Lauri Brewster’s research gets her up close and personal with White-Faced Capuchin Monkeys in Costa Rica

By Marc Glass (Fall 2007 issue)

There’s roughing it, and then there’s roughing it Lauri Brewster style. After graduating from UMF in 2003, Brewster hiked the Appalachian Trail with classmate Hannah Todd ’03. Then, as part of field research done for a master’s degree in conservation biology, Brewster shared a one-room, 10-by-11-foot cabin at the peaks of the continental divide in Monteverde, Costa Rica, with a host of creepy-crawlies.

“I once had to trap this tarantula the size of a softball with a salad bowl, and I always had to check the shower for scorpions. The other problem was that, of course, I was conducting my research during the rainiest season on record,” said Brewster, whose regular visitors near the high-altitude cloud forest included toucans, sloths and eyelash vipers, among other species of venomous snakes.

Brewster said all the inconveniences were a pittance to pay for the chance to examine droppings from the White-Faced Capuchin Monkey. Her original research on the house cat-sized, prehensile-tailed monkey (perhaps best known as Ross Geller’s pet on the television sit-com Friends) focused on the integral role the primate plays in cloud-forest seed dispersal.

According to Brewster, biologists have long acknowledged the role birds play in seed dispersal. By observing Capuchin feeding patterns, recovering seeds from their scat and successfully germinating those seeds, she discovered that Capuchins rival birds by dispersing 45 species of fruit. Since tree tops of the higher altitude cloud forest comprise the Capuchin habitat, Brewster also discovered that continued fragmentation of the cloud forest by crisscrossing roads inhibits Capuchin mobility, and, therefore, their potential for seeding biodiversity.

Brewster’s conservation biology research interests always have been rooted in rain and cloud forests, but there’s another reason she made a second trip to Costa Rica: to speak Spanish.

“I really topped off my fluency,” said Brewster, who spent six months in Chile during a high school semester abroad and continued her study of Spanish at UMF. And even though she’s back home in Montpelier, Vt., there’s little chance Brewster will lose the language. She is now engaged to Manriquế, a master’s degree candidate in computer science and education, whom she met at the University of Costa Rica. She’s been stateside only a few months exploring job options with U.S.-based international conservation organizations, but already Brewster pines for the land of cloud forests.

“He wouldn’t have to twist my arm too hard to go back,” she said.