This is Origin Stories, the Leaky Foundation podcast.

I'm Meredith Johnson.

On today's episode, you'll meet a Leaky Foundation grantee who'll share what it's like to study an endangered species, while at the same time working to help them survive.

Okay, you sound great. Okay. Can you tell me your name? I'm Dr. Zerine Machanda. I'm a professor at Tufts University.

Zerine Machanda is also co-director of a long-term chimpanzee research study called the Kibali Chimpanzee

Project. The study site is located within the Kibali National Park in Uganda. It's a 306 square

mile forest about the size of New York City. This forest is home to an estimated 1,200 chimpanzees.

The Kibali Chimpanzee project is focused on a community of about 50 to 60 chimps that live in the northwestern section of the forest. The project was started in

1987 by primatologist and Leakey Foundation grantee Richard Wrangham. Project members have collected data continuously

on these chimps every day for more than 30 years. Serena Chanda is the director in charge of that

data. One of the things that you're tasked with when you study an endangered species,

it's trying to archive the lives of these animals that have a

pretty high likelihood of going extinct, potentially in your lifetime. And so that this data

may be the only record of that species in the future. And so you really have to think,

what is, how do we get everything? How do we collect almost everything we can about this animal before we lose it?

And I feel very privileged and lucky to work with such an incredible data set.

In addition to managing the long-term data at Kibali,

Zareen is a field primatologist.

One of her main interests is understanding how and why chimpanzees form social bonds.

She's been interested in chimps since she was about five years old when she saw a TV documentary

about chimps in the U.S. space program.

In the documentary, I remember they interviewed John Glenn and they interviewed Jane Goodall.

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