The Michael Decon Program

[Jackstar]

The Last Giraffes on Earth

Take me with them.

[Dr. MD MD]

The woman who fell from the sky
When the pandemic potentially came within a thin sheet of glass to astronauts about to lift off into space, Star City, the secretive home of Russia's space program, became a place of suspicion, fear and blame. One doctor, the leader of the town's ambulance service, found herself in a desperate situation.

By POLINA IVANOVA in STAR CITY Filed Nov. 13, 2020, 11 a.m. GMT

The Star City Closed Administrative Territorial Unit is barely an hour’s drive northeast of the Kremlin, but for decades the town never appeared on any maps. Only after the Soviet Union fell apart was its location revealed.

Even now, it is shrouded by forests, and behind its tall concrete walls lies the somber infrastructure of Russia’s legendary space program, and the Soviet-era apartment blocks that its cosmonauts and scientists call home.

Star City’s medical clinic stands in a wooded area just past a monument to Yuri Gagarin, who became the first man in space in 1961, and a soaring symbol of Cold War-era glory. To this day, flowers are often placed at his feet.


A statue of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who became the first person in space in 1961, takes pride of place in Star City, the home of Russia’s space program. REUTERS/Evgenia Novozhenina

A wire-topped wall and a curtain of trees shield the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City. REUTERS/Evgenia Novozhenina

A wall covered with playful illustrations of Russian space glory and rings of barbed wire protects Star City from outsiders. REUTERS/Evgenia Novozhenina

Entry to Star City is closely controlled by checkpoints and security guards. REUTERS/Evgenia Novozhenina
For around a decade, physician Natalya Lebedeva worked out of the Star City clinic as a paramedic. One autumn, she and another doctor were called out to the 12th-floor apartment of a young musician.

“We walk in and he’s in nothing but his underwear,” the other paramedic recalled. “And Natalya screams, ‘Grab him!’”

The young man was heading for the open window.

“If she hadn’t screamed, I wouldn’t have noticed. It didn’t even cross my mind that he might try to jump,” the paramedic said.

They wrestled the young man away from the ledge. “It’s good that he was wearing underwear, at least. Otherwise, I don’t know what I might have grabbed.”

Bleak tales peppered with black humor were part of everyday life for Lebedeva and her team as they navigated Russia’s often maddeningly bureaucratic and underfunded medical system.

So was the pressure, working in a close-knit and closed-off town, a place of rumor and recrimination, heroism and national pride.

“Star City is not just some city. The residents there are not easy,” said Irina Antropova, who worked with Lebedeva on the town’s ambulance service from 2006 until 2009. Fewer than 6,000 people live in the town’s dozen or so apartment blocks, many of them working for the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center. “They are cosmonauts, the families of cosmonauts, military personnel.”

In the circular building housing the training center’s centrifuge, a 300-ton arm spins cosmonauts around an 18-meter radius until the force of gravity acting on their bodies is multiplied up to eight times, replicating the feeling of re-entering the atmosphere, of falling to Earth.


A new disease
When the first whispers of a new disease in China reached Russia in January, Lebedeva, a doctor trained in neurology, was working as the head of Star City’s ambulance service.

The team was close, ambulance driver Vladimir Chizhenko said. “We all lived as one collective.”

But medical work in Star City wasn’t standard fare. The clinic’s head doctor, Olga Minina, once received a late-night call on her mobile phone from a worried father asking about the health of his child.

The father was cosmonaut Oleg Artemyev, and he was calling from space.


Natalya Lebedeva ran Star City’s ambulance service.
The town’s status, and the fame of its residents, ramped up the stress. Rumors spread fast in the insular town. “As it is a closed city, and outsiders do not have access to the territory, they all live there, stewing in this world of theirs,” Antropova said.

Lebedeva, 51, wasn’t married and lived alone. Private and independent by nature, friends said, she responded to the panopticоn in which she lived by keeping to herself.

“Of course, everyone was interested in her personal life,” Antropova said. “So she kept it all very secret.”

Lebedeva had moved to the Moscow region from her hometown in southern Russia after her mother died, and she began working as a Star City doctor in the 2000s.

In 2009, the town stopped being a military base. But its clinic, though now fully civilian, didn’t join the standard Russian healthcare system. Instead, in 2010 it entered the structure of the Federal Medical and Biological Agency (FMBA), a sparse network of medical facilities servicing Russia’s nuclear facilities and security services, the high-level scientific research sector and aerospace.

Under the FMBA, with its direct reporting line to the Kremlin, Star City’s clinic was a highly strung place.

Lebedeva was a buffer, shielding her team of drivers and paramedics, defending them in disputes, four members of the team said, recalling fierce arguments with the head doctor over hours and pay.

“Then we would spend time ‘resuscitating’ her after those meetings,” said a medical worker who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Minina, the head doctor, said that she and Lebedeva were close, even in the tense atmosphere of Star City.


Women chat on a bench in the central square of the Star City, the home of Russia’s space program. REUTERS/Evgenia Novozhenina

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“The residents who are on my watch, each one of them is a celebrity,” Minina said. “So, of course I can be quite tough, because for me â€" one misstep and it’s the firing squad.”

Minina recalled occasions when she too would shield Lebedeva and the ambulance team from complaints. They’d leave work together, exhausted, she said, but Lebedeva would still suggest they get coffee together, or go visit the church across town. “We may have had our differences,” Minina said. “But she was a person that I could call at 4 a.m. and she’d get the job done. I trusted her very much.”

Antropova, the ambulance leader’s former coworker, said Lebedeva would take all the stress in her stride, saying, “Well, yes, well, yes, it’s not easy, but Irina, I’ll survive it.”

But even before the pandemic hit, she seemed different, ambulance driver Chizhenko said. She’d stopped joining the team on their lunch breaks, going for a walk instead, he said.

“I would tell her, why are you putting up with this? Leave this job. With your qualifications, you can always find another job. And recently, she had started to agree with me.”

On February 28, Chizhenko, tired of battles over pay, worked his last shift before handing in his notice. Two days later, the first confirmed case of the novel coronavirus in Moscow was discovered.


Preparing for space
That day, March 1, NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy arrived in Star City to prepare, together with two Russian cosmonauts, for a six-month stint on the International Space Station.

As they trained, coronavirus cases in Russia crept up, and restrictions grew. “I hear the streets in Moscow are quiet and empty,” Cassidy told a specialist spaceflight magazine toward the end of the month. “Here in Star City, it’s kind of like this oasis in the woods.”

On March 23, the astronauts laid flowers by Gagarin’s statue, and the next day set off for Russia’s space launch facility in Kazakhstan. It would be Star City’s last public event before lockdowns began.

Within a week, the number of reported coronavirus cases in Russia had shot up four times to more than 1,500. Moscow and the surrounding region â€" including Star City â€" went into lockdown. Regulations were strict: Residents could leave their homes only to reach the nearest shop or pharmacy, or to walk pets within a 100-meter radius.

Hospitals and healthcare workers across Moscow began to prepare for a crisis.


“He warned us”
Raisa Ketseleva, daughter of Star City ambulance driver Victor Ketselev, 59, said her father had planned to be on holiday in Belarus in April.

“When this whole pandemic started … Dad had a big meeting at work and they said that it would reach their facility, too,” she said. So he canceled his trip. “He said: ‘I’m not going to abandon my colleagues. I will stay and work.’”

Ketseleva said that at first, she didn’t understand how serious the pandemic was. Many friends simply didn’t believe the coronavirus was real. “They didn’t show us that sort of thing” on state TV, she said. Her father, though, “understood that it was an illness that could end in death. He warned us.”

He also told her that despite his ambulance work, the only protective equipment he had was a basic face mask.

Lebedeva was keenly aware of the danger facing her team. “She was very anxious about her work, about her department, about us … and members of our families, because all this fell on her shoulders,” her deputy, senior paramedic Marina Izmaylova, recalled.


Ambulances line up outside the Star City medical clinic where Natalya Lebedeva worked. REUTERS/Evgenia Novozhenina
Lebedeva began to lobby for staff to have access to protective gear and coronavirus tests, former coworker Antropova said.

“They were not being tested at the start of April,” Antropova said Lebedeva told her at the time. “The head doctor was refusing to test them, because if anyone tested positive, they would have had to put everyone” on quarantine. And if that happened, Star City would be left without medical care.

Head doctor Minina, however, painted a different picture: She said she personally secured 200 test kits â€" hard to come by at the time â€" from a research institute in Moscow. But there were guidelines and systems in place, and it was too early to test staff when there were no confirmed cases in the town, she said.

Some protective gear, earmarked for pandemic response, had been provided by the FMBA, and the team had far better kit than in neighboring clinics. Still, Minina said, she searched hard for additional supplies, amid a “super deficit” of masks on the market. In a statement, the FMBA said Star City’s clinic was provided with sufficient PPE for visits to patients with suspected COVID-19 and that testing of staff began March 25.

On April 2, the problem of testing and protective equipment blew up into an argument in the Star City clinic, said a doctor at the clinic who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Everything started boiling there,” the doctor said.


The virus reaches Star City
On April 11, on the eve of Star City’s annual celebration of Gagarin’s liftoff into space, ambulance driver Ketselev developed a sore throat.

On April 13, his temperature began to rise, his daughter said.

On April 15, his colleagues from the Star City clinic showed up to do a coronavirus test. A top Gagarin Training Center official had just tested positive, and mass testing of clinic staff had begun.

The next day, Ketselev’s test came back positive, his daughter said.

By that point, his shift partner had developed a cough. The partner’s wife and child were coughing, too, Ketselev’s daughter said. The third ambulance driver, a young man who had replaced Chizhenko when he quit, also fell ill, Chizhenko said.

On April 18, with his temperature soaring, Ketselev called Lebedeva and told her he was in agony. She said he should go to hospital, and after a long night searching for bed space, Ketselev was taken away in an ambulance. His daughter spent the next morning frantically ringing hospitals in the area, trying to work out where he might be.

By April 22, 27 staff members of the Star City clinic had tested positive for coronavirus, a letter sent to the town’s mayor on that date showed. So had 10 of their family members. Head doctor Minina, too, was in the ICU, with damage to 75% of her lungs, she said.

In the letter, cardiologist Svetlana Zakharova, who had taken over from Minina, asked the mayor to press the Moscow region health ministry for support. “The organization of medical support for the population of the Star City Closed Administrative Territorial Unit has become exceptionally difficult, especially the provision of emergency medical care,” according to the letter, seen by Reuters.

“At that point … we were truly fighting for our lives,” said senior paramedic Izmaylova, who was also hospitalized with severe COVID symptoms.

On April 20, Lebedeva was hospitalized in Moscow after testing positive.


Before liftoff, a close encounter
In the days before the virus started to spread in Star City, the three astronauts were preparing for liftoff at the Russian cosmodrome in Baikonur.

On the morning of April 9, liftoff day, the three men, dressed in their white spacesuits, met with Dmitry Rogozin, head of the Russian space agency. They also met with Evgeny Mikrin, deputy head of RSC Energia, which had built the Soyuz rocket they were about to take.

The astronauts spoke with the officials through a wall of glass, a quarantine measure. They walked out to the launchpad without the traditional crowds of well-wishers lining their way. At 11:05 a.m. Moscow time, they blasted into space.


International Space Station crew members Chris Cassidy of NASA (center), Anatoly Ivanishin (bottom) and Ivan Vagner of the Russian space agency Roscosmos board the Soyuz MS-16 spacecraft for the launch at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on April 9. Russian space agency Roscosmos/Handout via REUTERS

The crew members talk to Russian space officials separated by a wall of glass as a precaution. One of the officials, Evgeny Mikrin, second from left, deputy head of RSC Energia, which had built the Soyuz rocket they were about to take, later died of COVID-19. Russian space agency Roscosmos/Handout via REUTERS

The Soyuz MS-16 spacecraft carrying the crew blasts off to the International Space Station from the launchpad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on April 9. Russian space agency Roscosmos/Handout via REUTERS
Two days after returning from the liftoff, rocket designer Mikrin, 64, started to feel unwell. A coronavirus test came back positive. 

On April 12, Andrey Voloshin, a pilot and Gagarin Training Center official, also tested positive, a test results message seen by Reuters showed, becoming Star City’s first confirmed case. He had not attended the liftoff, but had met the party returning from Baikonur, Star City Mayor Evgeny Barishevsky said.

By the end of the month, 10 employees of the Gagarin Training Center had tested positive, local authorities reported. The space agency said 173 employees of Russia’s overall aerospace industry were sick, and six had died.

Mikrin would die of the disease on May 5. President Vladimir Putin wrote a short statement expressing his condolences online.


Star City Mayor Evgeny Baryshevsky says all possible precautionary and quarantine measures against the novel coronavirus were taken. REUTERS/Evgenia Novozhenina
A spokesman for the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, said that the liftoff group had tested negative immediately before and after the trip to Baikonur. Although tests were known to be unreliable in those early days, he said, there was no concern because strict quarantine measures had been followed throughout the liftoff.

Still, within weeks of Russia’s first confirmed case, the coronavirus had penetrated the closed walls of Star City and crossed the high-security gates of its cosmonaut training center. It had radiated across Russia’s revered space program during a moment of international attention and national pride, and had, potentially, come within an inch of glass away from traveling to space in a cosmonaut.


The search for someone to blame
In Star City, with the clinic in the grip of the outbreak, a hunt was launched for someone to blame, the doctor at the clinic said.

“They wanted to blame us, that it was us that infected them, not the other way around,” the doctor said of officials with the space program. “They wanted to blame the doctors.

“And then they started coming down hard on [Lebedeva], claiming she fell ill, infected everyone,” the doctor said.

Head doctor Minina said she didn’t know of any probe into the outbreak at the time; she herself was already in the hospital. But she said that reports had spread widely around the town blaming Lebedeva for rocket designer Mikrin’s positive test â€" despite the fact that he wasn’t a resident, and the two had had no contact at all. But the rumor was there.

A Roscosmos spokesman said he recalled some talk of accusations of negligence at the time, but it did not come from the space agency. “We did not initiate [any investigation] ... nor add to any rumors,” he said. That wouldn’t even be within the agency’s purview, he said.

According to the Gagarin Training Center, responding to a request for comment, the center had no issues with the Star City clinic’s work at all.

Lebedeva phoned several colleagues and close friends from her hospital bed, four people said. She had been admitted to the central FMBA hospital #83 in Moscow.

Her illness wasn’t severe. “Her temperature was a little over 37 degrees,” or 98.6 Fahrenheit, and “her lungs were affected only to a small degree,” her friend Antropova said.



“She called me and said … ‘I am going to be jailed. It’s the end for me.’”
A friend of Natalya Lebedeva


During several calls from the ward, Lebedeva repeatedly said that she was being blamed for being the source of the outbreak, a friend said. “She called me and said … ‘I am going to be jailed. It’s the end for me.’”

“I said … ‘How were you supposed to have prevented this, how? How? Come on. What are you, God?’” the friend recalled.

But Lebedeva was in tears. She said she had been contacted by investigators from the police.

Ketseleva, the ambulance driver’s daughter, said that some weeks later, Star City police officer Maxim Statsenko visited her at home. He refused to disclose what he was investigating, she said. “But I asked him questions, of course, and I understood that they were searching for who fell sick first.”

Reuters called Officer Statsenko to ask him about Lebedeva and his investigation. “I don’t know anything,” he said, and hung up.

In a statement, the FMBA said: “The detection of COVID-19 among the employees of [the Star City clinic] led to an internal audit by the management of the FMBA's interregional directorate #170. No charges were brought against N.V. Lebedeva as a result of the audit. The management of the FMBA and the [Star City clinic] also had no issues with the work of N.V. Lebedeva.”

Star City doctors criticized the idea of blaming anyone at all during a pandemic or searching for who infected whom. “We did everything by the book,” head doctor Minina said. “I’m a doctor, not a ballerina. I got sick because I was on the front line.”

On April 23, ambulance driver Ketselev was hooked up to a ventilator. Chances of recovery for patients on a ventilator were known to be low.

From her hospital bed, Lebedeva wrote a WhatsApp message to Minina: “I have understood that this is the virus of panic and fear.”


A fall to earth
Lebedeva was last active on WhatsApp at 00:21 on Friday, April 24, said a friend and former colleague at the Star City clinic, Natalya Zhernakova.

That day, several friends couldn’t reach her by phone. They began calling the FMBA hospital, friend Antropova recalled, but “the hospital told them that all information about Lebedeva was ‘closed.’”

On Saturday, Lebedeva’s friends contacted the Star City clinic ambulance service, Antropova said. “And her colleagues already… They had already received the information,” Antropova said, her voice breaking.

“They had been told that Natalya … had committed suicide.”

She had fallen from the window of the Moscow hospital’s coronavirus ward and died from her injuries, a television channel reported.

The FMBA released a statement on April 27: “On April 24, 2020, as the result of an unfortunate accident, Natalya Lebedeva tragically died.”



“They’ll cover it all up, because it’s space. Serious people are involved.”
Doctor at Star City clinic


The word “accident” angered many of Lebedeva’s friends, who believe she committed suicide out of desperation.

Responding to a request for comment, the FMBA said her death was a tragic event and that law enforcement officials have opened an investigation.

With no confirmation of the manner of Lebedeva’s death from the FMBA, the town stewed.

“They’ll cover it all up, because it’s space. Serious people are involved,” the doctor at the clinic said. “That’s why they wanted to blame it all on the ambulance service.”

A week after Lebedeva’s death, Ketseleva was told that her father, the ambulance driver, had died. Her mother was left to grieve alone and in quarantine for another month.

Ketseleva was sent a video, seen by Reuters. The person recording it walks through the empty corridors of Star City’s clinic. Benches are cordoned off with red-and-white hazard tape. At reception, the camera turns a corner.

There, under a bouquet of flowers, stand portraits of Ketselev and Lebedeva, a black ribbon on each.


Swan song
In early May, a funeral cortege traveled slowly through Star City, followed by two ambulances with sirens on throughout. The coffin for Lebedeva, whose surname is derived from the Russian word for swan, lebed, was white.

Star City resident Dmitry Saraev and others wrote on social media of watching from their windows. “This mourning escort became Natasha’s swan song, performed not by her but by her staff and vehicles,” Saraev wrote.

Star City ambulance dispatcher Tatyana Krivushina, 65, fell sick soon after her mother, who died in late May. Krivushina died on June 6.


Natalya Lebedeva is laid to rest in a white coffin.
In the last days of August, the head of the FMBA, Veronika Skvortsova, visited Star City. Pulling up in a black Mercedes, she toured the Gagarin Training Center, posing for a photograph in front of а Soyuz rocket training simulator.

Skvortsova also toured the Star City clinic. Among her festive welcome party was Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space.

Skvortsova talked to doctors and inspected the clinic's equipment, an official video showed. In the 2.5-minute clip, the outbreak at the clinic wasn't mentioned.

At one point on her tour, Skvortsova visited the clinic’s reception area. A press photo shows her standing in the corner by a noticeboard.

Behind her is the table on which the memorial bouquet was placed next to the framed photographs of Ketselev and Lebedeva. By the time of the official visit, the flowers and the portraits were gone.

[Dr. MD MD]

Take me with them.

I’ll allow it.

[Dr. MD MD]

The Wonderful, Transcendent Life of an Odd-Nosed Monkey

The island of Borneo is the only home of the proboscis monkey, an endangered primate that is surprisingly resilient.
by Jude Isabella
April 21, 2020 | 5,400 words, about 27 minutes
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Choosing a good place to sleep should be simple. But along the Kinabatangan River in Borneo, the monkeys swinging through the trees lining the water’s edge are picky and rambunctious as they search for a spot that’s just right. Their lives can depend on it.

Monkeys, in general, prefer trees without a lot of cover so they can spy predators, such as clouded leopards. Some spots are safer than othersâ€"like the slender ends of long branches where a monkey is out of reach of most predators and could be shaken awake by a stealthy cat approaching. But there’s a downsideâ€"a monkey that snags a perch on a tapering limb hanging over the river could tumble into the water if the branch snaps.

“We did a GPS survey on the crocodiles; they hunt below trees,” says Benoît Goossens. We’re in a boat with several students, learning how to conduct a primate survey. Goossens, an ecologist and the boat’s pilot, points to a macaque settling onto the branch of a dead tree overhanging the river. “That one’s ripe for falling in and getting eaten by a croc.” A monkey squabble, though, is usually the reason for an unintended dive.

To spot monkeys, Goossens’s first instruction is: look for moving branches. Counting them is fairly straightforward tooâ€"at least from a boat on the riverâ€"since the monkeys are nicely silhouetted by the setting sun. Identifying individual species, however, takes practice.

Silvered langurs, for example, have triangular heads with tufts of hair sticking out the sides and growing up in a spiky tuft. They have long tails and very orange offspring. They’re the placid onlookers in this monkey world. They avoid the shenanigans in the nearby trees, where gray-brown long-tailed macaques bounce about like young children putting off the moment they wink out at nightâ€"jumping on beds, scurrying about the room, monkeying around until their little bodies give out.


A wild macaque monkey rumpus is a common occurrence in the jungle. Video by filmjungle/Pond5

Just now, some macaques are leaping into a tree occupied by the much bigger proboscis monkeys. Proboscis females weigh up to 12 kilograms (about the same as an average-sized four-year-old child) and males up to 24 kilograms (about the same as an average-sized seven-year-old child). The macaquesâ€"around three to seven or so kilogramsâ€"are sassy. Their jumps are like a pffft in the face of any being within their vicinity. As they advance, the proboscises leave, one by one. The macaques follow; the proboscises spring back to the original tree. A real-life page from Where the Wild Things Are unfolds above me as the monkeys cavort in the canopy. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth they go in a wild monkey rumpus.

Even from a distance, the proboscis monkeys exhibit an air of forbearance for their naughty little primate cousins. The proboscises appear sangfroid. Equanimous. Unflappable. Considering today’s zeitgeist of endless outrage, such tolerance in our primate cousins is conspicuous.

Composure aside, the proboscis monkey is most famous for its looks. The female has a sweet face with an upturned nose; bright, wide-open eyes; a pudgy belly. The male is more … striking. A pronounced brow cloaks his eyes and his nose can reach an impressive 17.5 centimeters longâ€"a smidge longer than an iPhone Xâ€"a protuberance straight out of a Roald Dahl book. Bulbous. Fleshy. Floppy. His stomach is so Dahlishly pronounced, it’s perhaps the best example ever of the word potbelly. The paunch, the hooded eyes, and the fur piled on his shoulders like loose skin add to the furryâ€"old man look. In a treetop perch, gazing over the river, resting on his haunches, a big male wears an impassive expression but is thoroughly attentive to his surroundings, though he forgets his manners and scratches his tummy and nether regions now and again.

Wild male proboscis monkey (Nasalis larvatus) feeding
Proboscis monkeys are mostly folivores, leaf eaters, and their potbellies external evidence of their complex digestive system. Photo by Andrew Mackay/Alamy Stock Photo

Proboscis monkeys are a favorite among tourists in Borneo, and to see them is special. So too the silvered langurs, listed as near threatened by conservationists, are another highlight for visitors. No one worries about losing long-tailed macaques. In the wider world, they outnumber the other two monkeys; they are a species of least concern, being their cheeky selves in habitat that stretches across Southeast Asia. Silvered langurs are found beyond Borneo, too. The proboscises, however, live only on this island in the southwest corner of the Pacific Ocean, and they are endangered.

Out of the more than 600 primate species on the planet, the proboscis monkey is one of the more puzzling. No known fossilized remains exist, and historical data is scant. Their social structure is not fully understood. Yet despite some persistent knowledge gaps, they have become far less mysterious than they used to be: over the past 15 or 20 years, research has turned a fuzzy image of this Old World monkey, drawn in the past century by old-school naturalist-explorers, into a more sophisticated, if still pixelated, portrait.

Today, around 1,960 proboscis monkeys range along the Kinabatangan, all the way to the ocean. They probably once inhabited the entire Bornean coast, but as humans encroach on the beaches and turn mangroves into shrimp farms, the monkey’s riverine lowland forest habitat has become more vital. The latest efforts by scientists to learn about the proboscis monkey matter in a place where, between 1980 and 2000, more wood was harvested than in Africa and the Amazon combined. To save them, scientists must probe into even the minutest details of the monkeys’ existence.

For much of the 20th century, proboscis monkeys flunked as subjects for scientific study. Aside from their shoreline night-night ritual, they’re elusive animals and kept their secrets safe from science for a long time. Early European explorers and naturalists had little to say about this odd-nosed primate, one of 10 odd-nosed monkey species scattered across Southeast Asia. In Borneo’s jungle, the proboscis was hard to see, hard to follow, hard to shoot, and was (and still is) likely to die in captivity. Around a century ago, British zoologist Charles Hose sent two live specimens back to England, but they died before reaching Sri Lanka.

Just when the monkey was down on its luckâ€"mostly due to the slaughter of its habitat in the late 20th centuryâ€"and could have used some serious scientific attention, wildlife research underwent something of a revolution. New toolsâ€"GPS tracking, and less-invasive DNA analysis, for exampleâ€"allowed for a depth of understanding never imagined by early naturalists. It was as if a door to a secret society opened, and in walked all sorts of curious people, such as Goossens. He began his career learning how to study wildlife less invasively. His PhD adviser, Pierre Taberlet, pioneered noninvasive genetic sampling in the mid-1990s when studying brown bears in France’s Pyrenees mountains by sampling DNA from scat and from fur caught on strategically placed barbed wire.

A proboscis female with her young in Sabah, Borneo
A proboscis female with her infant in Sabah, Borneo. Photo by Sylvain Cordier/Minden Pictures

Today, Goossens is the director of the Danau Girang Field Centre (DGFC), a scientific research station in the Malaysian Bornean state of Sabah (Borneo rests partly in Malaysia, partly in Indonesia, and partly in the tiny sultanate of Brunei). Nestled within the rainforest on the Kinabatangan River, the center is a joint venture of Cardiff University in Wales and the Sabah Wildlife Department. Students from near and far come to study monkeys, birds, crocodiles, pangolins, slow lorises, snakes, and plants.

Goossens launched the center in 2008, eight years after he first arrived in Borneo to study orangutans on a grant from the Darwin Initiative. “I fell in love with Sabah,” he says. Goossens has no desire to return to Belgium, his native country. From his expressive eyebrows and sturdy build, Goossens calls to mind a character from the French comic book series Asterix, minus the droopy moustache. He has Asterix’s can-do spirit: when he stumbled on a collection of empty concrete buildings in the middle of the Sabah rainforest while doing fieldwork, he saw his opportunity.

The buildings belonged to the Sabah government but were no longer in use. Goossens convinced officials to lend him the space and Cardiff University (where he was working as a postdoctoral fellow) to fund a scientific field station. Not long after opening its doors, in walked a Canadian graduate student smitten with the proboscis monkey: Danica Stark.

Over 10 years and one PhD dissertation later, Stark entered the ranks of experts who really know the proboscis monkey. I call them Team Proboscis.

The main building at the Danau Girang Field Centre, a scientific research station in the Malaysian Bornean state of Sabah
The main building at the Danau Girang Field Centre, a scientific research station in the Malaysian Bornean state of Sabah. Photo courtesy of DGFC

Stark, hair pulled back into a ponytail, folds her tall frame into a chair in one of the center’s buildingsâ€"dining room, makeshift classroom, library, offices, and lab. We sit in the dining area next to a wall open to the elements but lined with a screen to deter animals, from nosy macaques to mosquitoes. The building, orange with burgundy trim, sits in a clearing a few meters off the ground on concrete blocks, its underside full of napping mammals: at dawn, bats scoot from the jungle back to their roosts beneath the building.

Stark’s deep-set eyes are friendly, though she exudes a Western Canadian reserve. She’d rather not talk about herself, but, on prodding, she shares her inspiration to become a primatologist: around her second year at the University of Alberta, she watched a spot aired on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation about famous Canadians. “There was one about Biruté Galdikas, an orangutan researcher,” Stark says, and grins. Stark wasn’t interested in orangutans so much as primatology, so she dropped her plan to become a veterinarian and transferred to the University of Calgary. Stark briefly studied howler monkeys in Panama, then mona and ursine colobus monkeys in Ghana, but it was the proboscis monkey that tugged at her curiosity, and she committed to this odd-nosed monkey for her master’s degree.

“From the beginning, it was their appearance,” Stark says. The monkeys’ mystery was also a factor: they were a puzzle with a whole lot more pieces missing than other primates. They melt out of sight and into the forest every day. They gallivant among the trees in swamps, around lakes and mangroves. “You just can’t follow them in. It’s been really restricting that way,” she says.

Danica Stark, a Canadian primatologist
Danica Stark, a Canadian primatologist, on the Kinabatangan River in Sabah, where she studies proboscis monkeys. Photo courtesy of DGFC

The environment is so restricting that estimating the population is guesswork. Based on the most recent estimate over 10 years ago, around 7,500 exist in Malaysian Borneo. The bulk of the population lies in the bigger portion of Borneoâ€"in Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of the islandâ€"and the guesstimate there is even fuzzier, numbering 20,000 to 25,000 from a survey also done over a decade ago.

Confirmation bias has undermined our understanding of the monkey: researchers assumed the proboscises prefer water because boats were the main method of human travel for most of Borneo’s history. Conveniently, they saw the monkeys in trees on ocean and river shorelines at dawn and dusk, and pushing further into the forest seemed unnecessary.

But where did the monkeys spend their days?

Trees. They block your path, catch your clothes, thrust twigs at your face, and drop leaves and seeds on your head. In a rainforest, they’re in charge, weaving and soaring, almost sentient. If you’re not paying attention, it feels as if you’ll walk forever among the trees, forever lost in a forested purgatory. Ask the researchers tramping the forest along the Kinabatangan River to name these tall beings and they give a one-word answer: dipterocarp.

The genesis of dipterocarp forests can be traced to the southern supercontinent of Gondwana that broke apart around 180 million years ago. Despite their inability to dodge chainsaws, like all trees, dipterocarps are so evolutionarily successfulâ€"there are so damn many of themâ€"that they almost defy scientific classification. Some 240 species of dipterocarp can coexist in an area the size of a sports field; one genus people from outside the ecosystem will recognize is Ficus, the fig tree, a popular houseplant.

Visitors to the field center are not allowed to head into the forest alone. It’s easy to lose your way and bump into danger in the form of snakes or orangutans; we stick to the boardwalks and trails linking the various buildings and the dock. One morning, I finally walk into the rainforest when I tag along with Elisa Panjang, one of Goossens’s graduate students and one of Borneo’s few pangolin (scaly anteater) researchers, to check on some wildlife cameras. Walking through the jungle must be done single file. The foliage is so thick, the sun pokes through the canopy only in small patches. Dead leaves form a brown deep-pile carpet and the air is heavy with moisture. Panjang and Roslee, a research assistant, carry parangs (machetes). The tread of gumboots and swish of quick-dry clothing accompany the occasional riff of a parang clearing the way.

Aerial photo of the Danau Girang Field Centre
The Danau Girang Field Centre is nestled within the Lower Kinabatangan Wildlife Sanctuary. Photo courtesy of Oliver Deppert

As we march along, I consider how much easier and more wondrous it would be to be a monkey here. To trudge is earthly. To vault from one tree to another, scamper along the canopy, and spy on the world from above would be transcendent.

Stark’s goal was to follow the proboscises’ movements, so she began placing GPS collars on monkeys in 2010, eventually tracking 10 and their extended familiesâ€"about 15 individuals per collared animal. All she had to do was wait for the data to beam from satellites to cellular towers and onto her computer. Stark’s research revealed that an average troop roves about 940 meters over the course of a day within an area smaller than a square kilometer, a relatively modest spatial need, and the monkeys are not especially territorial. Troop territories overlap, even those of so-called bachelor troops, which, oddly enough, are not always solely male; they’re known to accept a female or two into their ranks.

They’re easygoing creatures. Except when it comes to where they live. Stark’s research showed that proboscis monkeys need a forest canopy; nothing else will do.

A mere 15-minute hike from the riverbank, we emerge from the trees and enter a world the proboscis never will: a domesticated and regimented place, with row after row of stout, uniform trees devoid of understory. A palm oil plantation.

The DGFC lies within the Lower Kinabatangan Wildlife Sanctuary, a 270-square-kilometer patch of wild, a third of the size of New York City, New York. The sanctuary, however, is hemmed in by palm oil estates. In some parts, you only have to walk 300 meters from the river to enter an orderly plantation laid out in a grid like a city. Borneo has thousands of such plantations. The huge international market for palm oil is one reason the island has lost so many trees.


Pangolin researcher Elisa Panjang, right, and research assistant Roslee set up a wildlife camera in a palm oil plantation near the Danau Girang Field Centre. Video by Jude Isabella

Panjang checks on wildlife cameras she placed in the estate to record evidence of pangolins, or, as she calls them, “walking money.” Laborers may find it difficult to resist the temptation of poaching a pangolin trundling among palm oil trees or sleeping on a branch. A pangolin is worth around US $600 on the black market. Its meat may end up on a dinner plate at a private dinner in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah’s capital, and its scales in traditional Chinese medicine concoctions. Poachers also target proboscis monkeys to sell as pets or for their meat and bezoarsâ€"concretions formed in their digestive tracts, which are incorrectly considered medicinal.

An armed poacher with great aim can take down a proboscis, yet up in the sheltered canopy they’re beyond the reach of traps or snares, and they are consummate tree huggers. Proboscis monkeys, Stark learned, spend most of their daytime hours in the trees, presumably filling their potbellies. The dipterocarp canopy is particularly generous when it comes to nourishment.

Exactly what are they eating though?

The European explorers who set down in Borneo in the 19th century were, in keeping with the times, myopic researchers, more collectors than scientists, content to describe and count. So they dissected the monkeys’ brains or weighed their testes and at times declared truths based on few observations. Over a century ago, the Field Columbian Museum in Chicago, Illinois, mounted a taxidermic proboscis in a diorama where it was shown ravaging a woodpecker’s nest and tearing the bird to pieces.

The keen early observers knew that display was nonsense. They kept notes and reported proboscises eating shoots and the fruit of mangrove trees. Yet no one knew enough to keep a proboscis monkey captiveâ€"even the basics, like the right combination of foods, eluded early captors. The monkeys’ needs are complex, like their stomachs.

A proboscis potbelly is a multichambered stomach, sometimes accounting for 25 percent of the animal’s body weight. A chewed leaf lands in the proboscis’s foregut, a chamber full of cellulose-busting bacteria. From there it goes through a tube into another chamber, then empties into the small intestine. The process takes around 40 to 50 hours.

The Kinabatangan proboscis monkeys are also, so far, the only primate known to chew their cudâ€"they regurgitate a meal to chew it again, like cows. This finding was a bit of a science sensation in 2011 when reported by Ikki Matsuda, a Japanese researcher who, like Stark, was drawn to the mystery of the monkey.

Matsuda has studied proboscis monkeys living along the Kinabatangan Riverâ€"in Sukau, a village about two hours by boat downriver from the field centerâ€"since 2005, beginning as a young graduate student at Hokkaido University in Japan. Like Stark, he found his way to the proboscis through his country’s public broadcaster, Nippon Hoso Kyokai (NHK), when he watched a nature documentary.

“The TV program is saying this monkey is living in very swampy areas and their ecology is unknown,” Matsuda says over Skype, his short hair a spiky cap on his head, his eyes framed by black glasses. Now a primatologist at Chubu University in Japan, Matsuda was in his early 20s when he first watched the monkeys on the little screen and he too was intrigued: where do they go and what do they do in the forest all day?

Ikki Matsuda, Japanese primatologist
Ikki Matsuda is a Japanese primatologist who has studied proboscis monkeys since 2005. Photo courtesy of Ikki Matsuda

In 2005, Matsuda arrived in Sukau and went into the bush with a couple of research assistants and searched for a proboscis monkey troop. Matsuda and his colleagues identified and focused on a male and his harem, trailing the monkeys every day from morning until night for a month.

Finally, they habituated the group to their presence and could get close enough to regularly observe the monkeys’ daily routine in the forest. This troop had a big, dominant male, six females, and several other immature monkeys. The Japanese scientists named the monkeys after characters in the famous manga series Dragon Ball: Bejita, the dominant male, and Bulma and Chi-Chi, two of the six adult females, for example. Chi-Chi was one of Matsuda’s favorite monkeys.

She was something special, Matsuda says. Binoculars are great for studying behavior, but are not always helpful in the dense forest when trying to see exactly what the monkeys are eating. Chi-Chi was the first to allow the researchers to move closer. Eventually, the rest of the troop opened up, and Matsuda and his team could identify specific foods and which parts of the foods the monkeys preferred.

Feeding behavior, physiology, and spatial use of habitat tell researchers a lot about an animal’s needs. Given the data from the cooperative proboscis troop, Matsuda surmised that the monkeys needed 800 meters of forest on either side of the Kinabatangan River to comfortably survive. Another useful takeaway was that they like to chow down between 3:00 p.m. and 5:00 p.m., just before they hunker down for the night, giving them time to digest what turned out to be a hugely diverse diet: Chi-Chi and her family dined on 188 different species of plant. As for their fruit eating, the monkeys are primarily after the seeds, Matsuda and his team determined. The monkeys will eat both the flesh and the seeds of unripe fruit, but if they have to settle for ripe fruit, they leave the flesh and strictly go for the seeds: the sugars from ripe fruit can cause bloating and occasionally even death.

Questions answered invariably lead to more questions, and a peek at Chi-Chi and company’s eating habits led Matsuda and his colleagues to search for more detailed dataâ€"from inside the monkeys’ potbellies.

Those magical bellies are essential to dining so broadly in a dipterocarp forest. But there is a lingering suspicion that the monkeys first evolved to live in a mangrove forest.

Sonneratia trees dominate Borneo’s coastal mangroves. Their leaves are hard to digest and rich in tannin. “Proboscis monkeys are one of the only ones that can eat the stuff that’s in the mangroves,” Stark says. Their webbed fingers and toes are also handy in mangrove habitats, lending an ease to swimming and traipsing across mucky ground, where they’re less likely to be caught by a predator than in a dipterocarp forest.

But researchers also assume that as long as there’s a water sourceâ€"a river, lake, or swampâ€"proboscis monkeys will colonize an area. Nutritionally, a dipterocarp forest, even a disturbed one, is superior. A monkey in a mangrove forest has basic sustenance: the dutiful diet of a hospital cafeteria. In contrast, a monkey in riverine forest enjoys the kind of salubrious nutrition found in a hip vegan restaurant. We know this from the monkey’s microbiome.

Proboscis monkey in mangrove at low tide
Proboscis monkeys are well-adapted to live in mangrove habitats. Photo by Thomas Marent/Minden Pictures

The microbiome is a hot topic among proboscis monkey researchers. Matsuda, Stark, and others from Team Proboscis wanted to figure out the diets that promoted the most biotic diversity in the monkeys. So they collected the yet-to-be-digested contents of proboscis monkeys’ stomachs.

Six adult proboscises from different habitats provided the pre-gastric gunk. Two monkeys spent most of their time in a riverine forest, two dwelled in mangroves, one semi-free-range monkey lived in a mangrove surrounded by palm oil plantations, and one was captive.

The monkeys with the most species-rich microbiomes, more microbial diversity, and presumably healthier foreguts? Those that lived in the forest lining the Kinabatangan River. Their microbiomes had double the species of the other four microbiomes. The free-ranging mangrove dwellers had slightly more species richness than the other two monkeys, but mostly ate only Sonneratia caseolaris leaves and unripe fruit so had less overall microbial diversity. In contrast with the free-ranging mangrove monkeys, the captive monkey, held at a wildlife park near Kota Kinabalu, and the semi-free-range mangrove monkey ate foods with a greater variety of nutrients: sweet potatoes, ipil-ipil leaves, cucumbers, long beans, carrots, and sunflower seeds. And yet, though nutritionally sound, those two monkeys also shared microbiome species with humans, which includes potential human pathogens.

As with how Stark’s research revealed the parameters of a monkey’s home, the diet study drew a finer portrait of the proboscis and the depth of the impact of biodiverse ecosystems. Much like how converting the Amazon rainforest to agricultural lands limits the soil’s bacterial community, degrading the primate’s landscape limits the microbiota in its gut.

Expanding protected areas to include more biodiverse hotspots would be good for the proboscis monkeys. And recent research has shown the relationship is two way.


The purpose of such a big nose on the male proboscis monkey has been the subject of scientific conversation for over a century. Video by RMBolton/Pond5

Matsuda’s time with Chi-Chi’s family raised questions about how the monkeys might be spreading seeds. Were they seed predators or seed dispersers? Did a journey through the monkeys’ complicated guts kill the seeds or were they viable when pooped out?

So, a couple of grad students, Valentine Thiry and Oriana Bhasin, collected 201 fecal samples along 21 kilometers of the Kinabatangan River. They collected in the mornings from under the sleeping sites of various proboscis troops. They brought the samples back to the field centerâ€"from 77 percent of the proboscis poop, they collected 28,452 intact seeds, mostly of the species Nauclea orientalis (or bangkal, a tree that thrives in the soil around rivers). The students germinated those seeds and control seeds that never traveled through a monkey’s gut, from both ripe and unripe fruit.

They found that seeds traveling through a proboscis’s gut were much more likely to germinate than the other seeds. Also, seeds from unripe fruit were more likely to germinate than seeds from ripe fruit. So, given their use of habitat, proboscis monkeys were providing a service: they were dispersing intact seeds far from the parent plant to suitable riverine habitats.

Instead of a one-way relationshipâ€"the dipterocarp jungle giving life to the monkeysâ€"there is reciprocityâ€"or mutualism, in ecological terms. The trees and the monkeys benefit each other. If you’re restoring a forest, this is useful information. Plant bangkal, for example, and the monkeys will come and spread seeds for you.

Stark published her dissertation in 2018. When I ask her what surprised her most from her decade of studying proboscis monkeys, her answer is counterintuitive, the opposite of what most of conventional wisdom says about how reliant animals that live in old-growth forests are on the old growth itself.

“They actually do quite well in a disturbed forest, if they have enough forest,” Stark says. Old growth is not essential to the monkey’s well-being. “[A disturbed forest] has a lot of really young growth, which provides a lot of food. It’s really cool how they’re supposed to be super-specialized, but they seem to be able to make it as long as there’s forest.”

By 2010, Sabah had lost almost 40 percent of its old-growth forest, including trees up to 1,000 years old. Much of the forest along the Kinabatangan River is highly disturbed, with young trees resplendent with shiny new leaves that folivoresâ€"leaf eatersâ€"like the proboscis covet. Without monkeys dispersing seeds, forest regrowth could go in a different direction. A restored ecosystem isn’t the same as it was before, but if you have the original species around, they can help a lot. For conservationists, this is powerful knowledge. For instance, the reintroduction of wolves and beavers in Yellowstone National Park helped re-establish a diverse ecosystem. The life span of palm oil trees is about 30 years. Peak crop yield is nine to 18 years. If a plantation company hands the land back to the state, or even abandons it, the forest regrows quickly, especially with a little help, as the seed research showed.

The chances of a palm oil company willingly abandoning or handing over a plantation seem slim. Sometimes a firm nudge helps.

Lower Kinabatangan Wildlife Sanctuary and palm oil plantations
The Lower Kinabatangan Wildlife Sanctuary abuts palm oil plantations. Photo by Scubazoo

In 2014, Goossens noticed an estate alongside the wildlife sanctuary creeping beyond its borders. He contacted Sabah’s assistant minister of tourism at the time, Datuk Pang Yuk Ming. Pang had the boundary of the riparian reserve surveyed and found that about eight hectaresâ€"about eight sport fieldsâ€"of sanctuary had been converted to palm oil. The government had an excavator rip out about 400 illegally planted palm oil trees, and a nearby community ecotourism co-op, Kopel, replanted the area, which already boasts a canopy.

There’s another bit of good news. Drone footage taken by a researcher at DGFC in 2015 led to an important discoveryâ€"and to another government action. The imagery showed that almost 50 hectares of forest had been cleared from the sanctuary shortly before the drone flights. The logging had wiped out 30 percent of the home range of one of the troops Stark had followed via GPS collar. Drone images also showed that the felling extended down to the river’s edge, despite a law requiring riparian reserves of a minimum of 20 meters alongside rivers over three meters wide. A local landowner had logged reserved land with permission from a national government program that supported the rubber industry. The federal agency hadn’t consulted with the Sabah Wildlife Department.

Following this discovery, the field center sent out a press release with the aerial footage combined with Stark’s GPS data to show and explain this habitat destruction. Locals were outraged. The next day, the Sabah State Government ordered an immediate stop to further land clearing on sensitive areas along the river. Sabah’s decision was helped along by an emotional social media appeal, aided by the fact that there was already a regulation and proboscis monkeys had a proven economic value to ecotourism.

So what about that 800 meters on either side of a river that Matsuda identified as necessary habitat? Team Proboscis has not had luck convincing Sabah to change its riparian reserve law. “That’s obviously not enough,” Goossens says. To protect and expand the habitat, to give a voice to the voiceless flora and fauna, Goossens and his colleagues produced a 10-year action plan that the Sabah State Government approved last year. A buffer of 800 meters may be unrealistic, but Team Proboscis would be happy to begin with a minimum of 100 meters. Ultimately, the scientific data provided a starting point.

Once you’ve measured, you can manage more effectively. And conservation management is rarely about managing animals or plants, it’s mostly about managing people.

The air smells like black pepper. Four-beat callsâ€"ohwoo oo oo ooâ€"from crow pheasants lend a rhythmic line to our chatter in the boat. We’re back on the water for another primate survey.

A bachelor group of proboscises moves quickly from tree to tree, the macaques on their tails. Big, dominant proboscis males sit where they can watch over their female charges in the lower boughs. One male sits high up in the tree, looking down, it seems, at the primates looking up from the boat. We idle and listen. To non-jungle dwellers, proboscis sounds are a mash-up of the sounds of different animals: donkey brays, cat meows, bird whistles, pig snuffles, and human baby squawks.

How wonderful to see this magnificent creature in the flesh. The first published illustration of the proboscis was created in 1775 by a German naturalist, J. C. D. von Schreber, who probably never saw a proboscis, even a dead one. He likely read a French naturalist’s description of the animal. He drew a tall, muscular, hairy, confident, manlike bipedal creature sporting a furry muffler and a long, pointed nose.


Like their monkey cousins, proboscis monkeys are adept at traveling through the tree canopy. Video by RMBolton/Pond5

By the time a French naturalist bestowed the Latin name Nasalis larvatus, nasal mask, the locals had dubbed the monkey orang belanda, Malay for Dutchman: the potbelly and pointed nose reminding them of their white intruders. Figuring out the function of that paunch has been easy compared with understanding why the male needs so huge a honker.

Charles Hose, the English zoologist, wrote in 1893 that only proboscis monkeys of advanced age, males and females, have a big nose. Wrong. Over a century ago, naturalists argued over whether the nose was so big the male had to physically move it to eat. They figured it did. Again, wrong. “Their nose movement can be a bit hypnotizing when they’re eating,” Stark says. “It’s just flopping around.”

Of course, many a historical male naturalist explained the nose by intoning the old adage: big (insert nose, hands, or feet) = big (insert penis, dick, junk) = reproductive success. And, well, they were kind of right.

In a group of studies that took over 15 years, Matsuda and others on Team Proboscis found the best evidence yet to explain the big nose: the ladies like it. The bigger the male, the bigger the nose and the bigger the testes. And bigger testes correlates with higher sperm counts in primates. Smaller-nosed males take one look at a mega-schnozzle and they’ll stay awayâ€"they cannot compete.

The nose also calls a troop to attention. Big-nosed males can turn up the volume on their calls, making it easier to hear them in the dense rainforest. The ability to create a hullabaloo, apparently, makes a quality male.

Goossens waves to get everyone’s attention and points up toward a tree: a proboscis alarm call cuts through the chatter. The big male at the top of the tree sees danger: it’s a sound much like my friend’s cat made after it was hit by a car and couldn’t meow properly anymore, its cry catching midway in its throat. Although when Goossens imitates the cry it comes off sounding more like kahauâ€"the local name for the monkey.

When a kahau pierces the air, female proboscises and their offspring fling themselvesâ€"their arms extend out, legs back, bellies fully stretchedâ€"out. We slide past. A glance back reveals the male eyeing us. Goossens salutes him.

[Jackstar]

The Wonderful, Transcendent Life of an Odd-Nosed Monkey

The island of Borneo is the only home of the proboscis monkey, an endangered primate that is surprisingly resilient.
by Jude Isabella
April 21, 2020 | 5,400 words, about 27 minutes
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Choosing a good place to sleep should be simple. But along the Kinabatangan River in Borneo, the monkeys swinging through the trees lining the water’s edge are picky and rambunctious as they search for a spot that’s just right. Their lives can depend on it.

Monkeys, in general, prefer trees without a lot of cover so they can spy predators, such as clouded leopards. Some spots are safer than othersâ€"like the slender ends of long branches where a monkey is out of reach of most predators and could be shaken awake by a stealthy cat approaching. But there’s a downsideâ€"a monkey that snags a perch on a tapering limb hanging over the river could tumble into the water if the branch snaps.

“We did a GPS survey on the crocodiles; they hunt below trees,” says Benoît Goossens. We’re in a boat with several students, learning how to conduct a primate survey. Goossens, an ecologist and the boat’s pilot, points to a macaque settling onto the branch of a dead tree overhanging the river. “That one’s ripe for falling in and getting eaten by a croc.” A monkey squabble, though, is usually the reason for an unintended dive.

To spot monkeys, Goossens’s first instruction is: look for moving branches. Counting them is fairly straightforward tooâ€"at least from a boat on the riverâ€"since the monkeys are nicely silhouetted by the setting sun. Identifying individual species, however, takes practice.

Silvered langurs, for example, have triangular heads with tufts of hair sticking out the sides and growing up in a spiky tuft. They have long tails and very orange offspring. They’re the placid onlookers in this monkey world. They avoid the shenanigans in the nearby trees, where gray-brown long-tailed macaques bounce about like young children putting off the moment they wink out at nightâ€"jumping on beds, scurrying about the room, monkeying around until their little bodies give out.


A wild macaque monkey rumpus is a common occurrence in the jungle. Video by filmjungle/Pond5

Just now, some macaques are leaping into a tree occupied by the much bigger proboscis monkeys. Proboscis females weigh up to 12 kilograms (about the same as an average-sized four-year-old child) and males up to 24 kilograms (about the same as an average-sized seven-year-old child). The macaquesâ€"around three to seven or so kilogramsâ€"are sassy. Their jumps are like a pffft in the face of any being within their vicinity. As they advance, the proboscises leave, one by one. The macaques follow; the proboscises spring back to the original tree. A real-life page from Where the Wild Things Are unfolds above me as the monkeys cavort in the canopy. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth they go in a wild monkey rumpus.

Even from a distance, the proboscis monkeys exhibit an air of forbearance for their naughty little primate cousins. The proboscises appear sangfroid. Equanimous. Unflappable. Considering today’s zeitgeist of endless outrage, such tolerance in our primate cousins is conspicuous.

Composure aside, the proboscis monkey is most famous for its looks. The female has a sweet face with an upturned nose; bright, wide-open eyes; a pudgy belly. The male is more … striking. A pronounced brow cloaks his eyes and his nose can reach an impressive 17.5 centimeters longâ€"a smidge longer than an iPhone Xâ€"a protuberance straight out of a Roald Dahl book. Bulbous. Fleshy. Floppy. His stomach is so Dahlishly pronounced, it’s perhaps the best example ever of the word potbelly. The paunch, the hooded eyes, and the fur piled on his shoulders like loose skin add to the furryâ€"old man look. In a treetop perch, gazing over the river, resting on his haunches, a big male wears an impassive expression but is thoroughly attentive to his surroundings, though he forgets his manners and scratches his tummy and nether regions now and again.

Wild male proboscis monkey (Nasalis larvatus) feeding
Proboscis monkeys are mostly folivores, leaf eaters, and their potbellies external evidence of their complex digestive system. Photo by Andrew Mackay/Alamy Stock Photo

Proboscis monkeys are a favorite among tourists in Borneo, and to see them is special. So too the silvered langurs, listed as near threatened by conservationists, are another highlight for visitors. No one worries about losing long-tailed macaques. In the wider world, they outnumber the other two monkeys; they are a species of least concern, being their cheeky selves in habitat that stretches across Southeast Asia. Silvered langurs are found beyond Borneo, too. The proboscises, however, live only on this island in the southwest corner of the Pacific Ocean, and they are endangered.

Out of the more than 600 primate species on the planet, the proboscis monkey is one of the more puzzling. No known fossilized remains exist, and historical data is scant. Their social structure is not fully understood. Yet despite some persistent knowledge gaps, they have become far less mysterious than they used to be: over the past 15 or 20 years, research has turned a fuzzy image of this Old World monkey, drawn in the past century by old-school naturalist-explorers, into a more sophisticated, if still pixelated, portrait.

Today, around 1,960 proboscis monkeys range along the Kinabatangan, all the way to the ocean. They probably once inhabited the entire Bornean coast, but as humans encroach on the beaches and turn mangroves into shrimp farms, the monkey’s riverine lowland forest habitat has become more vital. The latest efforts by scientists to learn about the proboscis monkey matter in a place where, between 1980 and 2000, more wood was harvested than in Africa and the Amazon combined. To save them, scientists must probe into even the minutest details of the monkeys’ existence.

For much of the 20th century, proboscis monkeys flunked as subjects for scientific study. Aside from their shoreline night-night ritual, they’re elusive animals and kept their secrets safe from science for a long time. Early European explorers and naturalists had little to say about this odd-nosed primate, one of 10 odd-nosed monkey species scattered across Southeast Asia. In Borneo’s jungle, the proboscis was hard to see, hard to follow, hard to shoot, and was (and still is) likely to die in captivity. Around a century ago, British zoologist Charles Hose sent two live specimens back to England, but they died before reaching Sri Lanka.

Just when the monkey was down on its luckâ€"mostly due to the slaughter of its habitat in the late 20th centuryâ€"and could have used some serious scientific attention, wildlife research underwent something of a revolution. New toolsâ€"GPS tracking, and less-invasive DNA analysis, for exampleâ€"allowed for a depth of understanding never imagined by early naturalists. It was as if a door to a secret society opened, and in walked all sorts of curious people, such as Goossens. He began his career learning how to study wildlife less invasively. His PhD adviser, Pierre Taberlet, pioneered noninvasive genetic sampling in the mid-1990s when studying brown bears in France’s Pyrenees mountains by sampling DNA from scat and from fur caught on strategically placed barbed wire.

A proboscis female with her young in Sabah, Borneo
A proboscis female with her infant in Sabah, Borneo. Photo by Sylvain Cordier/Minden Pictures

Today, Goossens is the director of the Danau Girang Field Centre (DGFC), a scientific research station in the Malaysian Bornean state of Sabah (Borneo rests partly in Malaysia, partly in Indonesia, and partly in the tiny sultanate of Brunei). Nestled within the rainforest on the Kinabatangan River, the center is a joint venture of Cardiff University in Wales and the Sabah Wildlife Department. Students from near and far come to study monkeys, birds, crocodiles, pangolins, slow lorises, snakes, and plants.

Goossens launched the center in 2008, eight years after he first arrived in Borneo to study orangutans on a grant from the Darwin Initiative. “I fell in love with Sabah,” he says. Goossens has no desire to return to Belgium, his native country. From his expressive eyebrows and sturdy build, Goossens calls to mind a character from the French comic book series Asterix, minus the droopy moustache. He has Asterix’s can-do spirit: when he stumbled on a collection of empty concrete buildings in the middle of the Sabah rainforest while doing fieldwork, he saw his opportunity.

The buildings belonged to the Sabah government but were no longer in use. Goossens convinced officials to lend him the space and Cardiff University (where he was working as a postdoctoral fellow) to fund a scientific field station. Not long after opening its doors, in walked a Canadian graduate student smitten with the proboscis monkey: Danica Stark.

Over 10 years and one PhD dissertation later, Stark entered the ranks of experts who really know the proboscis monkey. I call them Team Proboscis.

The main building at the Danau Girang Field Centre, a scientific research station in the Malaysian Bornean state of Sabah
The main building at the Danau Girang Field Centre, a scientific research station in the Malaysian Bornean state of Sabah. Photo courtesy of DGFC

Stark, hair pulled back into a ponytail, folds her tall frame into a chair in one of the center’s buildingsâ€"dining room, makeshift classroom, library, offices, and lab. We sit in the dining area next to a wall open to the elements but lined with a screen to deter animals, from nosy macaques to mosquitoes. The building, orange with burgundy trim, sits in a clearing a few meters off the ground on concrete blocks, its underside full of napping mammals: at dawn, bats scoot from the jungle back to their roosts beneath the building.

Stark’s deep-set eyes are friendly, though she exudes a Western Canadian reserve. She’d rather not talk about herself, but, on prodding, she shares her inspiration to become a primatologist: around her second year at the University of Alberta, she watched a spot aired on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation about famous Canadians. “There was one about Biruté Galdikas, an orangutan researcher,” Stark says, and grins. Stark wasn’t interested in orangutans so much as primatology, so she dropped her plan to become a veterinarian and transferred to the University of Calgary. Stark briefly studied howler monkeys in Panama, then mona and ursine colobus monkeys in Ghana, but it was the proboscis monkey that tugged at her curiosity, and she committed to this odd-nosed monkey for her master’s degree.

“From the beginning, it was their appearance,” Stark says. The monkeys’ mystery was also a factor: they were a puzzle with a whole lot more pieces missing than other primates. They melt out of sight and into the forest every day. They gallivant among the trees in swamps, around lakes and mangroves. “You just can’t follow them in. It’s been really restricting that way,” she says.

Danica Stark, a Canadian primatologist
Danica Stark, a Canadian primatologist, on the Kinabatangan River in Sabah, where she studies proboscis monkeys. Photo courtesy of DGFC

The environment is so restricting that estimating the population is guesswork. Based on the most recent estimate over 10 years ago, around 7,500 exist in Malaysian Borneo. The bulk of the population lies in the bigger portion of Borneoâ€"in Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of the islandâ€"and the guesstimate there is even fuzzier, numbering 20,000 to 25,000 from a survey also done over a decade ago.

Confirmation bias has undermined our understanding of the monkey: researchers assumed the proboscises prefer water because boats were the main method of human travel for most of Borneo’s history. Conveniently, they saw the monkeys in trees on ocean and river shorelines at dawn and dusk, and pushing further into the forest seemed unnecessary.

But where did the monkeys spend their days?

Trees. They block your path, catch your clothes, thrust twigs at your face, and drop leaves and seeds on your head. In a rainforest, they’re in charge, weaving and soaring, almost sentient. If you’re not paying attention, it feels as if you’ll walk forever among the trees, forever lost in a forested purgatory. Ask the researchers tramping the forest along the Kinabatangan River to name these tall beings and they give a one-word answer: dipterocarp.

The genesis of dipterocarp forests can be traced to the southern supercontinent of Gondwana that broke apart around 180 million years ago. Despite their inability to dodge chainsaws, like all trees, dipterocarps are so evolutionarily successfulâ€"there are so damn many of themâ€"that they almost defy scientific classification. Some 240 species of dipterocarp can coexist in an area the size of a sports field; one genus people from outside the ecosystem will recognize is Ficus, the fig tree, a popular houseplant.

Visitors to the field center are not allowed to head into the forest alone. It’s easy to lose your way and bump into danger in the form of snakes or orangutans; we stick to the boardwalks and trails linking the various buildings and the dock. One morning, I finally walk into the rainforest when I tag along with Elisa Panjang, one of Goossens’s graduate students and one of Borneo’s few pangolin (scaly anteater) researchers, to check on some wildlife cameras. Walking through the jungle must be done single file. The foliage is so thick, the sun pokes through the canopy only in small patches. Dead leaves form a brown deep-pile carpet and the air is heavy with moisture. Panjang and Roslee, a research assistant, carry parangs (machetes). The tread of gumboots and swish of quick-dry clothing accompany the occasional riff of a parang clearing the way.

Aerial photo of the Danau Girang Field Centre
The Danau Girang Field Centre is nestled within the Lower Kinabatangan Wildlife Sanctuary. Photo courtesy of Oliver Deppert

As we march along, I consider how much easier and more wondrous it would be to be a monkey here. To trudge is earthly. To vault from one tree to another, scamper along the canopy, and spy on the world from above would be transcendent.

Stark’s goal was to follow the proboscises’ movements, so she began placing GPS collars on monkeys in 2010, eventually tracking 10 and their extended familiesâ€"about 15 individuals per collared animal. All she had to do was wait for the data to beam from satellites to cellular towers and onto her computer. Stark’s research revealed that an average troop roves about 940 meters over the course of a day within an area smaller than a square kilometer, a relatively modest spatial need, and the monkeys are not especially territorial. Troop territories overlap, even those of so-called bachelor troops, which, oddly enough, are not always solely male; they’re known to accept a female or two into their ranks.

They’re easygoing creatures. Except when it comes to where they live. Stark’s research showed that proboscis monkeys need a forest canopy; nothing else will do.

A mere 15-minute hike from the riverbank, we emerge from the trees and enter a world the proboscis never will: a domesticated and regimented place, with row after row of stout, uniform trees devoid of understory. A palm oil plantation.

The DGFC lies within the Lower Kinabatangan Wildlife Sanctuary, a 270-square-kilometer patch of wild, a third of the size of New York City, New York. The sanctuary, however, is hemmed in by palm oil estates. In some parts, you only have to walk 300 meters from the river to enter an orderly plantation laid out in a grid like a city. Borneo has thousands of such plantations. The huge international market for palm oil is one reason the island has lost so many trees.


Pangolin researcher Elisa Panjang, right, and research assistant Roslee set up a wildlife camera in a palm oil plantation near the Danau Girang Field Centre. Video by Jude Isabella

Panjang checks on wildlife cameras she placed in the estate to record evidence of pangolins, or, as she calls them, “walking money.” Laborers may find it difficult to resist the temptation of poaching a pangolin trundling among palm oil trees or sleeping on a branch. A pangolin is worth around US $600 on the black market. Its meat may end up on a dinner plate at a private dinner in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah’s capital, and its scales in traditional Chinese medicine concoctions. Poachers also target proboscis monkeys to sell as pets or for their meat and bezoarsâ€"concretions formed in their digestive tracts, which are incorrectly considered medicinal.

An armed poacher with great aim can take down a proboscis, yet up in the sheltered canopy they’re beyond the reach of traps or snares, and they are consummate tree huggers. Proboscis monkeys, Stark learned, spend most of their daytime hours in the trees, presumably filling their potbellies. The dipterocarp canopy is particularly generous when it comes to nourishment.

Exactly what are they eating though?

The European explorers who set down in Borneo in the 19th century were, in keeping with the times, myopic researchers, more collectors than scientists, content to describe and count. So they dissected the monkeys’ brains or weighed their testes and at times declared truths based on few observations. Over a century ago, the Field Columbian Museum in Chicago, Illinois, mounted a taxidermic proboscis in a diorama where it was shown ravaging a woodpecker’s nest and tearing the bird to pieces.

The keen early observers knew that display was nonsense. They kept notes and reported proboscises eating shoots and the fruit of mangrove trees. Yet no one knew enough to keep a proboscis monkey captiveâ€"even the basics, like the right combination of foods, eluded early captors. The monkeys’ needs are complex, like their stomachs.

A proboscis potbelly is a multichambered stomach, sometimes accounting for 25 percent of the animal’s body weight. A chewed leaf lands in the proboscis’s foregut, a chamber full of cellulose-busting bacteria. From there it goes through a tube into another chamber, then empties into the small intestine. The process takes around 40 to 50 hours.

The Kinabatangan proboscis monkeys are also, so far, the only primate known to chew their cudâ€"they regurgitate a meal to chew it again, like cows. This finding was a bit of a science sensation in 2011 when reported by Ikki Matsuda, a Japanese researcher who, like Stark, was drawn to the mystery of the monkey.

Matsuda has studied proboscis monkeys living along the Kinabatangan Riverâ€"in Sukau, a village about two hours by boat downriver from the field centerâ€"since 2005, beginning as a young graduate student at Hokkaido University in Japan. Like Stark, he found his way to the proboscis through his country’s public broadcaster, Nippon Hoso Kyokai (NHK), when he watched a nature documentary.

“The TV program is saying this monkey is living in very swampy areas and their ecology is unknown,” Matsuda says over Skype, his short hair a spiky cap on his head, his eyes framed by black glasses. Now a primatologist at Chubu University in Japan, Matsuda was in his early 20s when he first watched the monkeys on the little screen and he too was intrigued: where do they go and what do they do in the forest all day?

Ikki Matsuda, Japanese primatologist
Ikki Matsuda is a Japanese primatologist who has studied proboscis monkeys since 2005. Photo courtesy of Ikki Matsuda

In 2005, Matsuda arrived in Sukau and went into the bush with a couple of research assistants and searched for a proboscis monkey troop. Matsuda and his colleagues identified and focused on a male and his harem, trailing the monkeys every day from morning until night for a month.

Finally, they habituated the group to their presence and could get close enough to regularly observe the monkeys’ daily routine in the forest. This troop had a big, dominant male, six females, and several other immature monkeys. The Japanese scientists named the monkeys after characters in the famous manga series Dragon Ball: Bejita, the dominant male, and Bulma and Chi-Chi, two of the six adult females, for example. Chi-Chi was one of Matsuda’s favorite monkeys.

She was something special, Matsuda says. Binoculars are great for studying behavior, but are not always helpful in the dense forest when trying to see exactly what the monkeys are eating. Chi-Chi was the first to allow the researchers to move closer. Eventually, the rest of the troop opened up, and Matsuda and his team could identify specific foods and which parts of the foods the monkeys preferred.

Feeding behavior, physiology, and spatial use of habitat tell researchers a lot about an animal’s needs. Given the data from the cooperative proboscis troop, Matsuda surmised that the monkeys needed 800 meters of forest on either side of the Kinabatangan River to comfortably survive. Another useful takeaway was that they like to chow down between 3:00 p.m. and 5:00 p.m., just before they hunker down for the night, giving them time to digest what turned out to be a hugely diverse diet: Chi-Chi and her family dined on 188 different species of plant. As for their fruit eating, the monkeys are primarily after the seeds, Matsuda and his team determined. The monkeys will eat both the flesh and the seeds of unripe fruit, but if they have to settle for ripe fruit, they leave the flesh and strictly go for the seeds: the sugars from ripe fruit can cause bloating and occasionally even death.

Questions answered invariably lead to more questions, and a peek at Chi-Chi and company’s eating habits led Matsuda and his colleagues to search for more detailed dataâ€"from inside the monkeys’ potbellies.

Those magical bellies are essential to dining so broadly in a dipterocarp forest. But there is a lingering suspicion that the monkeys first evolved to live in a mangrove forest.

Sonneratia trees dominate Borneo’s coastal mangroves. Their leaves are hard to digest and rich in tannin. “Proboscis monkeys are one of the only ones that can eat the stuff that’s in the mangroves,” Stark says. Their webbed fingers and toes are also handy in mangrove habitats, lending an ease to swimming and traipsing across mucky ground, where they’re less likely to be caught by a predator than in a dipterocarp forest.

But researchers also assume that as long as there’s a water sourceâ€"a river, lake, or swampâ€"proboscis monkeys will colonize an area. Nutritionally, a dipterocarp forest, even a disturbed one, is superior. A monkey in a mangrove forest has basic sustenance: the dutiful diet of a hospital cafeteria. In contrast, a monkey in riverine forest enjoys the kind of salubrious nutrition found in a hip vegan restaurant. We know this from the monkey’s microbiome.

Proboscis monkey in mangrove at low tide
Proboscis monkeys are well-adapted to live in mangrove habitats. Photo by Thomas Marent/Minden Pictures

The microbiome is a hot topic among proboscis monkey researchers. Matsuda, Stark, and others from Team Proboscis wanted to figure out the diets that promoted the most biotic diversity in the monkeys. So they collected the yet-to-be-digested contents of proboscis monkeys’ stomachs.

Six adult proboscises from different habitats provided the pre-gastric gunk. Two monkeys spent most of their time in a riverine forest, two dwelled in mangroves, one semi-free-range monkey lived in a mangrove surrounded by palm oil plantations, and one was captive.

The monkeys with the most species-rich microbiomes, more microbial diversity, and presumably healthier foreguts? Those that lived in the forest lining the Kinabatangan River. Their microbiomes had double the species of the other four microbiomes. The free-ranging mangrove dwellers had slightly more species richness than the other two monkeys, but mostly ate only Sonneratia caseolaris leaves and unripe fruit so had less overall microbial diversity. In contrast with the free-ranging mangrove monkeys, the captive monkey, held at a wildlife park near Kota Kinabalu, and the semi-free-range mangrove monkey ate foods with a greater variety of nutrients: sweet potatoes, ipil-ipil leaves, cucumbers, long beans, carrots, and sunflower seeds. And yet, though nutritionally sound, those two monkeys also shared microbiome species with humans, which includes potential human pathogens.

As with how Stark’s research revealed the parameters of a monkey’s home, the diet study drew a finer portrait of the proboscis and the depth of the impact of biodiverse ecosystems. Much like how converting the Amazon rainforest to agricultural lands limits the soil’s bacterial community, degrading the primate’s landscape limits the microbiota in its gut.

Expanding protected areas to include more biodiverse hotspots would be good for the proboscis monkeys. And recent research has shown the relationship is two way.


The purpose of such a big nose on the male proboscis monkey has been the subject of scientific conversation for over a century. Video by RMBolton/Pond5

Matsuda’s time with Chi-Chi’s family raised questions about how the monkeys might be spreading seeds. Were they seed predators or seed dispersers? Did a journey through the monkeys’ complicated guts kill the seeds or were they viable when pooped out?

So, a couple of grad students, Valentine Thiry and Oriana Bhasin, collected 201 fecal samples along 21 kilometers of the Kinabatangan River. They collected in the mornings from under the sleeping sites of various proboscis troops. They brought the samples back to the field centerâ€"from 77 percent of the proboscis poop, they collected 28,452 intact seeds, mostly of the species Nauclea orientalis (or bangkal, a tree that thrives in the soil around rivers). The students germinated those seeds and control seeds that never traveled through a monkey’s gut, from both ripe and unripe fruit.

They found that seeds traveling through a proboscis’s gut were much more likely to germinate than the other seeds. Also, seeds from unripe fruit were more likely to germinate than seeds from ripe fruit. So, given their use of habitat, proboscis monkeys were providing a service: they were dispersing intact seeds far from the parent plant to suitable riverine habitats.

Instead of a one-way relationshipâ€"the dipterocarp jungle giving life to the monkeysâ€"there is reciprocityâ€"or mutualism, in ecological terms. The trees and the monkeys benefit each other. If you’re restoring a forest, this is useful information. Plant bangkal, for example, and the monkeys will come and spread seeds for you.

Stark published her dissertation in 2018. When I ask her what surprised her most from her decade of studying proboscis monkeys, her answer is counterintuitive, the opposite of what most of conventional wisdom says about how reliant animals that live in old-growth forests are on the old growth itself.

“They actually do quite well in a disturbed forest, if they have enough forest,” Stark says. Old growth is not essential to the monkey’s well-being. “[A disturbed forest] has a lot of really young growth, which provides a lot of food. It’s really cool how they’re supposed to be super-specialized, but they seem to be able to make it as long as there’s forest.”

By 2010, Sabah had lost almost 40 percent of its old-growth forest, including trees up to 1,000 years old. Much of the forest along the Kinabatangan River is highly disturbed, with young trees resplendent with shiny new leaves that folivoresâ€"leaf eatersâ€"like the proboscis covet. Without monkeys dispersing seeds, forest regrowth could go in a different direction. A restored ecosystem isn’t the same as it was before, but if you have the original species around, they can help a lot. For conservationists, this is powerful knowledge. For instance, the reintroduction of wolves and beavers in Yellowstone National Park helped re-establish a diverse ecosystem. The life span of palm oil trees is about 30 years. Peak crop yield is nine to 18 years. If a plantation company hands the land back to the state, or even abandons it, the forest regrows quickly, especially with a little help, as the seed research showed.

The chances of a palm oil company willingly abandoning or handing over a plantation seem slim. Sometimes a firm nudge helps.

Lower Kinabatangan Wildlife Sanctuary and palm oil plantations
The Lower Kinabatangan Wildlife Sanctuary abuts palm oil plantations. Photo by Scubazoo

In 2014, Goossens noticed an estate alongside the wildlife sanctuary creeping beyond its borders. He contacted Sabah’s assistant minister of tourism at the time, Datuk Pang Yuk Ming. Pang had the boundary of the riparian reserve surveyed and found that about eight hectaresâ€"about eight sport fieldsâ€"of sanctuary had been converted to palm oil. The government had an excavator rip out about 400 illegally planted palm oil trees, and a nearby community ecotourism co-op, Kopel, replanted the area, which already boasts a canopy.

There’s another bit of good news. Drone footage taken by a researcher at DGFC in 2015 led to an important discoveryâ€"and to another government action. The imagery showed that almost 50 hectares of forest had been cleared from the sanctuary shortly before the drone flights. The logging had wiped out 30 percent of the home range of one of the troops Stark had followed via GPS collar. Drone images also showed that the felling extended down to the river’s edge, despite a law requiring riparian reserves of a minimum of 20 meters alongside rivers over three meters wide. A local landowner had logged reserved land with permission from a national government program that supported the rubber industry. The federal agency hadn’t consulted with the Sabah Wildlife Department.

Following this discovery, the field center sent out a press release with the aerial footage combined with Stark’s GPS data to show and explain this habitat destruction. Locals were outraged. The next day, the Sabah State Government ordered an immediate stop to further land clearing on sensitive areas along the river. Sabah’s decision was helped along by an emotional social media appeal, aided by the fact that there was already a regulation and proboscis monkeys had a proven economic value to ecotourism.

So what about that 800 meters on either side of a river that Matsuda identified as necessary habitat? Team Proboscis has not had luck convincing Sabah to change its riparian reserve law. “That’s obviously not enough,” Goossens says. To protect and expand the habitat, to give a voice to the voiceless flora and fauna, Goossens and his colleagues produced a 10-year action plan that the Sabah State Government approved last year. A buffer of 800 meters may be unrealistic, but Team Proboscis would be happy to begin with a minimum of 100 meters. Ultimately, the scientific data provided a starting point.

Once you’ve measured, you can manage more effectively. And conservation management is rarely about managing animals or plants, it’s mostly about managing people.

The air smells like black pepper. Four-beat callsâ€"ohwoo oo oo ooâ€"from crow pheasants lend a rhythmic line to our chatter in the boat. We’re back on the water for another primate survey.

A bachelor group of proboscises moves quickly from tree to tree, the macaques on their tails. Big, dominant proboscis males sit where they can watch over their female charges in the lower boughs. One male sits high up in the tree, looking down, it seems, at the primates looking up from the boat. We idle and listen. To non-jungle dwellers, proboscis sounds are a mash-up of the sounds of different animals: donkey brays, cat meows, bird whistles, pig snuffles, and human baby squawks.

How wonderful to see this magnificent creature in the flesh. The first published illustration of the proboscis was created in 1775 by a German naturalist, J. C. D. von Schreber, who probably never saw a proboscis, even a dead one. He likely read a French naturalist’s description of the animal. He drew a tall, muscular, hairy, confident, manlike bipedal creature sporting a furry muffler and a long, pointed nose.


Like their monkey cousins, proboscis monkeys are adept at traveling through the tree canopy. Video by RMBolton/Pond5

By the time a French naturalist bestowed the Latin name Nasalis larvatus, nasal mask, the locals had dubbed the monkey orang belanda, Malay for Dutchman: the potbelly and pointed nose reminding them of their white intruders. Figuring out the function of that paunch has been easy compared with understanding why the male needs so huge a honker.

Charles Hose, the English zoologist, wrote in 1893 that only proboscis monkeys of advanced age, males and females, have a big nose. Wrong. Over a century ago, naturalists argued over whether the nose was so big the male had to physically move it to eat. They figured it did. Again, wrong. “Their nose movement can be a bit hypnotizing when they’re eating,” Stark says. “It’s just flopping around.”

Of course, many a historical male naturalist explained the nose by intoning the old adage: big (insert nose, hands, or feet) = big (insert penis, dick, junk) = reproductive success. And, well, they were kind of right.

In a group of studies that took over 15 years, Matsuda and others on Team Proboscis found the best evidence yet to explain the big nose: the ladies like it. The bigger the male, the bigger the nose and the bigger the testes. And bigger testes correlates with higher sperm counts in primates. Smaller-nosed males take one look at a mega-schnozzle and they’ll stay awayâ€"they cannot compete.

The nose also calls a troop to attention. Big-nosed males can turn up the volume on their calls, making it easier to hear them in the dense rainforest. The ability to create a hullabaloo, apparently, makes a quality male.

Goossens waves to get everyone’s attention and points up toward a tree: a proboscis alarm call cuts through the chatter. The big male at the top of the tree sees danger: it’s a sound much like my friend’s cat made after it was hit by a car and couldn’t meow properly anymore, its cry catching midway in its throat. Although when Goossens imitates the cry it comes off sounding more like kahauâ€"the local name for the monkey.

When a kahau pierces the air, female proboscises and their offspring fling themselvesâ€"their arms extend out, legs back, bellies fully stretchedâ€"out. We slide past. A glance back reveals the male eyeing us. Goossens salutes him.

Remember: you asked for this.

[Dr. MD MD]

Remember: you asked for this.

More like begged...but I’m a fair man and happy to oblige.

[Dr. MD MD]

The Burning Problem of America’s Sugar Cane Growers
There’s a hidden cost to the way Florida’s farmers bring in the sugar crop. Just visit the hospitals and measure the climate impact.
By Paul Tullis
March 28, 2020, 7:00 AM EDT Updated on April 1, 2020, 11:39 AM EDT
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Driving west on Florida Route 98 from Palm Beach, the smoke is visible before the warning signs. Near the Lion Country Safari (“Florida’s only drive-through safari”), there are, far across a vividly-green expanse, dark gray clouds climbing into the sharp-blue sky. A minute later, by the roadside, comes the announcement, courtesy of the state transportation authority: “REDUCED VISIBILITY POSSIBLE.” If the immediate danger isn’t present, it’s nonetheless clear: You’re entering sugar country.

On the following November day, about 50 miles west, a John Deere tractor towing a water tank rumbles through a narrow dirt path between two cane fields, or “blocks,” as the sugar growers call them. Behind the tank, a man stands holding a fire-starting device called a driptorch. The tractor’s driver sprays water on the block to its left so it won’t igniteâ€"flowers have not yet formed at the tops of the stalks to indicate they are ready for harvestâ€"while the man in the rear sets fire to the one on the right. The driver covers his airways with a bandana; the firestarter has chosen not to.

South of Lake Okeechobee is home to the largest concentration of sugar plantations in the U.S. About 25% of the U.S. harvest is grown here, sold under brands including Domino and providing ingredients to food manufacturers and grocery chains. Florida’s sugar farmers burn fields to clear them of excess organic materialâ€"“trash,” in industry parlanceâ€"making harvesting more efficient. The leaves, containing virtually no sugar, go up in smoke, while the sucrose-laden stalks, being about 72% water, don’t. Studies in Mexico have demonstrated that constituents of the smoke from burned sugar cane include black carbon, which has powerful global warming effects, as well as dangerous particulate matter and potential carcinogens, including benzo[a]pyrene. Some residents of Florida sugar country see a link between what seems like a lot of kids using inhalers and the October-to-May harvest season.

A sugar cane field burns like the guy in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises went broke: gradually, then suddenly. Flame is touched to the drier stalks near the ground, and within seconds crackling can be heard as the water inside them warms to a boil, forming bubbles that then pop. The popping grows louder and more frequent as the fire spreads. The flames, reaching 30 to 40 feet, gather a roaring wind as they suck in oxygen to feed themselves. The smoke is so dense in places as to be opaque. Undeterred, egrets accumulate near the block’s edge to ambush fleeing insects. After several minutes, the fire is over, and the block is now “clean.” If all goes according to plan, the smoke rises high above the cane stalks and dissipates quickly. Sometimes, though, it lingers at ground level, thick enough that if you drove your car into it, you’d be blinded. Here, the smoke has drifted south and all is quiet again.

relates to The Burning Problem of America’s Sugar Cane Growers
Ardis and Alan Hammock on their property in Clewiston, Florida.
Photographer: Sofia Valiente for Bloomberg Green
“You burn so the trash doesn’t go to the mill,” says Alan Hammock. He’s been working for 46 years on land his uncle began to till more than a century ago. He and his wife, Ardis, own 700 acres.

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“Whatever leaf material gets to the mill is deducted from the total you sent in,” Alan says. If he delivers 100 pounds and 10 pounds of it is leaf, he only gets paid for 90 pounds. He takes a look at the results and pronounces today’s burn “picture perfect.”

Alan grabs a rusty cane knife and chops a stalk from a block belonging to a neighbor. Peeling away the skin to reveal the sugar-laden fiber, he pops a chunk in his mouth. “Man!” he exclaims. “These people’s making some money right here!”

No doubt about that: Florida companies turned cane from farmers such as the Hammocks into $630 million worth of sugar in 2017. Their economic impact is $3 billion, according to agribusiness market intelligence firm LMC International, and they support more than 12,000 jobs. That year, Florida’s Forest Service, which regulates agricultural burning, received more than 11,000 applications for permits to burn sugar fields, according to a document obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. More than 95% were approved.

Driving back to the Hammocks’ home, Alan says, “If I thought we were being detrimental to the community or the atmosphere, I wouldn’t be in [cane farming].” He peers up. “It looks like blue skies to me. A little bit of smoke and ash is just gone in no time.” Ardis points to the house where her grandchildren live, circled on three sides by cane. “Why would I put my children in harm’s way knowing that was going to affect their health?”

relates to The Burning Problem of America’s Sugar Cane Growers
A controlled burn in Clewiston, Florida.
Photographer: Sofia Valiente for Bloomberg Green
The smoke contains a lot of chemicals that linger, though. Sugarcane burning is estimated to contribute more than half of Palm Beach County’s total emissions for 15 hazardous air pollutants. From 2003 to 2007, 17% of the contiguous United States’ crop-burning emissions of carbon dioxide, 10% of the methane and 15% of 2.5-micron particulate matter occurred in Florida. (Carbon dioxide and methane are greenhouse gases. Particulate matter-2.5 is an ingredient in smog that closely correlates with increased mortality.)

Dozens of scientific studies have purported to show harm or risk to the health of those who live near sugarcane fields in Brazil, Mexico, Hawaii, Louisiana and elsewhere, and concluded that eliminating the practice led to improved health outcomes.

Cane fields run up to the property lines of homes, schools, stores and businesses throughout Clewiston, Belle Glade, South Bay and Pahokee, small towns that hug the shore of Lake Okeechobee and are home to many industry workers. Children at Rosenwald Elementary, which borders a sugar field, were sent to the hospital at least once in 2008 after smoke from a bordering block didn’t dissipate as anticipated; they and students at other schools, residents say, often visit the school nurse to use a breathing machine. (Florida’s Department of Health, which administers nurses in the state’s public schools, did not respond to repeated requests for an interview with a nurse in the Glades area.)

relates to The Burning Problem of America’s Sugar Cane Growers
Alan Hammock points out their family’s tract of land on an old drainage map.
Photographer: Sofia Valiente for Bloomberg Green
“It was normal to us growing up,” says Kina Phillips, an anti-burn activist whose child attended Rosenwald and who lives nearby. “‘Kinaâ€"go get your inhaler and go play.’ Why? Why should our schools be so filled with inhalers?” A woman who says she has lived in the area for 23 years and had a child in February 2019, told lawyers that in April her son was diagnosed with asthma. “He’s suffering from wheezing, breathing problems,” she says. “I just wish they could really stop the burning because my child is suffering.” (Bloomberg was unable to independently verify her statement.)

Shanique Scott, the former mayor of South Bay, owns a kids’ dance studio in town. “Just in the past month, three of my kids have been out because they’re dealing with asthma problemsâ€"their parents taking them to the doctor for respiratory problems flaring up because it’s the [burning] season,” she said in November.

Five years ago, when she was the mayor, Scott tried to get city commissioners to do something about the burning, but they declined to join her in speaking out. Frustrated, she called the Sierra Club and asked for help. Later that year, the group launched a “Stop the Burn” campaign in the area. It hasn’t been able to attract more than a few dozen residents to become active in it, but in 2018, attorneys filed a class-action lawsuit against nine sugar growers and harvesters, calling for compensatory damages, medical monitoring of the plaintiffs and an injunction against further burning. If the judge approves class-action status, some 28,000 residents could be represented. The defendants have filed a motion to dismiss the suit; the judge has not set a date for a hearing. “The companies believe the lawsuit is without merit,” Ryan Weston, CEO of the Sugar Cane League, which represents the three largest growers and processors in Florida, wrote in an email. (Florida Crystals and the other named defendants declined to make any employees available for an interview; a U.S. Sugar spokeswoman answered questions via email.)

relates to The Burning Problem of America’s Sugar Cane Growers
Harvested cane is loaded into train cars to be transported to the mill in Clewiston, Florida.
Photographer: Sofia Valiente for Bloomberg Green
The lawyers and activists such as Scott maintain they aren’t trying to put the industry out of business, just to get it to change its practices. There is an alternative to burning, and Florida sugar growers are already doing itâ€"at least in a few fields. Known as green harvesting, mechanical harvesters collect the trash, which can be sold for fuel pellets or to generate electricity, or it’s left in the fields.

The fields bordering the Walmart in Clewiston are harvested green to prevent smoke from bothering the customers in the parking lot, according to the guide of a tour of the area organized by the Clewiston Chamber of Commerce. (Judy Sanchez, senior director of corporate communications and public affairs for U.S. Sugar, said these fields are “harvested via controlled pre-harvest burn techniques whenever the conditions meet the requirements for obtaining a permit.”)

Legions of farmers abroad have switched to green harvesting. Mills that account for 63% of the annual harvest in Brazil agreed in 2007 to phase out cane burning within a decade, and carbon dioxide emissions dropped by almost 10 million tons. Most of Australia’s $1.37 billion industry no longer burns. Thailand announced in August that it would end burning within three years out of concern for the smog in cane-producing provinces.

But Florida’s sugar industry insists green harvesting wouldn’t work in its “muck” soils, made up of decayed organic matter from when the cane fields were swampland. Regions overseas that are moving away from burning, Ardis Hammock tells me, “don’t have the same soil types we do. If you leave dense plant matter on the rows, it blankets over the shoot. Trying to sprout with a blanket of trash on top, it’s the perfect scenario for funguses.”

relates to The Burning Problem of America’s Sugar Cane Growers
The Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences research facility in Belle Glade.
Photographer: Sofia Valiente for Bloomberg Green
But years-long experiments led by researchers at the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences have shown that the shoots fight through the trash and grow to produce about as many tons of sugar as in cane fields that have been burned. Other research has confirmed this, and Andrew Wood, an Australian expert in green harvesting, studied Florida’s industry and concluded that green harvesting would result in higher profits for the industry, despite the unique soil.

Even so, switching all 400,000 acres of Florida sugar to green harvesting would be a major expense: Additional harvesters would be required to handle the extra material, along with more wagons to carry it off, more workers to operate the additional equipment and more fuel to run it all. All this, plus the trucks rolling through town to haul off the trash that isn’t left in the field, would mean more diesel pollution in the four towns. Ardis Hammock and the director of IFAS, Gregg Nuessly, questioned whether there is a market for converting the trash into paper and packaging, though the managing director of Emerald Brand, which makes plant-based paper and plastic products, Ralph Bianculli, Jr., says, “We could probably use this material.”

Sugar wields plenty of power in Florida, and there’s little incentive to change. The industry gave more than $8 million to political candidates in the 2016 election cycle. Growers are convinced that their work benefits the area. “We haven’t seen any facts that would make us want to change our mind,” about burning, says Miller Couse, chairman of the board of First Bank in Clewiston, which provides agribusiness loans in the region.

relates to The Burning Problem of America’s Sugar Cane Growers
Steve Messam, a resident of Belle Glade, says his family’s respiratory ailments ease when they spend time outside the area. 
Photographer: Sofia Valiente for Bloomberg Green
Whether residents believe that cane burning harms the health of the surrounding communities seems to depend on where they live and on the color of their skin. Clewiston is majority white; South Bay, Belle Glade and Pahokee are majority black.

All the white Clewiston residents and community leaders I meet during five days I stayed in town tell me they don’t know anyone who has asthma. The mayor, Mali Gardner, tells me about how her mother is 91, her aunt 88, and her dad passed at 93.

Couse and industry representatives point to data showing favorable air quality in the Glades. But Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection operates just one monitor in the region, in Belle Glade, which collects data on just one pollutant, PM2.5. (Not, for example, on such polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons as benzo(a)pyrene, which have been found at levels 15 times higher during the burn season as in the summer.) The device is a “non-regulatory” monitor, meaning it has not been approved by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to determine compliance with national ambient air-quality standards. The data it reports average out pollution over a time frame too broad to pick-up short-term spikesâ€"such as field burns. The industry pays for additional monitors to ensure compliance with regulatory standards. Maps of areas that may be impacted by smoke, which the Forest Service produces daily, indicate smoke can travel up to 26 miles.

I met only one black person who wasn’t convinced that sugarcane burning is poisoning the Glades communities. Eric Green, assistant coach of the Clewiston High School football team, says that in five years, he has supervised only one player who needed an inhaler.

Steve Messam has had a different experience. “Growing up here, I always breathed heavy as a child,” he says. Returning from college in Michigan over Christmas break as a freshman, he noticed he felt worse. Years later, he lived with his wife and son east of the Glades, but when they moved to Belle Glade, Messam says, his son started having trouble breathing (though he has not been diagnosed with asthma). Messam’s wife, who, like him, is black, started experiencing upper respiratory tract infections. When they go to Orlando on vacation, or to Jamaica to visit family, the problems disappear.

The divide between the anti-burning camp and supporters of the status quo seems to be so sharp that Couse tells me, “I don’t know of any local opposition. I don’t know any local people raising any fuss about the burning of cane.”

relates to The Burning Problem of America’s Sugar Cane Growers
Past campaign buttons made by Ardis Hammock.
Photographer: Sofia Valiente for Bloomberg Green
This has perhaps contributed to the widespread belief that the opposition to burning is led by people from outside the Glades communities. Still, the Sierra Club says its involvement didn’t begin until Scott called. And Matthew Moore, the Berman Law Group attorney heading the class-action suit, tells me his firm became interested in the issue only after hiring Joe Abruzzo, a former state senator who represented the area.

Whether you are bothered by smoke also depends on where you live. Household income in Pahokee, Belle Glade and South Bay is about half Florida’s median, and its unemployment rate is higher. Wealthier, whiter communities east of the Everglades Agricultural Area don’t experience burning anymore: In the 1990s, residents in eastern Palm Beach County complained, and now the state won’t issue burn permits when the weather forecasts that wind will blow toward their homes. (In some cases, with special authorization, it is allowed.)

“The more affluential folks started complaining about it, and they gave them the courtesy. They won’t burn,” says Messam. “But they won’t give us, who live in the middle of these fields, the same courtesy.” The area with the fewest restrictions on burning includes all four Glades towns. “They’re not allowed to burn when it’s going into civilized areas,” is how the former mayor of Pahokee, J.P Sasser, sarcastically puts it.

The zone map system for permits seems to implicitly acknowledge that smoke is dangerous, or at least bothersome, and rule changes in October instituted a buffer zone between sugar burns and wildlands. Florida’s Department of Health recommended in 2013 that schools and daycare centers near busy roadways limit children’s exposure to air pollution.

Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services Commissioner Nikki Fried says in an interview that “one of the things we’re taking into consideration” during a second phase of changes, to be rolled out in 2020, is redrawing the zone map that allows burn permits to be issued only when wind is blowing toward the lower-income, majority-black communities and Clewiston. Forest Service Director Jim Karels echoes those in the industry who continually tell me that, the permit zone map notwithstanding, wind speed, direction and other factors are always taken into account when burn permits are issued. But as anyone who has ever been caught without an umbrella can tell you, forecasts often miss the mark.

relates to The Burning Problem of America’s Sugar Cane Growers
A painting and novelty machetes decorate the Hammock residence. They have been razing cane since before the mechanization of sugarcane harvesting.
Photographer: Sofia Valiente for Bloomberg Green
The experience of Clewiston’s white residentsâ€"and the other cities’ black residentsâ€"are anecdotal. They don’t constitute meaningful data. Florida’s Department of Health tracks measures such as asthma hospitalizations; Palm Beach County as a whole, which encompasses both Belle Glade and Mar-a-Lago, ranks fifth in the state for the rate of asthma hospitalizationsâ€"ahead of Broward and Miami-Dade, which have both more poverty and more traffic, two predictors of asthma in an area.

But another predictor of asthma is whether or not you are black. Tending to have less access to health care, more likely to be poor than whites and more likely to face exposure to environmental toxins, black Americans have higher rates of asthma andâ€"even controlling for socioeconomic factorsâ€"they are more difficult to treat. Could the exposure of Glades residents to cane burning  fundamentally reflect their genetic makeup and socioeconomic status?

Matthew Moore, the attorney leading the class-action suit, says he will present to the court data showing 2.5 times higher rates of hospitalizations for pulmonary issues in zip codes where burning occurs, compared with the rest of Florida. The hospitalization figure is a crude measure: Some people might seek treatment at a doctor’s office, or not at all, meaning the prevalence of the disease could be more widespread than public health data is picking up. Dr. Sally Wenzel, director of the Asthma Institute at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, says that “The only way to answer the question” as to whether sugarcane burning is the direct cause of the respiratory issues that residents experience “is with a better level of granularityâ€"to do a person-based study, as opposed to a population-based study” such as the ones published so far.

relates to The Burning Problem of America’s Sugar Cane Growers
An alligator swims through an irrigation ditch while smoke rises from a controlled burn outside of the sugar mill in Belle Glade.
Photographer: Sofia Valiente for Bloomberg Green
Those studies are expensive, though. This is an area with little air quality monitoring, low household income, and a high proportion of minority residents. Who would pay for it? The sugar companies earn hundreds of millions in annual revenue and receive $1.2 billion in annual subsidies from the federal government to prop up prices. But why would it want to invest in what could be bad news? In any case, funding from an entity with so clear an interest in the findings could bias the results.

“People take it as just, this is what it is down here,” says Steve Messam. “It’s part of the daily grind.” But Messam is a pastor and a life coachâ€"he’s passionate and he has a vision for the Glades that includes residents earning good wages by producing environmentally friendly disposable products from cane trash. “My dad cut cane for 75 cents a row, by hand,” he says. “Now we’ve progressed. Why use these archaic methods? I just want them to be good neighbors.”

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