Graduate Student Profile: Lilith Frakes
Lilith Frakes is a 3rd year PhD student in History of Consciousness and a 2025-26 THI Summer Research Fellow. With this support, Lilith conducted preliminary fieldwork in Malaysia for her dissertation “Hybrid Primates/Hybrid Futures,” which examines the care and politics of orangutan hybridity in animal conservation. Lilith’s research in Malaysia builds on previous fieldwork she conducted at The Center for Great Apes in Florida as a 2024-25 THI Summer Pathways Fellow. We recently caught up with Lilith about the insights she’s gathered so far from working closely with hybrid apes, their caregivers, and primatologists over the course of these two trips.
Hi Lilith! Thanks for chatting with us about your ongoing research. To begin, could you give us a general synopsis of your research project?
Thanks for asking! My research looks at how primates, specifically hybrid primates, function within science, conservation, and care. Though most of us were taught to have a very rigid idea of the differences between different species of animals, genetic and evolutionary history has a lot of evidence of species interbreeding. Amid the threats of deforestation and habitat change today, primate scientists are recording increasing amounts of hybridization between different species of monkeys, lemurs, and apes. For scientists and conservationists, this is troubling, because it could pose a threat to endangered species. My research asks about the different stakes of hybrid primates in our current moment. Because hybrids cross species lines, they are sometimes excluded from conservation plans or scientific research. But even if increasing hybrids might be the result of human impacts on their ecosystems, they are nonetheless the products of a long evolutionary history of adapting to different environments. By studying hybrid primates, I hope to formulate better questions about how to care for the primates we live alongside and seek to protect.
What a fascinating project! Can you share a little bit about why you decided to pursue this research?
I have always loved primates. Before coming to UCSC, I received an MS in primate behavior and studied orangutans in zoos and sanctuaries. During my training as a primatologist, I became really interested in the different boundaries that exist within the field. For example, there is a divide between captive and wild research, and animals in one setting are sometimes assumed to have little relevance to the behavior of those in the other. While this distinction makes sense for structuring scientific practice and crafting specific behavioral repertoires, in reality the lines are much blurrier. Many primates live in human cities, are provisioned with food, or have been rehabilitated and re-released into the wild, or otherwise live on the boundaries that complicate simple categories of “wild” or “captive.”
As I read more reports of hybrid primates in increasingly fragmented habitats, I found myself similarly troubled by how they were framed. Why are hybrids so often treated as problems or outliers, when in fact they have long been part of the adaptive and genetic trajectories of evolution? I began to wonder what it means for science and conservation when categories like wild/captive or pure/hybrid no longer hold up in practice. Rather than seeing hybrids as a potential danger, I am interested in what they reveal about the assumptions and values built into primatology, and how the field might adapt alongside the changing lives of the primates it studies.
As a THI Summer Pathways Fellow in 2024, you spent 12 weeks interning and conducting research at The Center for Great Apes in Florida. We’d love to learn more about the center, as well as about the time you spent there. What were some of your ape caregiving responsibilities? Was there a particular moment that stood out to you –a moment of surprise, shock, awe, or understanding you’d like to share with us?
Getting to intern at the Center for Great Apes was such an incredible experience! I am so grateful to the caregivers and staff who taught me about caring for the orangutans (most of whom are hybrids) and chimpanzees who live there. As an intern caregiver, I was trained in the daily practices of caring for the retired apes at the sanctuary. There is a colossal amount of work that goes into providing for the physical, emotional, and cognitive needs of these apes. My responsibilities included ensuring the apes had clean indoor and outdoor spaces through routine sanitation, assembling specific diets and helping to distribute them, creating interesting enrichment and cognitive tasks, and spending time with apes to ensure their emotional needs were met. Many of the orangutans and chimpanzees I worked with were retired from the entertainment industry or previously lived as pets, and as such were accustomed to companionship with humans. Though ape–ape interactions were always prioritized at the sanctuary, the staff also acknowledged that apes’ personal histories meant that human interactions were important to their well-being.
Something that surprised me at the Center was how the caregivers and orangutans communicated! Though I have researched orangutans before, their intelligence always shocks me. A particular moment of awe during my time at the sanctuary came when I watched one of the caregivers I was shadowing have a conversation with an orangutan. Working with these apes for years means that both caregiver and orangutan learn a lot about each other’s signals, and paying attention to and being patient with one another enables the kind of interspecies dialogue that allows apes to assert what they need and receive the best care.
My time at the Center made it clear that thinking about hybrid primates cannot stop at their genetics, it must also include the ways they communicate, collaborate, and live alongside humans in sanctuary settings.
One day during my internship at the sanctuary, the caregiver I was training with asked the orangutan if he was ready for her to close the bedroom door to his “night house”, so that we could safely clean his large outdoor enclosure and set up new daily enrichment before returning it to him. “Can I close?” she asked, touching the door’s lever. He sat there for a moment, blinking at her, and I asked if it was time to close the door. “Not yet, he’s thinking,” she informed me. Then, in an instant, the orangutan got up and moved outside. I assumed this meant that he was not giving us permission to be shifted indoors, and wanted to keep his outside access. But still, the caregiver waited, her hand on the door lever. A moment later, he reappeared, dragging about three blankets with him. He arranged them in a nest in his night house bedroom, and settled down on top of them. Then he turned to look at his caregiver. “Now you’re ready to close?” she asked. The orangutan clapped his hands and then clasped them in his lap. “That’s how he says he is ready!” she informed me, and announced “closing!” to the ape as she closed his door, while he watched with a relaxed lower lip.
Before working at the sanctuary, I would have thought that this kind of communication with apes was the stuff of extensive sign-language projects or science-fiction stories, but through patience, routine, and affective relationships that caregivers and apes cultivate, orangutans and chimpanzees have conversations like this with their caregivers every day at the Center. The exchange revealed a kind of deliberation and mutual recognition that pushed me to reconsider what counts as dialogue across species. My time at the Center made it clear that thinking about hybrid primates cannot stop at their genetics, it must also include the ways they communicate, collaborate, and live alongside humans in sanctuary settings. This perspective continues to shape the kinds of questions I ask about how primatology might adapt to reflect the hybrid realities of primate life.
This summer, you visited Sabah, Malaysia to conduct ethnographic research as a THI Summer Research Fellow. Could you tell us a little bit about your time there? What was it like collaborating with primatologists at Malaysian universities and the local guides at the protected wildlife sanctuary you visited? How did your time there build on your previous experience at The Center for Great Apes? What new insights, if any, did it offer?
Getting to meet and make research plans with primate researchers based in Malaysia was a really rich and collaborative experience. I am excited to join a project that examines hybrid primates in a “wild” setting and to learn about the different concerns that various stakeholders (scientists, conservationists, and local communities) bring to primate conservation and scientific practice. This summer, I spent time doing preliminary fieldwork in a protected wildlife forest, where I met local guides who are at the forefront of observing how primate life is changing and adapting in the ecosystem where they live and work. In this forest, some mixed-species groups are forming, with males of one species establishing family groups with females of another. Understanding how and why this happens is a central concern for the primatologists I am working with, who are themselves indebted to the expertise of local guides who have witnessed these behavioral shifts over time.
This experience has helped me develop a more nuanced understanding of the politics of hybrid primates, as well as the stakes of conservation projects, scientific expertise, and hybrid welfare when hybridization occurs in situ. It has also pushed me to think critically about primatology itself: if the field can adapt to account for the realities of changing primates, it also needs to reflect on which human voices matter in deciding which non-human ones do.
To wrap up, why have these fellowships been important for your research? Any advice you can share with newer UCSC students considering different opportunities?
The THI fellowships I have received have been pivotal in developing my research here at UCSC. I can’t imagine where my project’s trajectory would be right now without the experiences I have had over the past two summers!
If I could give any advice, it would be to be bold and go after every opportunity that excites you in your research. Don’t be afraid to reach out to researchers you admire, and apply for funding like THI fellowships whenever you can. Your enthusiasm and passion for the work you want to do are your greatest strengths.
Banner Image: A painting made by a orangutan as part of a daily enrichment activity, courtesy of the The Center for Great Apes in Wauchula, Florida.