Interview: Dr. Lisa Dabek, Tree Kangaroo Scientist

Dr. Lisa Dabek with a Matschie’s tree kangaroo

Dr. Lisa Dabek works out of the Woodland Park Zoo, Seattle, and has studied tree kangaroos in the cloud forests of Papua New Guinea since 1996. She is a pioneer of community-based conservation.

In the interview below, this writer’s questions and comments are in bold, Dr. Dabek’s words are in regular text, and extra clarification (links, etc) added after the interview are in bold italics or footnotes.

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I’m really excited to be talking with you, because you’re a childhood hero of mine! Reading about your work in Sy Montgomery's Quest for the Tree Kangaroo was an extremely influential moment in my childhood, especially because I had severe asthma as well at the time. (I interviewed Sy recently). Your work directly inspired me to volunteer to study lemurs in Madagascar in 2019 (as I wrote about here).

That is really touching. That really touched me when you wrote that, because you never know what's going to be helpful to other people. So we share a common bond! That’s great.

Could you tell me your personal story, how you overcame asthma to become a scientist? And then, what are tree kangaroos? I think that very few people know about tree kangaroos. Tell me how you learned about them from your perspective, and how you came to study them.

I always loved animals, from when I was a little kid. My mom used to say that when she would wheel me in a stroller, I would always be looking up at the birds. But I grew up in New York City, which is not what you think of as a wilderness place. Going to the Bronx Zoo was a big part of my growing up.

And so when I went to school, I knew I wanted to study animals. I went to college out in California, and pretty quickly realized that it wasn't just biology, but environmental studies, an interdisciplinary approach to studying animals, was what made sense for me. I ended up double majoring in biology and environmental studies, and I think that was really a turning point for me to figure out how to give back to the world.

There, I was studying marine mammals. I thought I was going to do marine mammal biology, that was going to be my career. Then when I decided to go to graduate school, I started to study primates. I ended up at the University of Washington here in Seattle, and I knew zoos were a place that you could study animal behavior. So I contacted the Woodland Park Zoo, I got introduced to this zookeeper, and she said, we have tree kangaroos at our zoo. Nobody knows anything about them. Nobody's really studied them. We have two females with joeys in the pouch if you want to study them.

I said, “What's a tree kangaroo?” But then I looked them up and found out that very little is known about them. And I just fell in love with them. They're incredibly cute. The babies are incredibly cute, the joeys. Their strategy for reproduction and raising their young is fascinating, they have a pouch where the young is born, so small, and then they crawl into the pouch and then they grow until seven months later when they start coming out of the pouch. What a great strategy for raising your young.

But then, as I was studying them, I also learned that they were endangered. The particular species that are in zoos in North America, it's the Matschie’s tree kangaroo, and I learned that they were endangered in Papua New Guinea. So my whole thinking was, when I finish my PhD, I want to go to Papua New Guinea and use what I learned to help the animals there. And that's what got me. I flew over there in 1994 and then started this tree kangaroo conservation program in 1996. So that's my story.

That is wonderful, that is fascinating. I've always been fascinated by Papua New Guinea because it's such a unique place in the world.

Map of Papua New Guinea

The first place I really read about it was in the book about you, Quest for the Tree Kangaroo, but since then I've tried to follow news on it. It's a really unusual, complex sociopolitical environment, right?

In Papua New Guinea, agriculture emerged there early but metalworking didn't. There's over, I think, 800 different languages on the island. I don't know if you saw this, but there was a recent finding, where the official population of Papua New Guinea was about 8 million, but a recent study found it might be as high as 17 million and people didn't know. And that just blew my mind when I saw that. Can you imagine if the U.S. just said, “Psych, we actually have 600 million people!”

So what's it like? You arrive on a plane in Papua New Guinea in 1996.

What are your impressions of this really unique place and what have you learned since?

Yeah, it's true. It is like no other country in the world. And I've traveled to many other countries.

I think part of it is the land tenure system. So it's the local indigenous people, the local landowners that own their forests and their seas. The local landowners own over 90% of the land and that's recognized by the national government. It's unlike any other country. It's truly the grassroots local landowners, villagers that are the decision makers for how the natural resources are used and also whether they protect their forests.

So when I landed and went into the villages in 1996, immediately we had to get permission to go into their forests. It wasn't that you could just go in there and say, I'm a scientist, I'm going to do my work. You had to build relationships and you had to build trust and we had to get permission. After weeks of spending time in the village, they invited us to go into their forest with the best tree kangaroo hunter, and we were able to find tree kangaroos. And then the landowner, the hunter, said he would pledge land for conservation and start working with us.

It’s one of the reasons why I love working in Papua New Guinea. It's very remote, very difficult. The communities where I work, there are no roads in there. There's no electricity. But the people, by and large, are so wonderful and welcoming.

There’s complex social systems, the 800 languages like you mentioned. Where we work, it's about 50 villages and about 15,000 people, but there are seven languages! And these are distinct languages, not dialects. And they're all subsistence farmers and hunters. So very quickly, we realized that in order to do any kind of conservation work there, we also had to give back to the community. And that made sense to me. So we started out by supporting their education, their village schools. And then we later on, we moved into helping with the health care.

That's amazing.

So this is in the YUS area in the Huon Peninsula. What is life like there? It’s primarily agricultural and hunting, right, for food subsistence.

And people are connected to the outside world, but it must be a really different sort of connection, because it's attenuated with just the occasional plane visiting.

Do most people speak English? Do most people have an internet connection, or solar panels for artificial lights? What is the standard of living like?

Map of the Yopno, Uruwa, Som (YUS) area in Papua New Guinea. The conservation area (CA) that Dr. Dabek helped establish is marked with red hatch lines.

So it's incredibly remote as I said. The agriculture, the soil is really rich. So their gardens are just phenomenal and their produce is phenomenal. And then they do hunting, but there's not that many mammals. Tree kangaroos are the largest mammal and those are not that big. They're the size of a large domestic cat. And there are birds there, but a lot of it is the gardening. They also grow coffee to sell, that's a livelihood project.

The area, YUS stands for Yopno, Uruwa, and Som. Those are the three main rivers in the area, the watersheds, and the rivers are very clean. This whole region, most of it is pristine forest where the tree kangaroos live.

Source

And of course, once you're in the villages, then there are issues of making sure that the water is clean and all of that. They have very traditionally built houses with traditional roofs. They have fire pits in their houses for keeping warm and for cooking.

Most recently, we've been working with the Honnold Foundation, who've been supporting us to put in household solar panels. That’s been huge for the communities, and we're continuing to do that.

We've done it in seven villages. And now this year, we'll be doing it in another ten villages.

Awesome! Honnold Foundation as in Alex Honnold, the famous free-climber?

Exactly. It's a really neat connection. He believes in lighting up the world, and that will help with poverty, so he's supporting us.

Yeah, village life, everyone comes together, everyone cares for each other. But then, the downside is they don't have access to doctors. There's clinics there, but not enough health care. The schools, it’s hard to get teachers sometimes. So there's a lot of challenges as well, living in such a remote area.

So for the tree kangaroos, what’s their ecological role like? What are their major predators? In Papua New Guinea, there's no big cats, there's no snakes. Are they major fruit dispersers? Do they display that classic “landscape of fear” predator avoidance, because of human hunters? Or since your conservation and research work, are they habituated now to human presence? What is their life in the forest like?

Yeah, they're definitely prey species. It's the New Guinea Harpy Eagle that is their predator.

A Matschie’s tree kangaroo

They use camouflage. That beautiful rich cinnamon colored fur is the same color as the moss in the trees, so it's very, very difficult to spot them. It's the hunters and our trackers that are so good at finding them. They see their long tail hanging down or they see their little face.

The forest is cloud forest, so it's a cooler kind of forest, and they have a very thick fur, adapted for the cloud forest.

They’re very shy animals. They do not habituate to people. So we end up doing GPS collaring, so that we can track how they use the forest. They seem to have favorite trees that they rest in. They do eat up in the trees, but they also come down to the ground to eat.

They're generalists in terms of their feeding. We've documented over 90 species of plants that they eat. They're mainly leaf eaters, folivores.

We call them the flagship of the forest because they really represent the whole ecosystem of the cloud forest. There’s long-beaked echidnas, birds of paradise, many different possums, cuscus, et cetera, that live in that forest. But tree kangaroos are kind of the icon of the Papua New Guinea cloud forest.

And there's also a bird with poisonous feathers. Is that correct? The pitohui, I want to say?

The hooded pitohui of Papua New Guinea has batrachotoxin in its skin and feathers, the same toxin that poison dart frogs have in their skin. Scienitsts who handle them report feeling a numbing sensation.

There's a couple of types of bird that have poisonous feathers. I mean, there's amazing adaptations in New Guinea and incredible biodiversity. I mean, over 5% of the world's biodiversity is on the island of New Guinea, which is pretty amazing for an island.

That’s just absolutely incredible.

This really reminds me, I spent a summer working as a volunteer research assistant in Madagascar, and it was similar to Papua New Guinea in some ways. It's an island, it's really biodiverse, it's got its own unique sort of ecosystem going on, and we were studying another sort of arboreal social mammal, the greater bamboo lemur.

Fascinating. Do you know Russ Mittermeier, the famous primatologist?

The founder of Conservation International, right?

Yes. He was the one who dared me to go to New Guinea. He said, I don't think you could do it. And I said, well, you watch me. Then 10 years later, we brought him up there with his son. He loves New Guinea, but he had never seen a tree kangaroo so we got to show him tree kangaroos up at our field site. It was so wonderful to be up there with him, observing. And then he said, “This reminds me so much of the lemurs, they're so similar.”

One thing that's so different with Madagascar, from what I've read and heard, is the conservation issues and the pressures on the forests. That's one of the reasons why we're so fortunate in Papua New Guinea. Over 70% of the forest is still intact, we’re not dealing with little islands surrounded by agriculture.

Community mapping

That's why we do the work that we do with our communities, the youth, villagers. They're doing land use planning, and so we're helping them to really think ahead. Like, what area do you need for hunting? Because they still need to hunt. What area do you need for agriculture? How much forest should you have to protect the wildlife and to protect the rivers and so on?

We're lucky that we're not in a crisis. We still have time to really plan and for the communities to truly be stewards of their resources.

Fascinating.

So, are you planning in advance for any future infrastructure projects? I don't know what the thinking in the YUS region is, but are people trying to build a road there in the future? Are there plans for, maybe, larger renewable developments? Given that you've got this conservation ethos at a place so early in its development, what are people thinking about how to balance preserving their amazing ecosystem with getting higher living standards?

Yeah. So one of the things that we started about a decade ago was, you know, obviously the community members need a source of income to send their kids to school or to get health care. We asked them, what would be appropriate for you? And they said coffee, because coffee had been introduced in the 50s and 60s. But because there are no roads, it was too expensive to fly the beans out, so they gave up. They abandoned it.

So we got a big grant and we have been working with international coffee roasters. We started with Cafe Vita, which is in Seattle, and we're able to create a conservation coffee that's farm direct that gets the beans flown out. That’s a premium coffee, so they get a higher price, which can cover the costs of flying out the beans. That has made a huge difference. There's a lot of challenges with it, particularly the transportation, getting them out. But coffee has been a big one.

We've been trying to work with the lowland communities along the shore on cocoa, and there's other opportunities with vanilla and honey and so on, but there's no really major projects underway. They made an agreement when they created this conservation area, which is a first for Papua New Guinea. It was under the Conservation Areas Act of 1978. They made the agreement that there would be no commercial logging or mining in this area. So that is off the table, and so then we help them to look for appropriate livelihood activities.

There has been a road planned ever since I've been working in YUS. And they work on it in fits and starts, but it's so rugged and so hard to build a road that I don't know if in my lifetime there will actually be a road to use.

One of the things that I'm very proud of is when we declared the conservation area, the governor for the province promised a high school for YUS. Because all the kids couldn't go past eighth grade. and then they would have to either go into town or go to the coast and it was so expensive and kids could get sick. They are now building a high school in YUS so that all kids can go to high school in YUS. They're talking about a road into that village where the high school is, but I don't know if it will ever happen.

Interesting.

So you wrote a really interesting paper called The Costs of Exclusion. Which I thought was really interesting because we've seen, you know, the fortress conservation model that dates back to the age of European imperialism in Africa and Asia has increasingly been shown to not work out great, and you've been one of the pioneers of community-based conservation. Do you want to talk about that?

Yeah, absolutely.

Papua New Guinea has this amazing and unique land tenure system, so truly, the landowners, the villagers are the decision makers. You cannot go into Papua New Guinea and say, we have the answer, we're going to set aside and create a national park, and we're going to move all of you out of your area. You can't do that.

Gabriel Porolak, one of Dr. Dabek’s Papua New Guinean research partners, prepares to give a Matschie’s tree kangaroo with a radio collar.

So that allowed us to think more creatively and really think about community-based, community-led conservation. Because if you're truly going to have communities take responsibility and manage their own resources, you have to provide the tools and you have to provide the training for leadership in that. And so we're doing that right now. We have a major grant from BIOPAMA, it's European Union funding to really look at governance structures and how the communities can be set up to successfully manage their protected area and also get funding from the government to support development needs, like water quality, health systems, schools, etc. I really believe more and more, and this has become my mantra, that the best thing that I can do and the best thing that conservationists can do is support indigenous-led conservation. Because ultimately, it's up to the people that are living there to create living landscapes.

Absolutely. It’s their land, it's their home, that is the only way that things work long-term. Thank you for helping change the mindset on that.

So you have another paper that was really interesting, about Papua New Guinea and chytrid fungus, the global amphibian death plague. I'm not an amphibian expert at all, but I've just read about it. You said that New Guinea is the largest climatically suitable landmass that may still be free of this fungus. So that sounds really important, potentially the last place that has frogs but no frog death fungus. Can you talk about that?

Yeah. I'm just one of many, many authors you can see on that paper, and I am not a herpetologist, but I'm an expert in working in Papua New Guinea.

Sadly, there is evidence now of chytrid fungus on the island of New Guinea. But there hasn't been enough research done. Part of that was COVID, you know, there were years when there couldn't be much fieldwork. My hope is that there will be more efforts in this because there are still areas that are so pristine that probably have not been touched by that. I think it's definitely something that needs to be addressed.

It's not my area of work as much, but in places in the world where there's still pristine areas, we need to focus on them and protect them.

So in the broader context, Papua New Guinea and the Pacific in general have increasingly become more geopolitically central. I don't know how much you follow this, but the U.S. just signed a defense deal with Papua New Guinea, with Prime Minister James Marape at Port Moresby, I believe. And nearby, the Solomon Islands seems to be leaning more towards China.

U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken, signing a defense pact with PNG Prime Minister James Marape

And when I was in Madagascar, I climbed a mountain, Sanga Sanga, with my Malagasy boss, Theoluc, this amazing guy. And he said, over there is a Chinese mine. He said, the Chinese miners are awful. They're awful people. They abuse the local village women and stuff, they're awful. In Madagascar, people told me, the Americans we meet tend to be nice scientists, the Chinese we meet are miners who are terrible people. China tends to lead with rapid resource exploitation by Chinese companies that often has a lot of negative side effects.

So, have you seen any sort of Chinese presence in Papua New Guinea?

And I want to make clear, you know, I'm talking about the problems of the current Chinese government and its exploitative foreign policy, not anything wrong with the Chinese people or culture.

Is there any sense of that? Do people have opinions on America and China in Papua New Guinea? What is the feeling around that?

So over the last five-plus years, there's definitely been more Chinese influence and presence. The same approach that they've used in other areas, like in Brazil and other places, of building major infrastructure, roads and buildings, but making it more of a loan versus a payment.

Debt trap diplomacy.

Definitely we are seeing that Australia and the U.S. have paid much more attention to Papua New Guinea to counteract the Chinese influence.

What do you see on the ground?

Well, I think the biggest thing that I see is that Australia has always invested a lot in Papua New Guinea, but the U.S. is investing a lot more in Papua New Guinea.

So some real examples: the U.S. Embassy used to just be a floor of a building in Port Moresby. Now they built an entire compound, there's a huge U.S. embassy there now. There didn't used to be a USAID mission in Papua New Guinea. Now there is. The work that we're doing, we've been funded through a five-year USAID biodiversity project. We're part of a big grant from USAID, and every time I go over there, I go to the U.S. Embassy, I meet with the USAID people. We are supported by the U.S. government to do our work. And there's a lot more investment in trying to support Papua New Guinea in a productive and fair way, and not having them end up owing money, like China does.

And also, right after 9-11, there was a real interest in how strategic the location of Papua New Guinea is in terms of any threats. So, yeah, the U.S. government, and more and more the European government. The President of France visited just a few months ago. There's a huge grant for climate change research and conservation.

So I think the U.S., Australia, Europe, they're really putting a focus, and I'm very glad about this, on how do we make this sustainable. Let's focus on climate change, let's focus on biodiversity, conservation, etc. And people in Papua New Guinea are talking about the support. I was just in the field in October. We were doing a health workshop in one of the villages, and the Papua New Guinea representative for USAID, she wanted to join us. She was in the field with us for a week and the community members got to talk with her about what the U.S. government is doing to support villagers who are protecting their forests. So they're making that direct link

It's not super fashionable in my generation, but I'm trying to be patriotic about some of the cool stuff America does. I'm trying to highlight some of the cool stuff like your research and support for sustainable development.

Yeah, and USAID biodiversity grants! That is amazing. During COVID, they continued it. One of the things that I learned was that there’s bipartisan support for USAID biodiversity projects, which really surprised me given what's going on politically. There is a lot of support from the government. And we have to keep it going, it’s important.

That is really spectacular.

Yeah! And I would say, you know, what we all can do in our country is vote and support politicians that really believe in conservation and all of that.

Absolutely. I very much believe in that. I've worked on voter registration, I was an election worker on Election Day 2020. I'm very much trying to engage people in that, and I'm a huge fan of the Biden Administration and the amazing work they've done on climate and conservation.

Can you talk about your collaboration with National Geographic?

Yeah, it's been really wonderful. I started to get grants from National Geographic and once you get a grant, you become a National Geographic Explorer for life, which I'm very proud of. One of the big projects that we did was the Crittercam. I used to visit D.C. regularly and meet with the people doing the Crittercam research. We were able to develop a Crittercam for the first time to put on an arboreal animal. That was back in 2009, and we showed that you could do that. We created a collar with the camera, and then the animal was able to basically videotape itself up high. We were able to get footage 100 feet off the ground of eating orchids up in the trees. The villagers were amazed. They were like, oh, we didn't know they ate those species of orchids.

So National Geographic for me is one of the best ways to get the word out.

I've been a huge fan since I was a kid.

It's definitely been a very positive relationship for our program. They also supported some of our local staff members to do research, and I think that's important. And they also supported us to be innovative in terms of our research tools, using these GPS collars and so on. It's really great, the kind of support that they give.

Spectacular.

Do you use drones at all? As these are arboreal animals, I can imagine that would be useful. There's been a big wave of new animal monitoring technology, drones, AI-powered cameras. Have you been able to integrate some of this?

In 2017 and 18, when we were deploying the GPS collars, we also had a graduate student who was doing drone mapping. He was doing three-dimensional vegetation mapping and that allowed us to see the elevation of the heights of the canopy and where the animals were using the forest. We now have a drone specialist from Australia who is working with one of our researchers, our local team. They're going up in March and they're going to be doing more drone work. He's actually bringing four different drones to see what will work best, and also looking at thermal imaging to see if that's a way of maybe surveying the arboreal animals. So, yeah, definitely drones are on our horizon, and we’re working on them. I mean, what's amazing for me with technology is in the 25-plus years of working in New Guinea, the technology has changed so much and there's so many advances. And I know there's going to be so many more that I can't even envision.

With tree kangaroos, it's very hard to study them. They're elusive. They're shy animals. To get a window into their world is very challenging. So we use GPS collars, the Crittercam, drones. We've just deployed remote video cameras to the trees where we caught the animals to collar them, and we're starting to get video of the animals on the ground feeding. Because they don't get habituated to us, we can't get behavior unless it's remote video. So that's a new thing that we're doing now as well. We're really excited! That's happening as we speak. We deployed the collars and the video cameras in October. We'll be retrieving them in April, so stay tuned.

Shoot me a link, I'll keep an eye out for it, and I'll include it in my newsletter when the paper or whatever comes out!

Sure.

On the home front, so to speak, what's it like working with the tree kangaroos at the Woodland Park Zoo? I'm guessing those are like ambassadors for the species. I'm guessing you can learn a lot of stuff about them that you can't really learn from the wild ones because you can see them 24/7. What's the home front of tree kangaroo research like?

Yeah, so definitely the tree kangaroos at Woodland Park Zoo are the ambassadors, just like you said. They haven't been on exhibit for a long time because we had a fire in one of our exhibit areas, but in 2026, we're opening a new exhibit that is going to showcase the tree kangaroos. I'm very excited, because we'll be able to go full circle on telling the story about the tree kangaroo conservation program at Woodland Park Zoo and really showcasing the animals and how special they are and talking about our coffee project. It's 2024 now, so in two years, we'll be opening this exhibit, and we're in the planning stages of it.

I think it's really important. You know, I really believe in the role of zoos in conservation, because it's where most people go. Where I grew up, going to the Bronx Zoo is where I got introduced to animals. It's a way to teach people about conservation, about endangered species, and for people that are never going to go to Madagascar or Papua New Guinea, it’s a way to see those animals. And we can really use that as a way to then get support for the field conservation. It's why I'm based at a zoo. I feel like I can make that link of teaching people at the zoo, having these ambassador animals, and then going out and actually protecting them.

Amazing.

So you've answered all the questions I had prepared. What would you like to share?

Surveying local lands

I just have a few more minutes that I can talk, but I would say what's really important to me now is, like I said before, supporting indigenous led conservation. But I also think what’s really important for me at this stage is the next generation of conservationists, of practitioners, etc. I think what you're doing is wonderful, getting the word out, telling our story. In Papua New Guinea, we sit around the fire and people have an oral tradition and they tell stories or they sing or they dance. Here we have different ways of doing that. But I think getting this story out is so important.

And then I think supporting the next generation, I mentor staff in Papua New Guinea, young biologists, young conservationists, it's important. I'm on the advisory council of a relatively new organization called Conservation Nation. They support the next generation, young professionals and students, especially women and people of color, to really be able to be in the conservation field. As I get older, I'm thinking about passing on, you know, and I think that succession is really important. How do you build up that leadership for the next generation? So I appreciate that you reached out to me. Thank you.

Thank you so much! This was amazing. It's been a huge pleasure talking with you.

Same here. Thanks so much! Have a good day.

This has been such a pleasure. You are an inspiration. Thank you so much.

Thank you.