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He is the Lorax. He speaks for truffles. His origins are never explicitly addressed in the children's illustrated book that bears his name, but new research indicates that his coolness was inspired by a real animal – the monkey patas – and the monkey's connection to a real tree, the wheezing thorn. In fact, according to the study, it may be their close relationship that has pushed Theodor Seuss Geisel, known by generations of children as Dr. Seuss.
The story of this research begins at a dinner at Dartmouth College, where evolutionary biologist Nathaniel Dominiy ended up sitting with Seuss' famous expert, Don Pease. The biologist says that he was a bit lacking what to talk about, but fortunately, "I have two children … and so I know Dr. Seuss' work well." One thing he had noticed during his fieldwork in Kenya: a monkey found near Mount Kenya, the patas monkey, looked a lot like the fictional Lorax. What Dominiy did not know, is that Dr. Seuss had already visited a station in this part of Kenya – in fact, he wrote most of the Loraxes after suffering from a prolonged blockage of the block of the writer
. Pease, he was skeptical about the idea that the monkey might have inspired Seuss. In the late 1970s, when Seuss began writing The Lorax, he had created illustrated books full of fantastic characters and absurdly invented words for more than three decades. He had a lot of wonderful characters to draw, and there was no reason to think that he would look elsewhere. "But then, I thought about what it might add to the established understanding of Lorax," Pease said. A common perception of Lorax is like a crusader from the grumpy environment or "eco-policeman" who comes from the outside to "speak for" an environment in which he has no stake.
But if Lorax's relationship with truffula trees mirrored that of patas monkeys and the tree from which they derive more than 80 percent of their food, he was both an advocate of the truffula trees. environment and as important as the Bar-ba-loots, Swanee-Swans and Humming-Fish that rely on the truffle ecosystem. Then the message becomes, "Human beings should understand themselves as part of the environment," says Pease. After all, as climate change fundamentally changes our planet, we are all in the same situation as Lorax and his ilk.
Pease and Dominiy embarked on a quest to badess whether the patas monkey was able to inspire Seuss an badysis. They compared Lorax's Whiskery mug to five Kenyan monkeys and another Seuss creature often cited as an antecedent. The method they used, Eigenface badysis, compares images by looking for facial features and calculating their relationship with each other. Faces with more similar relationships look more like each other. In this case, they found that Lorax's face looks more like that of three of the monkeys, including the patas monkey, than that of the other creature of Seuss. In addition, the researchers write, "Even the voice of the Lorax (a" sneeze sawdust ") resembles the vocalization" whoo-wherr "of the patas monkeys."
"We also know that he was very impressed by the local trees," Dominiy said. Patas monkeys and whistling spines have what is called a commensal relationship, where monkeys prune and maintain trees, which provide their main sources of food. Because of these attentions, they look weird, bushy and tall.
In 1971, when The Lorax was first published, the modern American environmental movement was still in its infancy. What Seuss wrote, teaching generations of children, was the basis of what is called a "trophic cascade," says Dominiy. In other words, "When you remove some of the community, the rest of this community starts to collapse." These concepts may seem obvious today, but at the time they were not understood outside the academic world, he says. Seuss helped change that.
Although these things may have inspired Seuss, the patas apes and whistling acacias have not yet suffered the sad fate of the truffles and creatures that mattered to them, says primate ecologist Lynne Isbell. Isbell, who was not involved in this document, has worked a lot with patas monkeys in the past. Monkeys are not yet in danger, she says, but their ecosystem is not as stable as it once was. Monkeys lose their food and habitat as the human population grows in a landscape that can not even withstand the current level of human incursion. In this case, an important factor is the local population, which uses charcoal from the acacia, cutting trees to make fuel.
"Unless people can find a better source of energy … [the patas monkeys]," she says. And just like the character they inspired, monkeys do not control the fate of trees. The conservation of this habitat can come only at the request of the people who live there. In other words; Unless someone like you is worried a lot, nothing will get better. This is not
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