Encounters & Notes

From Molecules to Monkeys: A visit to the Monkey Kingdom at Polonnaruwa

I had the wonderful opportunity to meet Dr. Wolfgang Dittus, the renowned primatologist who played a key role in the production of Disney Nature’s Monkey Kingdom [link]. Wolf has decades of field research on Sri Lanka’s Toque macaques (Macaca sinica), grey langur (Semnopithecus priam thersites), and northern purple-faced leaf monkey (Semnopithecus vetulus philbricki) populations. He invited me to visit the Primate Research Station in Polonnaruwa (initiated as a Smithsonian Institute project in the 1960s), affectionately known as the Monkey Camp, where I spent several days immersed in the rhythms of field science. The nature conservation surrounding the station also hosts one of the largest populations of slender loris. 

Although we approach primate biology from opposite ends of the scientific spectrum—I focus on primate proteostasis at the molecular and cellular levels, while Dr. Dittus studies primates as whole organisms in their natural environments—we found a shared curiosity: how might evolutionary changes at the molecular scale shape the observable behavior and biology of living primates in their natural habitats?

What struck me most was how rare, and yet how valuable, this kind of cross-disciplinary encounter is. Scientists like Dr. Dittus and I usually work in parallel, rarely intersecting. But our ongoing conversations have reinforced a shared belief that true understanding of complex biological systems may require looking both inward and outward, from the invisible workings of the cell to the visible rhythms of life in the wild.

You can learn more about the Polonnaruwa monkey sanctuary [link].