ORIGIN OF (A NEW) SPECIES
When primatologist Carolyn Ehardt went into the Udzungwa Mountains of Tanzania to catalog Sanje mangabeys, she never dreamed she’d come out with an entirely new species of African monkey. Nor did she imagine that during her research she’d move her base of operations from the University of Georgia to UTSA.
Ehardt’s discovery of Lophocebus kipunji, the highland mangabey, was almost an accident. Her move from Georgia to Texas, on the other hand, was very deliberate. When UTSA’s College of Liberal and Fine Arts added an anthropology doctoral program in 2006, Ehardt wanted to be a part of it.
“The historical subdisciplines of anthropology are biological, archaeological, cultural and linguistic anthropology,” says Ehardt, who earned both her master’s and Ph.D. at UT Austin. “Anyone who works in any of those areas has to take environment and ecology into account to do what they do. Humans and the environment are inseparable. We always have been.
“We, as primates, are having to live in association with nonhuman primates, sharing resources, and we really need to find ways to make that communal ecology a much more workable thing.
“My specialization is within the subdiscipline of biological anthropology. And within that, I specialize in primatology. It’s what I call conservation ecology of threatened primates. It’s a way of melding the traditional subdisciplines of anthropology.”
Environmental and ecological anthropology are the basis of the doctoral program at the University of Georgia. It is a principle that appeals to Ehardt and is also the foundation of the new Ph.D. program at UTSA.
“What we did at Georgia was bring the environmental and ecological aspects of what all of us did, no matter what kind of anthropologists we were, to the fore,” she explains. “It was tremendously successful. We were able to recruit outstanding doctoral students. The last year I was there, the doctoral students alone brought in over $300,000 in funding from various sources to support their research.
“When UTSA decided to do the same thing, to focus on ecological anthropology, I found myself very interested in being a part of that. It was very appealing to think I might play some role in making that happen and making it work as well as it did at Georgia.”
One of those outstanding doctoral students Ehardt recruited is Emily Lloyd. Lloyd, along with four other graduate students studying with Ehardt, has transferred from Georgia to UTSA to continue her work.
“I chose specifically to work with Dr. Ehardt as I am most interested in primate conservation, which is her particular area of expertise,” explains Lloyd. “I was keen to work with African primates, so her project in Tanzania was really appealing.”
Lloyd adds that Ehardt helped her make numerous contacts in Tanzania and become familiar with field research conditions. “I now have a better idea of how it all ‘works’ in Tanzania. It’s important for me to know what field conditions are like and who I’ll be working with since this is where I will be working in the future.”
— Randy Lankford
Illustrations by Zina Deretsky, National Science Foundation