Wildlife and Nature Protection Society monthly lecture on Thursday

The latest Wildlife and Nature Protection Society monthly lecture will be held on 21 January at 6 p.m. at the Met department Auditorium, Bauddhaloka Mawatha, Colombo 7.

The title of the January lecture is ‘Monkey Kingdom – Primate social evolution and conservation’.

It will be delivered by Dr. Wolfgang Dittus. From 1968 to 2016, Dr. Dittus has conducted primate research on the Macaques of Sri Lanka mainly in the Polonnaruwa region. This constitutes one of the longest continuous studies of wild primates in the world and almost matches in time Jane Goodall’s study of the chimpanzees of Africa. During the course of this research he was the first to establish a life-table for wild primates and linked social behaviour to rates of survival and reproductive success. He also unveiled semantic communication in the vocal signals of macaques.

Dr. Dittus’s current positions illustrate the weight of his academic learning and repute. He is currently Research Associate, Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, USA (SCBI), Senior Visiting Scientist, National Institute of Fundamental Studies (NIFS), Director, Primate Biology Program, Sri Lanka (SI-PBP) and Chair, Association for the Conservation of Primate Diversity (ACPD).

Dr. Dittus truly lives up to his guiding principle for scientific research and conservation, that being “People will conserve only what they love, and will love only what they know and understand, and will understand only what they are taught.”

The Society said Sri Lankan primates are a unique national heritage and global biological treasure that is critically threatened by the absence of political courage for meaningful conservation.

The valuable conservation work and research carried out by Dr. Wolfgang Dittus and his team on Sri Lanka’s primates, have been the inspiration behind the internationally acclaimed documentary ‘The Monkey Kingdom’ which was produced by Disney and played recently in several of the major movie theatres in Sri Lanka.

The common ancestry of monkeys and humans is evident today in shared patterns of social behaviour that relate for example to the selection of mates, gender differences in anatomy and behaviour and parenting styles. But the human lineage diverged from that of monkeys as seen for example in the distribution of body fat and its significance in spurring evolution to human dominance of global landscapes.