Interview with David Brown
When David Brown was very young, he knew that he wanted to go to Africa to see giraffes, elephants, and their habitats – and he did! David went to university to become a biologist and studied giraffes in Africa. He is the co-editor of Mongabay Kids, a wildlife and nature conservation website. A study that David co-authored suggests that there may be several species of giraffe in Africa.
On February 12th, 2022 David spoke to the Junior Giraffe Club, which inspired Aglaia to ask him the following questions:
How did you become interested in the field of conservation biology? Who was your role model?
I have been interested in nature conservation and protecting animals for as long as I can remember. The science of conservation biology was created in the 1980s when I was a teenager and knew that I wanted to be a biologist. When I went to the university at the University of California, Davis in the early 1990s I took as many conservation classes as I could. I found some professors and their graduate students doing conservation-related projects and volunteered to help them. This put me on the path of doing scientific research myself.
My role models were people like Jane Goodall working on chimpanzees and Cynthia Moss and her colleagues studying African elephants. Dr. Dagg and her friend Bristol Foster were definitely role models. I found their book when I was in elementary school, and Dr. Foster wrote a story about his giraffe research in National Geographic. That book and article made me realize that I wanted to study wild giraffes when I grew up and to help find ways to conserve them and their habitat.
What is your favorite giraffe story?
I love that giraffes and okapis can clean their ears with their tongues. When people ask me for a giraffe fun fact, they always laugh when I tell them that one.
Currently, the IUCN recognizes one species and nine subspecies of giraffes. What is your theory?
My goal with using genetics to study giraffe subspecies was to see what the evolutionary history of giraffe populations in the wild was like. The giraffe populations classified as different subspecies will mate and have babies in zoos, so many people assumed that was what was going on in the wild. The technology to sequence DNA allowed me and my colleagues to test the question of whether the different giraffe subspecies breed with each other in the wild like they do in zoos. What we found with the results was a surprise. Patterns of genetic differences showed that the different giraffe subspecies DO NOT breed with each other in the wild. That helped solve a question that people argued over for 100 years, whether there was one giraffe species with interbreeding subspecies or many giraffe species. My study showed that there are several giraffe species.
Were there any struggles when trying to endure your passion in conservation biology?
Yes, there were (and are) several struggles. Finding money to do scientific studies is difficult. Finding the right laboratory and mentor professor to do the work that you want to do is a challenge. Convincing people that the questions that you want to study are worthwhile can be challenging. Collecting hundreds of DNA samples from individual wild giraffes across Africa meant working with a team of people to collect them and gather them together in a lab. When you write a scientific paper that challenges existing ideas, some people don't believe your results. We ran into that problem until we showed them enough genetic data and analyses of the data that we really did find giraffe subspecies were not interbeeding and were likely different species. After the results were published it took a long time to convince people that each of the likely giraffe species was in a lot more conservation danger than assumed. People did not think that giraffes were endangered like elephants and rhinos are. Over the last 20 years my scientific research and that of my colleagues and the work of the IUCN Giraffe and Okapi Specialist Group has finally shown the world that giraffes really need conservation help like elephants and rhinos do.
I learned from these challenges that perseverance and determination are essential if you have a goal that you want to meet. Setbacks and disappointments are inevitable, and you will make many mistakes, but you can learn from them and move forward. I also learned that science and conservation are team sports; you need to work with many people with different agendas and personalities if you want to help save animals and their habitats. I find that it is all worthwhile though, and for all the problems and challenges, I am very happy that I have pursued helping protect giraffes and their habitats as a life goal.
How can we get more people to care about giraffes, to save them?
Giraffes are an animal that people around the world love, no matter where they live. An essential step in protecting them is to help people who love them keep up with how they are doing in the wild and what their conservation challenges are. How can we create meaningful conservation awareness of giraffes and their habitats? People follow sports teams, celebrities, and technology trends - how can they do the same thing for giraffes, elephants, lions? Maybe you in the Junior Giraffe Club can help figure that out, because it is really important that people keep paying attention to giraffes and don't forget about them. Figuring out how to do that is more of a social and popular cultural question than a science question, and not nearly enough attention gets paid to it. It is also really important to realize that it is the young people in giraffe range states in Africa who are the primary decision makers about how giraffes survive in the wild. What do they think about giraffe conservation? What kind of help do they want from giraffe fans around the world? These are all giraffe conservation questions that need a lot of attention.
