This week, as our Human Nature series continues, we’re sharing two stories from scientists whose experiences in the field changed their perspectives.
Part 1: As a young ecologist in Brazil's Mata Atlântica rainforest, Lauren Eckert struggles to find the monkeys she’s looking for.
Lauren Eckert is a settler and Conservation Scientist currently based in Powell River, BC (Tla'amin and Coast Salish territory). She is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Victoria, a Raincoast Conservation Fellow, Vanier Scholar, National Geographic Explorer, peanut butter aficionada, and adventure enthusiast.
Part 2: As a marine biologist, Dyhia Belhabib was trained to view fishers as predators, but then she makes an unexpected connection at the port of Bejaia.
Dr. Dyhia Belhabib is a Principal Investigator of Fisheries at Ecotrust Canada, Vancouver, and the Founder of Spyglass.fish. Her work integrates notions of adjacency, fairness, and accountability relating to the global oceans and fisheries, databases on sea crimes and their impacts on small-scale communities in the world, and engagement with stakeholders to implement research findings in policy. She is a two times TEDxer, and is the Chief Scientific Officer at Shackleton Research Trusts meant to empower under-represented students of Science. Mobilizing interdisciplinary research, she combines a complexion of expertise and disciplines, and ‘hard data’ with nuanced understanding of the economic and political landscapes of the countries she works on. Follow Dyhia on Twitter and Instagram.
Part 1: Lauren Eckert
I found myself in Brazil's Mata Atlântica rainforest during the summer of 2013. At the time, I was an overly keen 21-year-old researcher pursuing a career in ecology. I was also dazzled by the dense canopy of green that made up a rainforest more ancient than the Amazon and, unfortunately, much more fragmented.
Lauren Eckert is a settler and Conservation Scientist currently based in Powell River, BC (Tla'amin and Coast Salish territory).
Brazil's Mata Atlântica rainforest. Photo by Lauren Eckert.
In the rainforest I was interned with a team of awesome Brazilian scientists studying northern muriqui monkeys, and was stumbling through both my subpar Portuguese and through dense, ever wet, mountainous forest paths.
Muriquis are oft lovingly referred to as hippie monkeys. They are captivating, adorable as well as critically endangered. Their social structure is egalitarian and they frequently engage in these impossibly cute, full-frontal hugs as a social stress relief tactics.
Our team was tasked with tracking, counting, observing and photographing the monkeys to better understand them and to benefit local conservation goals.
That summer in the rainforest was a time in my life when I was almost entirely motivated by the quantifiable. I was certain that environmental crises that we all face could be overcome with more data. I was also certain that counting, particularly the calories I was personally consuming and expending, was the answer to my own struggles with self‑love and self‑worth.
This obsession with the quantifiable took tons of really destructive forms. Each morning, even in that remote field station in the rainforest, I would obsessively chart my 800 calories for the day. I knew exactly the carbohydrates, proteins and fats in each tiny bite of measured food.
I'm not sure where this total obsession with counting began, but my guess is somewhere at the messy interface of internalized misogyny, a whirling lack of control over my life and a glaring lack of self-love.
I am, however, sure that those meager portions of carefully counted black beans alongside my skeletal frame and dangerously low body fat percentage made the 10 to 20 kilometers that we hiked each day more dangerous and more miserable.
While still in those dark grips of that counting obsession and disordered eating, my horrible health was completely invisible to me. When I first pictured my time in the rainforest, I expected to be overwhelmed by what we scientists sometimes like to call charismatic megafauna, large mammals that are cute enough to be the darlings of conservation efforts. I thought I would be surrounded by these golden-furred, spindly-limbed muriquis every day, providing data and photographs that would immediately help their plight.
But many days into my time in the rainforest, we hadn't even seen the monkeys, much less collected data to save them. Each morning, as we crossed now familiar streams and foggy forest mountains, I had a little bit of hope that we would find the monkeys. Each evening, we returned down the slopes back to the research station, heavy, tired and downtrodden for cold showers and dinner of rice, black beans and these delicious, really thinly-sliced collard greens. I avoided the warm white rice as if it were the root of all earthly sin.
Each day we awoke for another trek, I found it harder to keep my spirits and always-lacking energy up as I tripped and stumbled and bounded in frustration behind the very graceful team of scientists who had spent many more years in the forest than I.
One typical we-probably-won't-find-the-monkeys-today morning, gearing up for our hike, I'm greeted by a cheerful new friend and local station employee, São João. João was this infectiously cheerful and burly middle-aged man with a prominent silvery mustache and kind eyes. He arrived with a fresh bag of homegrown and home-roasted coffee beans and a confidence that he could assist us in finding the muriquis.
Although both the coffee and hope were welcome, I'm skeptical that we'll be successful with the latter. My skepticism arose from João's credentials. João's ecological training was totally different from my own. He had grown up in the rapidly changing Mata Atlântica and his wealth of knowledge stem not from scientific degrees but from continuous experience in one place, his home.
My training in academia left me wary of such knowledge. His sure steps led us quickly over those familiar streams, through rows of young trees that were covered in these bright circles of green and red mosses. I'm stumbling along with moderated expectations and distracted already by routine hunger, cold and tired as we bound up yet another hill.
As we move through the final layer of pre-dawn fog and crests the hill, João slows his pace and grabs his binoculars. “Olhe!” João said ‘look’ in Portuguese with a giant smile.
I follow his gaze with sudden newfound anticipation in my stomach and thoughts of food and calories and exhaustion suddenly melted away. That first sight of the monkeys even from afar took my breath away. These gangly-limbed magical creatures, this is why I am here, why I was hiking, what I so profoundly care about.
João has a hearty knowing chuckle at my simultaneous elation and disbelief at an animal he has known his whole life. In that first of many exposures to the monkeys, I watch them bound through the treetops and shout my astonishment at every particularly daring leap between branches. In that moment, critical lessons begin crystallizing for me.
Lauren’s photos of the Muriquis she was tracking.
My first realization is this. Oh, shit, western science isn't the panacea I thought it was. It is certainly not the only, nor the best way of knowing in a world filled with incredible biodiversity and equally diverse brilliant humans engaging in constant, thoughtful observation. Other ways of knowing far beyond counting, quantifying are of course complex. They're accurate. They're valuable on their own account. And in the case of indigenous knowledge set in millennia of ecosystem management, this realization, though, much of the world was way ahead of me on this one, particularly indigenous nations leaders and scholars was nonetheless so transformative and would lead me down the pathway to a totally new type of conservation, one that considers obviously critical things, like social equity, decolonization and more in these ever-changing human and ecosystem landscapes.
But there was an even more profound way that walk in the rainforest began to transform me. As I watched the monkeys bound from our vantage point, a transformation begins that would eventually literally save me and put many recent events in a clearer light. That makes sense of the fact that a month before my time in the rainforest, my kind, caring and ever-distraught mother had paid $90 in shipping fees to send this huge jar of Skippy peanut butter to Brazil from the U.S. Natural peanut butter was one of the only calorically dense foods I found acceptable and approved at the time.
It also reframed the experience, the recent experience when I was too downtrodden and tired to go looking for the monkeys when Dona Maria, the station caretaker, had stopped me mid-P90x workout to ask very perplexed and a little worried if I wanted to be a clothing model. At the time, I wrote her remarks off as a matter of cultural misunderstanding. Dona Maria must not be familiar with the craze of fitness media and online cardio workouts.
What I began to see as I realized João's way of knowing and my own follies was that I was a shadow of myself, starving, miserable, small, skeletal, sick.
When I first found myself at home in the Mata Atlântica rainforest that unusually cold June, I was obsessed with counting calories, grade point averages, monkeys and a local population. I was certain we could save the world and I could save myself through counting, calculating and extrapolating our way out of oblivion.
I was certain we could save the world and I could save myself through counting, calculating, extrapolating our way out of oblivion. On both counts, I was wrong. An average apple holds within its sweet fleshy being about 80 kilocalories of energy, 4 grams of soluble fiber, 20 grams of carbohydrates, but unlocking these quantitative measurements, while super useful, does not knowledge of the whole apple make. These measurements sterilize the miracle of the apple that its fleshy interior is sun spun into food that will give you energy for all the cliché and wonderful things: laughing, loving, writing and dancing. Nor does this account for the apple's life history. Was it mass-produced? Plucked from a branch of a tree? Planted by a grandparent decades ago?
In making the apple only a caloric unit and my body only a fat-saving or fat-losing machine, I had denied myself the glory of an apple, the relationship with the fruit that humans have been eating, planting, stewarding, changing for thousands of years.
Fewer than 1,000 northern muriqui monkeys are alive in the Mata Atlântica and on our planet today. While western scientific understanding, quantitative measurements of their species is critical to their survival, this data alone won't be enough to save them. Perhaps we start on that path instead by recognizing just how much we have to learn. Perhaps we start by following, stumbling, shouting our joy at the leaping grace of an endangered golden monkey or reveling in our sun-made food fruit.
Part 2: Dyhia Belhabib
I'm a marine biologist but I'm not a fan of Jacques Cousteau. And like many marine biologists, or whatever I can call myself these days, let's just say multidisciplinary ocean researcher.
Dyhia Belhabib is a Principal Investigator of Fisheries at Ecotrust Canada, Vancouver, and the Founder of Spyglass.fish.
I did not come to this field because I was inspired by a tuna or a sad-faced dolphin shown in an inspiring documentary with nice and dramatic music. I am sure he was a revolutionary diver but I grew up in a country where they only showed his documentaries to mourn the death or the massacre of dozens of people. See, during my childhood in Algeria, the national television would cut all entertainment programs and replace them with documentaries all day long to show mourning. And since we were living in a terrorist era, we had a lot of that. So whenever Cousteau was on TV, the first thing that came to my mind was, “Who died?”
It's still the case today. I cannot watch a Cousteau documentary without entertaining those ironically same feelings. I don't even know how to swim and, yet, because I grew up in a very challenging context for women where I was and my fellow women expected to be medical doctors or teachers or housewives only and our choices were very limited, I decided to challenge that by enrolling in a more fun program.
So going on a boat, diving without knowing how to swim, it was really fun. And I learned to love it just like a forced marriage sometimes. But what I loved was sampling fish, calculating their age, knowing how much fish were left in the water, what typically marine biologists would do.
I was trained to think that fishers were predators wanting to extract as many fish as possible, emptying the waters driven by greed and money. I had this very evilish image of fishermen. To me then, the ecosystem was all about the ocean without the fishermen.
So with that mindset, I show up to the port of Bejaia, which is a coastal town nearly 200 kilometers from the capital of Algeria, Algiers, to do my field work. The first thing that greets you when you get there is the smell, the smell of low tide. You know? That smell is usually very sweet. It's nice. Well, I like it. But imagine it ten times more intense. It becomes putrid.
As I walk closer to the water, I see it black. It's far from the vintage image that I had of ports but I'm still very pleased to see that beautiful mix between old Ottoman and Roman ruins adjacent to the port. It was beautiful. God, I always have butterflies in my stomach whenever I remember that view.
It's not the first time for me at that port. I had started the sampling of the very expensive royal shrimp days before. It's funny because fishermen probably feel good and satisfied and proud peeing on something royal. Fisherman peeing on shrimp is also a vintage image of the port of Bejaia. I'm told they do that because it's the cheapest way for them to keep the nice and red color of the shrimp. Probably the most environmentally-friendly way as well.
My student job here is to wait for the shrimp boats to come in and go beg for a sample and interview vessel captains. There is this one vessel in particular that the port authority was very happy and always proud to show me when I started my field work. It's a trawler. So basically it's a boat that drags a net on the seafloor to take shrimp and other fish. In fact, it just takes everything on its way while flattening the seafloor. It is not the most sustainable gear, if you ask me.
So that boat is not port that day and I can always recognize it easily because it is huge and nice and shiny and all new. It was really big. The captain also made a mark because he always would hit on me, likely the only female student ever to go to that port and do any research work there. We were only ten fisheries engineers that year in the whole country. Five of us were women and I had to experience that. I mean, dude, it's not romantic.
I tried friend zoning him but it didn't work. I still feel the disgusting feeling. So it's not gratifying to undergo such a behavior while doing field work, but that isn't the only issue. This captain, Yazid, really comes off as greedy. In his many attempts to convince me to marry him, he often mentions his apartment he bought in Spain and that in three or four years he, a 27-year-old, will be so rich he will retire from fishing after making the most of it, and he is making the most of it today.
That often strikes a nerve. It made me angry. And I always keep quiet because I want my sample. Also, it was really intimidating for me. I'm a 20-year-old woman dressed like the young version of Britney Spears aspiring to Lara Croft, surrounded by men, big boats and lacking, very much lacking confidence.
I usually am only interested in shrimp fishers because I'm a marine biologist and I need to know absolutely everything about the age of shrimp and how they reproduce. I guess I'm one of those people who are really into shrimp porn.
Whenever I go to port, the trawlers are there so I just need to go on board, ask for my sample, do my interview in a very busy and intimidating setting, smile and nod at the captain hitting on me and just leave. But today there are no trawlers here yet. I can see the big, shiny one, Yazid-operated fishing not far from the coast but it's not back yet and I need to kill the time.
So I start walking aimlessly through the beautiful blue nets taking pictures with my old clap phone, and I know those pictures are never going to make it to my computer, then I see this old fisherman. I'm assuming he's a fisherman because he's repairing his nets. He's just sitting there on a little stool knitting.
He has this rusty blue jean jacket. His face has the traces of hard work and a heavy exposure to sunlight. He's alone, I'm alone, so I'm thinking I'm just going to talk to him. Little do I know that that conversation would change my future and my perception of my own past.
I say salaam to greet the fisherman, which means peace be upon you. He looks at me with what I'm thinking is a judgmental smile maybe, but I later figured that it is a sad smile of one that is worried. He does not seem surprised to see me but he asked what I was doing there.
And as I'm explaining, I ask him if I could interview him. I'm going rogue here. He does not fish for shrimp but for sharks that live on the bottom of the sea and other species and I was only supposed to interview trawl captains along the lines of those rigid sampling methods that we love so much in science.
My questions are designed to be very simple. What do you fish for? How many times do you go out at sea? How much fish do you catch? Translating in economic terms into how much money do you make?
He pauses from talking for a second as he was answering my questions while he was still knitting, and as he's talking about all the sharks, he looks up towards the sea and points with his needle to that one shiny big boat and says, “Do you see that boat? Do you see how close it is? It's not supposed to be there. He takes all the fish away. I caught nothing.”
That question I asked with not much sensitivity and somewhere from my high horse as I was just getting comfortable is actually a hit in the heart. At that moment, I see tears in his eyes and his tone went from anger to a mix of sadness, frustration, hopelessness.
“They pay the navy and I'm going home tonight to my kids empty-handed.”
I am from a culture where we do not see men cry a lot. He cried. He was vulnerable. He exposed me to the human side of the ocean and, for the first time, I saw a divide between greed and identity, culture, necessity in fishing.
That day, those tears that fisherman whose name I have not asked made me go back to my supervisor and tell her… and there's a nuance here. I haven't asked for permission. I told her that I was going to work on the bioeconomics of the fishery instead.
I was not going really towards it like a scientific breakthrough or anything like that, although you probably learned something from the fisherman peeing on the shrimp, but I decided I did not want to count fish and calculate their age anymore. And I'm sure there is much more to it as a marine biologist. But I wanted to focus on the people. I was really interested in the people. I was moved by his emotions and quite drastically so.
Why would the trawler fish so close when it was not supposed to? Why would this fisherman not be protected by existing laws that were ill-implemented? How can he make a decent living? What steps were missing? How could I help? Can I actually be pretentious enough to assume that I could ever help?
That same year, six months later, I was in Quebec studying fisheries management and focusing on the people for my masters. And fast forward to the future. As a researcher, I now entertain a narrative where even small-scale fishermen that get involved in like drug trafficking and other types of crimes have their fair share of tears and should not be criminalized.
Marine protected areas that we cherish so much are great, but they're only great when the people that are adjacent to them are taken into account and participate. My idea today is one where these people are stewards of the ocean. They are part of it and, hence, they should not be excluded by mechanisms such as illegal fishing or ill-thought governance or conservation initiatives or an advocacy narrative that calls people to stop eating fish.
It may be a frequency illusion or, as we call it, a Baader Meinhof phenomenon, a cognitive bias where I see and hear over and over again the same thing, “They took all the fish away from me.” But I now understand that Yazid, the greed-driven fisherman, with a lack of manners isn't a fair representation of these people. In fact, most fishermen I meet today, even those charged for offenses, have a story to tell that is far from my initial stereotype.
I will never forget those tears. I thought I would be able to one day maybe help that fisherman or fishermen like him, and today I'm very glad that he helped me.