Profile

I look at why climate change would make baboons more, or less, ill with disease.  So I study their poo to see what diseases they have (and yes, it is smelly).

To do this I have quite a lot of different work to do:

Fieldwork – following baboons in Africa
Laboratory work – Looking at the poo samples to find the parasites
Computer work – Using the information from the field and the lab to find out how climate change will affect disease in animals and in humans!

And why baboons?  Baboons are important to study for many reasons; they get the same diseases as humans, and they act similar to humans, and they spread diseases to humans! They are also primates, and there are many primates that are nearly going extinct – so the more we know about them the better!

Fieldwork

In Africa I live in Namibia and I stay in a tent at a campsite  on a project with London Zoo called the Tsaobis Baboon Project.  Here we have two troops of baboons that we follow every day.  We wake up before sunrise to find the troop waking up, and then we follow them all day long, like this.  We do a lot of walking – until they rest and we get to rest with them. We would write down their behaviour (like, who their friends are), collect poo samples, and see what food they eat.  We have been trying to get the baboons to weigh themselves, which is very difficult! Then we wait until the baboons go to sleep at sunset before we go back home to sleep.

We have to be careful of other wild animals, such as this snake I nearly stood on!

Laboratory

In the laboratory I look down the microscope.  I look at the poo (after sieving it and adding chemicals) to try and see how many diseases the baboons have.  The diseases are parasites (both worms and amoeba), and I find out how many there are by the number of eggs I find, and they look like this:

Office work

When I’m in the office I get to drink lots of cups of tea!  I also read, write and learn as much as I can.  At the moment I am building a model so that I can use all the information I know about disease in baboons and the weather – and then it will tell me what will happen when the climate changes in the future! And what will happen to humans!

And sometimes I just spend my time taking pictures of baboons – they like posing for the camera!