Interview With Monica Bond
Monica has been an animal lover for as long as she can remember! She became particularly interested in biology in high school, and discovered the world of wildlife science in college, after visiting a friend who was studying nesting of Peregrine Falcons in Great Smokey Mountains National Park. She loves to mix field research with writing and talking about the beauty and importance of wildlife and nature. She has lived and worked in Tanzania for 10 years.
Monica Bond and the Wild Nature Institute team are studying more than 3,500 wild Masai giraffes in an area over 25,000 sq. km in Tanzania. This is the BIGGEST study of giraffe survival and reproduction in the world!
JGC member, Mariana, interviewed Monica after she spoke to the JGC in January:
Working with the Wild Nature Institute as the biggest study of giraffe survival and reproduction in the world, how do you think this project will impact future giraffe generations?
“Giraffes are an endangered species, and their numbers have plummeted across Africa over the past several decades. We need to understand giraffes to save them.
Our research is helping to understand where giraffes are doing well (where they survive better and have lots of babies) and where they are not doing well. We are also learning specifically why giraffes are doing well in one place but maybe not in another place.
This information helps people to take actions so giraffes do better. For example, we followed them around to see what kind of plants they prefer to eat, to make sure that we don’t cut down the food they need.
We also discovered that when there are lots of wildebeests and zebras in an area (they migrate long distances), the giraffe babies survive better in that area because the lions and hyenas eat the wildebeests and zebras instead of the giraffe babies. So to save giraffes, we need to save the wildebeests and zebras too: we must protect the entire food web.
We also found out that giraffe mothers like to bring their babies near to cattle herders because they keep away the lions. So people and giraffes can share the same space! But when farms are built, giraffes cannot use those areas, so we need to limit where we put farms to help protect giraffe habitat. This information can help us to safeguard giraffes so that they have a future in this world.
Can you imagine a world without wild giraffes? Let’s make sure that doesn’t happen!”
As a young child, what led you to the love of animals you have today?
“I have always loved animals so much. I think this love was just born into me – like our hero Dr. Anne Innis Dagg loved giraffes from when she was a very young child.
I even love bugs and refuse to kill them – if there is a spider or a fly or a bee stuck in the house, I put it in a glass jar and cover it with a piece of paper and take it outside to let it free. I have always wanted to make sure that people didn’t do things to hurt animals. Animals don’t have a voice in human society, so it is up to people like us who love animals be a voice for them and help protect them.
When I was young, I wanted to be a veterinarian but then I discovered that I could be a wildlife biologist and be in wild nature. I decided to do that!”
Based on your experience working in this (WNI), what changed scientifically in this ten-year time compared to your first day of researching giraffes?
”In our large wild population of Masai giraffes in the Tarangire region of Tanzania where we have been working for 10 years, we showed that females maintain loose relationships with about 60 to 90 other females in what we call ‘social communities’.
They know all of these other females in their community, but have stronger relationships with some and weaker relationships with others, and almost no relationship with females outside their community.
Some females use the same space yet we never see them together. This is a lot like people—two people may shop at the same store and live in the same neighbourhood, but they aren’t friends. So giraffes have friends and strangers just like us.
Young male giraffes are really sociable as they explore their environment and meet the other giraffes around them. The males move away from their mothers, and they will join other young males to practice fighting (called a bachelor herd).”
We know that okapi and giraffes are related and they both have purple-blue tongues. Giraffes are believed to have this colour because of sunburns, but okapi also share this feature and their habitat is full of shade. What are your thoughts on this?
“Okapi and giraffes both have purple tongues but they also share other features such as ossicones and lobed canine teeth.
Their tongues are purple due to the presence of more melanin, which is a dark color pigment.
Some people like to say this is to prevent sunburn, but because scientists believe the okapi is a more primitive form of Giraffidae, and okapis live in the dense jungles, the sunburn hypothesis may not be true.”
Some scientific research claims that there are four species of giraffes and others, like IUCN, recognizes one species and nine giraffe subspecies. Based on your research, what is your opinion on this?
”I do not have a very informed opinion, as I am not a geneticist. However, there is also some compelling scientific evidence that there might be 3 species rather than 4, or even 6 species. What I do believe is there may likely be more than one species, but there is more work to be done together as giraffe scientists to decide how many species we think there are.”