Arizona State University professors, students team up to help rare monkeys in Ethiopia
PHOENIX (AZFamily)—Ethiopia’s Simien Mountains National Park is the only place in the world where the rare, endangered gelada monkey lives.
These “bleeding-heart” monkeys face a plastic problem from tourists who visit the area. Trash that is left in the park is burned and harms the monkeys’ health and ecosystem.
ASU Professor India Schneider-Crease has been studying the problem for a decade. She is currently the co-director of the Simien Mountains Gelada Research Project. She works alongside fellow professor Tyler Eglen as they try to address and provide solutions to help the endangered monkeys.
The pair teamed up with ASU’s Chapter of Engineers Without Borders to travel to Ethiopia this summer. The group is creating machines to recycle plastic that has been impacting the monkeys’ ecosystem.
The machines recycle the plastic into products that local communities sell to tourists.
The program is building a flexible framework to implement the system in the mountains and hopes to expand it to other areas in Ethiopia that are encountering similar problems in the near future.
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