidents, right?
If it's a monkey that is doing its own monkey business, playing with their own family members or authors eating fish in the river, it might not come up as the news. So 99% of the time when you read about the news behaviors that are quite negative only happen. Maybe less than 5% actually underground
Because of those 5% not so pleasant encounters and traumatic experiences that some people have had when they come into contact with animals, that's why people maybe tend to stay away to avoid them or because out of fear or maybe because they just want to give them space. What's the most common misconceptions people have,
if it's got to do with the monkeys in Singapore, one of the misconceptions would be that the monkeys don't have enough food in the forest, which is why they're coming to my home to get food. The monkeys have sufficient food in the forest and the food that they
eat would be plants. They could also take in small animals like desserts, bird eggs for example, but because the food that humans eat full of high calories and energy content, that if they were to take those food items, they would get their calorie intake for the day with just a short amount of time. So if we were to leave food out there unattended or trash bins that are not closed properly, then the animals would stay and get those
food other than those misconceptions, then what do you see as the biggest barrier to encourage more people to coexist with nature and animals?
We want to be close to nature, whether it's the clean air or just the calming effect of nature, but people might not understand that nature contains different aspects, it's not just the beautiful butterflies or the chopping birds, that sounds really pleasant into your years, but there could be wild chickens, there, there could be crows, wild pigs
and snakes as well. So some people might be selective about the kind of nature that they want, but if we are selective then ecosystem will not be intact and thrive,
let's say we have an encounter with a monkey either in the park or comes through the window or something like that, what should or shouldn't we do
firstly if say we are out in the nature areas and you see monkeys most of the time they won't be bothering you if you don't bother them. So if you keep a safe distance you walk away, continue on your path will be fine. But if the monkeys are in your path you have to see whether there's another route that you can take all the money to wait
for them to disperse. But if you're in a rush, what you can do is to make some sounds to show them that you are there to alert them so that you're not actually surprising them. When you're walking close, you can clap your hands just in the motion that it's more consistent just to announce your presence. I'm here, you clap and also you need to watch where the babies are because when they're infants
of course the adults will be more protective. So you can always try to think in terms of the monkey's paw point of view, just like humans, you have your babys or your little ones, you want to be protective of them.
So be aware of where the little ones are and don't walk too close to them when you clap usually dispersed from you and just to make sure you don't bring any plastic bags or 100 plus coke, you know, walking in the jungle keep in your bag and once you're away from the animals, then you can maybe take,
take your item that's very meaningful to you car keys or handphone. Do you chase after them? Do you wait for them to return it to you? Is there a way
in general? If you take your food items, you can forget about it just by another. I don't need to take it back. Even if you take it back, I don't want to consume anyway. If it's non food related, like your car keys, phone or your wallet, they might take it and bring it up to a tree, wait for them to drop
the items. They
might be doing a bit of your wallet but they won't be eating it. So once you know that it's not for items they would drop. So just wait patiently. They would know that it's not food, but you might have to just buy a new Orleans eventually wants to get back to your own.
Those are great tips. What other efforts can we make in preserving wildlife, protecting endangered animals because personally I thought the ecological bridge that helps animals safely get from one place to another. I thought that was a brilliant idea. I
think the example you gave like the equal link is a good way to connect
forests that have been separated or fragmented. But before we get there to build a bridge to reconnect, it would be good if we can retain existing forests already to prevent cutting through forests and then you have to come in to build something to reconnect of course in Singapore in such a small area where we have to continue to develop, we can't stop clearing forests but we can do it in a more, I would say structured way that has more plans mitigations in it such that we can minimize
impacts to wildlife and environment as much as possible. So having a good understanding of what's out there doing research before the development. There are also other things that individuals
can do. For example when you're driving near nature areas, if you can just drive slowly, be more aware because those animals would be running onto the road sometimes in order to get to another forest patch or you can also spend time to volunteer with organizations to go out there to collect information to provide to national agencies in order to use those information to protect species.
And then how do you then envision the future of monkeys in Singapore?
I'm hoping that when I talk to people, when people talk to me about monkeys, the adjectives that they use will not always be naughty, mischievous, cheeky and aggressive, but coming more from the point of view of appreciating our native biodiversity, it could be that they're cute. I'm biased, they could be interesting, they can be really playful, they can be peaceful. So rather than all the negative terms, it would be good if you could see the other side of the animals as well.
So I'm just hoping that not just for monkeys but for native wildlife in Singapore, that might not be typically charismatic. They could get a fair share of love from singaporeans as well.
Andy thank you so much. It's been a pleasure talking to you. Thank you. Well thanks to my guest Andy Yang and thanks to all of you for tuning in. We hope you enjoyed this episode, but do remember to subscribe and like this podcast. So you know when a new episode drops, you can find Ciena's climate and sustainability coverage online at sienna dot asia. The team behind this podcast is Joanne, chan, Jacqueline chan Danieli and Christina robert and I'm julie you signing off.