A week in the life of a Primate Research Intern  

Hi, I am Chandler Brown English, and I am currently the Primate Research Intern here at Zoo Atlanta. In this role, my time is split evenly between Zoo Atlanta and one of the Zoo’s Signature Conservation Partners, the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund. This is an approximate “Week in the Life” of a Primate Research Intern.     

I spend my Mondays in the Fossey Fund offices, where I kick off my week with an 8 a.m. video call with my international research cohorts. Although the call is at 8 a.m. for me, it is a 3 p.m./4 p.m. call for them in Rwanda and Central Europe, where we check in on ongoing projects, answer any questions, and discuss new projects as they arise. On top of all the spreadsheets and other data management odd jobs, this role has also given me the opportunity to develop a better understanding of the operations of a nonprofit and to meet interesting people on the conservation and fundraising side of things.   

On Tuesdays, I am in the Zoo offices doing an assortment of research tasks. One of the first things that I began training on was individual identifications. Typically, on your first day at a new job, you encounter a slew of new names and faces you need to know. Given the scope of my role, I was introduced to a couple dozen names and faces of human and non-human primates to learn. So, when the weather’s nice, I’ll start my day out in the Zoo practicing identifying a particular species with my research cohorts.   

We utilize the app ZooMonitor for behavioral observations, and in order to use it properly, I need to know who is who, as well as be trained on the ethogram. An ethogram is a list of defined behaviors for a specific species used for observations and data collection. Once I am trained on this software, I will use it to collect behavioral data, non-invasively, from our primates. While I continue training on data collection, a side project I’ve been tasked with is analyzing data collected this summer by our wonderful Volunteens.    

Wednesdays are interesting. For starters, I have to report to work an hour early. I begin my day at 8 a.m. in the gorilla building for husbandry. Technically, in this sense, “husbandry” is the scientific management of animal care, but I like to think of myself as part of their housekeeping team these days. Being both new and an intern, I am only delegated certain tasks each week; I liken it to when you’re a kid and you have to do some yard work, but they don’t trust you with the lawn mower yet, so they just have you scoop poop, pull weeds, and pick up sticks. However, unlike childhood yard work, this work is interesting and insightful, and to have this hands-on experience with animal welfare and management is incredible.    

Typically, when I arrive, they send me out into the habitat to finish setting up their food and enrichment for the day. After the gorillas shift outside, we begin cleaning inside. Thankfully, none of this work is too gross. I grew up in a fairly rural area of Georgia, and I come from agrarian people. Both my brother and sister showed cows, pigs, and goats in the FFA growing up, so I’ve done my share of classical barnyard work.    

Once I complete my turn down service for the gorillas (typically around Noon), I retire to the Fossey Fund offices, where I eat lunch and then pick up wherever I left off on Monday. Everyone else in the office works remotely on Wednesday, which is convenient because I typically leave husbandry at least a little stinky.    

Thursdays I pick up where I left off the day prior at the Fossey Fund. One of my ongoing ventures with the Fossey Fund is doing metadata tags through archival photographs and videos. That’s a fancy way of saying I go back and add hashtags to make it easier to pull media with specific attributes. For example: say it’s Father’s Day and they want to find good pictures for social media. They can search “silverback and infant” and “cute” and see all the pictures they can choose from that meet the criteria. Or if they were aggregating health data, they could search “teeth” and see all the pictures from over the years where a gorilla’s teeth were very visible.    

Typically, around when I break for lunch, I’ll step out of the office for a bit to do behavioral observations. Despite not mentioning it until now, I do typically do at least one set of behavioral observations a day. This allows us to maximize the sampling windows by collecting behavioral data at various times of day and days of the week. Lastly, Thursday nights are when I play Scrabble with a buddy from my days working in restaurants.   

My week concludes back in the Zoo offices, where I continue training on IDs and observations software, and analyzing data, but on Fridays I like to dedicate some time to developing my independent project. Technically, I do a little of this every day, but for the purposes of this blog post, let’s just pretend that it’s a special task I do on Fridays. I am in a literature review-heavy stage of this project. What is the project? Stay tuned! Perhaps more on that in future blog posts!   

Chandler Brown English   
Primate Research Intern