Graduate student wins Fulbright scholarship

SIU News


Recording siamang – Justin D’Agostino uses a Marantz professional audio recorder with a Sennheiser shotgun microphone to capture high-quality recordings of wild siamang vocalizations. While the “very loud” conversations can be heard more than 1.5 kilometers away in the forest, capturing recordings that can be statistically analyzed necessitates being within 300 meters of the gibbons, D’Agostino said. (Photo provided)

April 28, 2017
Graduate student wins Fulbright scholarship
by Christi Mathis
CARBONDALE, Ill. -- Southern Illinois University Carbondale graduate student Justin D’Agostino is the recipient of a J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship award to study the origins of language flexibility by investigating how globalization impacts primate vocalizations.
A doctoral anthropology student, D’Agostino will spend a minimum of 10 months in Indonesia, flying into Jakarta in September to do field work in Sikundur and Batang Toru on the island of Sumatra. His project, “Effects of anthropogenic noise on the natural calling behavior of wild siamang,” involves testing how human-induced noise affects the loud, long, almost daily duets of the siamangs – the largest of the gibbons.
D’Agostino said the implications of his study extend well beyond the black furry mammals.
“One of the most important parts of my doctoral education here at SIU is learning how to put this into an evolutionary perspective. It is possible, but at the same time quite difficult, to clearly show that if a close relative to humans, with a similar vocalization system, is impacted by noise, then all modern humans are also likely susceptible,” he said. “This project also has important conservation implications and could show that these animals are impacted not only by direct deforestation, but also by subtle things like human noise.”
In addition to his research, D’Agostino, in partnership with Syiah Kuala University, Yayasan Ekosistem Lestari and the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Program, will work with local field guides and make educational presentations in local ...

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