Oh hey, it's the bird hanging out near your park bench, hoping that your sandwich crumbles into pieces. Alley, ward and listen. No matter what place in your life, lemurs have make some room because it's about to get bigger. What are these animals? Well, the most endangered mammals on earth, but also I'm going to be a little shallow. They're the cutest, and in that ven diagram of adorable and vulnerable, there exists pure relevance. So this guest is someone whose work
I've loved for years. She's based at Duke University in North Carolina, where there is a world renowned Lemur Center. They got free range lemurs running all over the forests. As lemur ecologists assist with conservation breeding programs. They take notes, they watch them, they collect their poop, doing non invasive research. It's a dream. You can also visit the Duke Gleamer Center and you can look at lemurs if so inclined,
which who wouldn't be. So this ologists did their undergrad at Duke in evolutionary anthropology and they did a PhD in ecology studying lemurs in Madagascar, and she's worked at the Duke Lemur Center did a postdoc at a lemur lab studying adaptation and hibernation, and she's an excellent science communicator and a champion of lemurs. We're going to get into it, including questions that you submitted via patreon dot com slash Ologies, which you can join for a hot
dollar a month. Thank you to patrons and to everyone out there wearing ologies merch fromologiesmerch dot com. Thanks also to everyone who's ever written a review, which really helps keep us up in the charts where more people can
find us. And I read everyone, including one this week from Haley, a cancer biologist, another from MM Marshall twenty, who wrote, if you need to reignite your sense of wonder and awe in the universe because hyper focusing on all your problems has made you forget that we are statistically anomalists flesh sas on a spinning rock in space. This podcast may help. M Marshall twenty. I'm right there with you. I'm on this rock. I'm ready to hear
about lemurs. So, due to time zones, I got up a little early and this was recorded in pajamas Liio. Good morning, Good morning, seven thirty am Pacific time. We're talking lemurs.
It's a good thing to talk about.
First thing, Yes, it was so. First off, the word lemur comes from the Latin for ghosts or spirits of the dead, because of their nighttime prowlings. And yes, people who study lemurs are limerologists, just straight up. That's the word. It's on their LinkedIn bios. It's a term used in journals.
Limerologist is a thing that you can be, and you might want to be after this, So tuck in or hop around to hear about dangerous, fateful journeys, button noses, saucer eyes, striped tales, movie flimplam, tiny demons, giant anatomy, weird toe claws, matriarchies, madagascar, landscapes, folklore, travel tale, and why intelligence is really all about how you use it. With wildlife ecologist and limerologist, doctor Lydia Green.
My name is Lydia Green and I go by she.
Her pronouns lemurs, lemurs, lemurs. I've known of you, We've been friends mutuals, as they say online, for quite some time. I've wanted to come down to the Lemur Center and have not been able to, and you so graciously let me interview you remotely Can I still come to the Lemur Center at some point.
Yes, But what I would suggest would be even better if you came with me to Madagascar.
Okay, great, what time? Put it in a give me a gcal invite. I'll just clicks without looking at detail.
Sounds good. We got to make sure the time zone works out.
But you know, how often do you go to Madagascar?
As often as I can, But in a good year, I would say I try to go maybe once or twice a year for like a two to three month trip. It really just depends on the project and what we're trying to accomplish while we're there.
What is Madagascar like? I have clearly never been, but I can't even picture it.
It is extraordinary. It's a really large, diverse island. In fact, there's one argument to be made that it is so big and so diverse that we should really think about it more like a continent than we should like a country, just in terms of its geographic features. Mountains, you know, oceans, beaches, forests, rainforest, dry forests, highlands. It's just it's got everything you could
possibly want. And so the biodiversity and also the cultural diversity is equally as diverse to match that geographic diversity. So there's no one way to describe Madagascar.
It's just extraordinary, and our lemurs just Malagasy or do they live in other parts.
So lemurs are endemic only to the island of Madagascar, and in fact, many of us define a feature of lemurs as they're living only endemically on Madagascar. There is a population of some lemurs on the Comoros Islands, but there is a pretty strong evidence that they were introduced by people and do not naturally live there.
How many species of lemur, so.
We currently recognize one hundred and eight species of lemur.
There are also subspecies that push that number up so many, but it really kind of changes across years, and that's in part due to advancement in genetic sequencing, because there's quite a lot of diversity in lemurs that we can't necessarily see with our own eyes, because that diversity isn't present in how the animals look, but that diversity is present in their genomes, and so we need to do the genetic sequencing to see the diversity that we can't
visually see. And so as the community is sequencing more and more animals, they're gaining more clarity about how much diversity there really is, and so that's been causing a big increase in the number of species, which is why we keep seeing new lemur species discovered. We of course knew that animal lived there, but it's through understanding changes or differences in the genomes that we're understanding how many species there actually are.
So yes, genetic testing helps limerologists take a head count of how many species are roving about in this over two hundred thousand square mile island nation, which is about two and a half times the size of the UK. And if you're trying to get a visual picture, who think rocky deserts, brilliant blue lagoons, rainforests, mountains and savannahs silhouetted with Madagascar's iconic towering, thick trunk baobab trees. I have never Google image search Madagascar, but my heavens, it's
a gorgeous place. Also, it's filled with a primate that, for some reason just burn into my very heart. Every photo of a lemur hits you like it's your favorite child. And there are again one hundred and eight species plus more subspecies, which Lydia helps keep track of. How does that work. Do you like meat a lemur, you make friends with it, you're like a little bit of sleepy time, And then do you do a cheek swab like they do for like twenty three and meters.
So it really would depend on the species and the size of the lemur. From the bigger animals, where we can do really close behavioral observations because we can see them and they're active during the day, a lot of the genetics is done through fecal samples that are just
collected off the forest floor. For the small nocturnal lemurs, particularly the mouse lemurs that are as their name implies the size of a mouse, Being able to collect fecal samples from that animal as it's leaping through the tree
tops at night is near and possible. So for those species, we tend to use live traps like sherman traps or tomahawk traps baited with banana or peanut butter, and then we'll give the animal a brief physical exam under anesthesia so they're super comfortable and don't know what's going on, and then we'll usually take a small skin punch, like a little ear clip or something that they don't even
really notice. And grows back pretty well. And then after they recover from anesthesia, we'll give them another snack and then we'll release them that evening to their home territory, so they're removed from the forest for less than twenty four hours, and we make sure that they have a safe place to sleep at camp during the day.
Oh, mouse levers, Yeah, what do they look like?
They look like primate mice. I guess would be the So there are about twenty five species of mouse leamers, so there's actually quite a lot of diversity within that genus. But they're about forty to eighty grams at adult weight, so they're super small.
So they have a round body like a little pair and even with their furry tail, a mouse leamer is shorter than a human foot most human feet and many species of mouselemer have these little pointy elf ears. Sometimes they got a tiny tongue sticking out of their mouth, and of course a set of these gorgeous hazel eyes. They look like marbles shoved into a slipper.
And they have very large eyes, and they have quite the Napoleon complex because they're so tiny, they can be they can be quite feisty, but they're they're pretty remarkable in how they just navigate treetops being so small.
I mean, if you had asked me, like a pub quiz how many species of lemurs, I would have said, max four, three to four. I'm shocked by this.
That is incorrect. On your pub quiz, you would not gain that point. There are in fact five families of lemurs that diversify into fifteen genera and then over one hundred species. And I think what happens in sort of the American public knowledge is that we see images of a select few species that tend to be overrepresented in captive institution or that are really easy for people to
see in the wild and then get photographs of. But there are also all these other species, like the sport of lemurs, the wooly lemurs, all these different species of mouse sleamers, the fork marked lemurs that people don't really see or have as much connection to because some of them don't live in captivity or that wouldn't be the thing you would go see on a tour in Madagascar, and so we're just less familiar with those species in pop culture compared to say the ringtailed lemur.
Mm hmm, I gotta say, I'm shocked that there aren't more influencers that have mouse sleamers just as an exotic pet.
Oh my god, I'm so glad they don't.
I imagine if they have a Napoleon complex and jump around, it might be a little more difficult than having a squirrel.
Yeah, I think you know. Lemurs are primates, they're smart, they're social, They live their best lives in the environments in which they evolve to live, and so it's just not a great life for a lemur to be living by itself in somebody's house eating food. Didn't evolved to eat dog. So we tend to think about lemurs as living their best lives out in nature, in a nice quality habitat where there's plenty of fresh figs on the trees.
Do you say figs?
Yeah, the ficus trees are a big part of the diet of a lot of the fruit eating lemurs.
Well, let's backtrack a little and get into basics. What even is a lemur? In an email setting this up, I wrote to Lydia, I was like, Hey, the ologies feed is just screaming for a good monkey episode. Are lemurs monkeys? Just one of my many questions to which she was forced to reply, well, no, lemurs are decidedly not monkeys. I was kidding when I asked that, because they have long, curly tails and they bounce around in forest canopies, they're fuzzy. They live off the coast of Africa.
Of course, the monkeys, what else are they going to be? Hairy? Alligators, tree elephants, not monkeys. And here we are lemurs are not monkeys and they live in one island in the world. What is going on? What are they describe them? Thank you?
Yeah, so lemurs are not monkeys, but they're relatives of monkeys. So like monkeys, lemurs are primates. So they are one lineage within the order primates, that's the mammalian order that we belong to as well. And so the primates really split into two major groups. That's the strep serines and the halflarines. Now we humans are halflarines apes or halflarines. Monkeys are halflarines, and the lemurs, along with the lorises and the bush babies, clump over in the strepserine category.
And those words strepserine and halflarine actually have to do with the shape of the nose, and so you can classify primates first and foremost by what type of nose they have. So strepsis for turning in and rhine for nose in Greek, so they have sort of these sort of curlicue noses on their ends the strip serines do.
They're also known as the wet nose primates because lemurs have a wet, fleshy tip at the end of their nose, called a wet rhinarium, just like your dog or your cat would have, whereas the halflarines like us are the dry nose frimemates, And so as that name implies, they have a pretty good sense of smell and are much more sensitive to odors than we humans are.
So if I hid a cantelope and you loved cantelope, could you find the cantelope? You could if you were a ringtailed lemur. According to the twenty twenty one paper, ringtailed leamurs use old faction to locate distant fruit and researchers launched essentially like an Easter egg hunt with melons, but also hit some melon like objects that the paper called sham cantelopes, and the results our ringtailed friends could sniff out the real cantalope from nearly fifty feet away.
When the breeze drifted their direction, the sham telope remained unfound. But also reading the study, I learned that clinotaxis is a term that means to snoot around, sniff in the breeze until you find treasure. Just twitch in your little snooty snout sniffer. Total little snacky clinotaxis. But it's not
all sweetness or juicy melons. So a twenty eighteen press publication out of Lydia's own Duke University was titled in all caps, lemurs can smell weakness in each other, and it referenced the study costs of injury for scent signaling in a strep serene primate, and the researchers found the first off, lemurs can get into little tussles, little fights, especially when everyone's hornt up wants to bang. But sometimes
when lemurs get intovites. If one male is injured, others can tell just by his smell, and the paper detailed quote lemur genital secretions were significantly diminished and altered during injury, so smelling the wounded male's secretions mean he'd be picked on more because the other males knew he felt like shit. But wait back, I'm sorry, back up, what are what secretions? Oh? Yes, coo.
So male and female lemurs have glands in their crotches that ooze out sexy juices made up of up to three hundred different chemical compounds, and then they rubbed that stuff on branches like grif. That's a hinge profile. And one researcher at Duke said that this love butter is quite pungent and musky and quote not something you'd want to get a big whiff of. But luckily, as simple nosed haflarines, we wouldn't be able to smell as well as our lemeri wet nosed strip c arine friends, would.
We, especially me? And so then within the strip Serines, the lemurs are the sort of most diverse group within the strip Serines, and they live only on Madagascar, but they're also bush babies or galagos and lorises that live in continental Africa and then over in Asia, and they belong to the same group the strip Serinds. But monkeys are all the way over in the half Larines, so they're quite quite divergent from the lemurs.
I had no idea, does that come up? A lot. Is that the biggest question that you're having to correct. Do people just say, look at that monkey with the big eyes?
I would think that was the case maybe about ten years ago. The other big one for people who study anthropology or primatologies, that chimpanzees are not monkeys. That's a big one. And pop culture that people get cranky about as well. But I would say right now, the biggest question I get is, quote, do they like to move it? Move it?
Iruct, don't move it? Movement? I duck, don't move it movement?
That is the Madagascar movie. That is the dance that they do. And I have to clarify that lemurs, in fact, do not like to move it, move it.
This is good to know. And how did they all wind up on Madagascar?
Okay, so now we're getting into one of my favorite things on earth to talk about, and you're gonna have to cut me off when I ramble too much. No, never, because actually people usually ask me what's my favorite thing about lemurs, and I say it's the diversity of species and how that diversity came to be because it's actually
a rather extraordinary story. And so we have to go back to Pangaea when all of Earth's land masses were schmushed together in one land mass sandwich, and Madagascar was sandwiched between continental affor in India and was actually attached to Antarctica as well. And this was of course the age of the dinosaurs. Primates had not yet started evolving, but Madagascar had this connectivity to both continental Africa and
to India. And as Pangaea separates, Madagascar separates first from mainland Africa about one hundred and thirty million years ago and then separates from India about eighty to ninety million years ago, which means that it's been an island for eighty to ninety million years, which makes it one of
the oldest standing islands that's left around today. And for those of us who learned about the dinosaur extinction and the rise of the mammals, and like middle school science, you might have the number of sixty five million years ago in your brain. That is the asteroid that killed everything, and like fire and brimstone and dinosaurs going extinct, and from there, that mass extinction event is what allowed the mammals to sort of take dominance over the planet, including
the rise of the primates. And so we see primate evolution in the fossil record as really taking off around fifty five to sixty five million years ago, but Madagascar had already been an island for fifteen million years, and primate evolution is taking off in mainland Africa. So this big question in lemur biology had always been how did they get to Madagascar because there's this huge time gap in between when primates are evolving in Africa and when Madagascar became an island.
So Madagascar kind of chunked off of Africa like a bite out of a cookie. And then India sailed off to its current place as well, but very very slowly, and again roughly ninety million years ago.
And one of the unfortunate things about Madagascar is we don't really have a great fossil record around fifty five to sixty five million years, this exact window when lemurs would have first been getting to Madagascar, we don't have a fossil record. So we were all as a community pretty stumped by this question for a while. And I like, how I'm calling myself we as if I were part of this community. This all got done way before I got to college. But I'm going to get by self
a little credit here. And so the first thing that happened is people like doctor An Yoder, who use genetics as a sort of a puzzle solving technique, started to ask the question, well, can we place a molecular clock on the time at which lemurs got to Madagascar by comparing the genes of today's lemurs to their relatives in Africa, say the bush babies or called the Galagos, and can we figure out the date when these guys split from
each other? And also if all lemurs stem from one ancestor, or if we think there were multiple colonizing events.
So by looking at their sweet faced bush baby cousins on the African continent from a molecular genetic standpoint, they can figure out how many times groups of lamurs I guess they're called a conspiracy of lemurs came to this island to then branch off into over one hundred different species. So, okay, listen up, this is so cool. I love lemur origin story gossip.
And those data demonstrated a date around fifty eight million years ago plus or minus. And also that all lemurs stem from one colonizing event, So we know from genetics that lemurs got to Madagascar once and it happened about fifty eight million years ago, which is a pretty good window on when we think things were happening.
How far off the coast of mainland is Madagascar.
It's a couple hundred miles. Yeah.
Do you have to look to the Galapagos to try to figure out similar islands with a lot of diversity, Any correlations there?
Do you think I think there could be in that island. Systems often operate under similar dynamics. But where we really need to give credit is to a guy named George Gaillard Simpson, who in the nineteen forties, before genetic dating, before all of these sort of modern techniques, said well what if they rafted? And he came up with this idea of rafting as a way that animals would move
between land masses and across oceans. And so this is where the genetic data get combined with the ocean current data with Simpson's hypothesis about rafting and actually help us tell the story that we think what happened is some fifty eight million years ago, some small family group of early primates got washed out into the Mozambique Channel on a giant mat of floating vegetation in the middle of a cyclone, and the way the ocean currents worked back then,
it would have blown this vegetative matt from Mozambique over to Madagascar. And this happened probably once for lemurs, and it's just by luck that they got there. And what's extraordinary as well is that the same thing seems to have happened in more recent history with the rodents, the ten res, and the carnivores.
Some of those other mammals include a narrow striped mongoose, some flying fox, bats, and ten res which ps. When she said that I didn't know what a tenreck was, I thought it sounded like a mid size suv like Hyundai Tenreck. But no, it's a little pointy snouted mammal and their closest relative is an africans. True, So imagine all these critters' ancestors, each on their own journey, just swept to see on a plant boat, just hope and for the best. That's some real main character stuff right there.
So there were in fact four rafting events that gave rise to the mammalian biodiversity of Madagascar that we see today. Because of course, mammals were starting to evolve after Madagascar was already an island.
I wonder how long it would take in a cyclone to make it from the coast to an island on a mat of vegetation.
So I have heard of estimates as short as three days. I think I've heard ones as long as a month. There is one camp that suggests that those early primates that made that journey must have been hibernators in order to survive that. There's another camp that says hibernation and lemurs evolved de novo or newly evolved once they arrived in Madagascar. So there's sort of a lot of playtime and trying us trying to understand how this could have happened.
But of course without a fossil record, it's all just sort of like everyone making their best educated guests.
And does it not have a fossil record just because it doesn't have certain sedimentary rock climates.
So my sister's a geologist, and she's gonna roll her eyes really hard when she hears me try to explain this. So I apologize, Sarah. But from my understanding is that for the past sixty five million years, Madagascar has sort of been favoring erosion rather than deposition of soils, and so there's just not really good rock preservation for what was happening at the time when the first lemur would have arrived to Madagascar.
And if you had to describe a lemur, what are some features that are common. Let's say that you're looking at a lineup of fictitious and real lemurs. What makes a real lemur?
So they have a lot of primate traits, forward facing eyes, three D vision, five fingers, and opposable thumbs. Also a posable toes, big toes, that is, fingernails instead of claws. So all of these sort of characteristic primate traits. They also have a couple of things that make them distinct from the other type of primates, the monkeys and the apes,
including us the haplarines. They have this thing called a grooming claw, which is that the second toe is has a claw on the end of it instead of a nail, and that's for you know, scratching in your ear, and some of the older literature they call it a toilet claw, which I just think doesn't sound that nice to say anymore. So we've upgraded it to a grooming claw. And then they also have some weird things. Most lemurs, not all of them, have some weird things with their bottom front teeth.
So their incisors and their canines are sort of fused together and they lay flat and it looks like a comb. And this is how they groom their fur because lemurs do have opposable thumbs, but they do not have the manual dexterity that a monkey has, and so they're not very good at pinching, and so they end up using their teeth to groom the sort of grooming toothcomb in their in their jaws end upath. They clean their fur and their their groupmates fur. So not some with the hands.
Hey, if I like you and we're buds, I'll rake my teeth through your hair and maybe I'll eat what I find. What does leamur fur feel like?
They look so fuzzy, So don't touch wild lemers just as a preface, this gotcha. But there's a lot of variation in their fur. So some fur is super thin and super soft, so for animals that live in a warmer climate. For animals that are living in a colder climate, say the central Highlands where it's really cold in winter, they have really big thick, fluffy fur to keep them warm. The rough leamers that live on the very canopy of the rainforests where it's quite wet because it rains a lot.
It's also cold, have a very very thick coat that helps protect them from water. E eyes have very wiry, sort of bushy fur. So it really you know, different furs for different animals and different habitats for different functions. That's the story of lemurs, is a story of diversity.
Why do I eyes look like you put a demon in the wash and it's shrunk.
That's what we did. That was the evolution. That was the evolutionary process by which we got I eyes. Yeah, I can say that for sure. Washing machine.
Okay. Side note if you need a visual on these, picture something the size of a small cat but resembling a wingless bat with possom ears and a shock of black and silver hair that looks like a middle aged hangover. And the name II, which is spelled aye aye. It's thought to come from a Malagasy term for I don't know what the fuck that is. It literally means I don't know, imagine a creature so weird, so unsettlingly, horrifying
and cute that its name translates to idkidk. On top of that, they have long, beef jerky fingers that look like twigs but alive, and they use one skinnier finger to drum on branches and then they lean their ear on the wood to listen for some chubby maggot snacks inside, and then they use a different thicker finger to dig them out, like a toddler would plumb a nostril. So yeah, saying that iiyes, fulfill a particular niche in Madagascar, it's one way to put it.
No, So some things about eyes are just undescribable in terms of why, but basically, eyes evolve to fill a very particular niche in Madagascar, which is that they specialize on resources that are hard to extract, so think grubs inside trees or really fleshy nuts inside very very hard cases, or for example, coconut fruit, and so they are anatomically
set up to be able to extract these resources. So they have very very like strong, ever growing teeth that can just gnaw into anything, including like a padlock in captivity I've seen, or cement in captivity. They're extraordinarily strong in their jaws. But then they have this delicate, flexible, sensitive,
long middle finger that can scoop out resources. So they can scoop out, for example, a soft boiled egg out of its shell, and they can also scoop out the flesh of an orange or the flesh of a coconut after they've made a hole or a grub from inside a hole that they've not in a tree. So they just have this morphological toolkit to extract the resources that they need. And you see commonalities with other primates, So chimpanzees using a stick to fish for termites. I eyes
have their stick just in their body. It's their finger. But if you'd like to be extra horrified, there was actually an extinct giant II Daubintonia robusta that I'm actually kind of glad is extinct because I think it would be absolutely traumatizing to see that thing in the wild at night. But there's this very, very large cousin to today's II that that has now since gone extinct. Like the rest of the giant lemurs.
Lydia says that the vast majority of lemurs are nocturnal, but not all of them. So what's up with their big oldhead lights, orange eyes, huge eyes, what do we know about that?
So not all lemurs have orange eyes. So I would say lemurs do have huge eyes, particularly the nocturnal species, because seeing at night is difficult, and so the bigger the eyes, the more light they can capture. And so probably because early lemurs were likely nocturnal. And I can already hear people yelling at me that we don't know that for sure, which is the case, but it's possible that early lemurs were nocturnal, and so the sort of big eyes was sort of built into them as a
thing to help them survive. And you see even bigger eyes in primates like tarsiers, which is just go spend an hour on YouTube looking up tarsier eye videos and you'll be astonished.
So okay, all right, think of a ferbie that got photoshopped to have eyes twice as big but a nose half the size, So a tarsi. It's not a lemur, but rather it's a small camel colored angel that hugs tree branches and whose eye to face proportion is much closer to a roswell New Mexico alien head than any mammal on the planet.
And so I think part of it just has to with capturing light. Even the species that we think of as diurnal, like ringtail leamers, and particularly the brown lemurs, are actually casemeral, which means they can be active at night or during the day, depending on what's better for them.
So we see a lot of brown lemurs foraging at night during the warmest parts of the year when it's just really really energetically expensive to forage in the heat, so the forage at night instead, and so for them, there is a really good reason to maintain big eyes
that capture a lot of light. So it probably just has to do with functionality, But you do see a range and eye color across species from very very dark, like if you look at the all black chaffock, they have very very dark eyes, and then if you look at the cockrell chaffock, their eyes can be deep orange to light orange too yellow, to even light green. And then you have the blue eyed lemurs, who of course have blue eyes and they're like sapphire blue. So you
just get with everything in lemurs. It really depends on the species, and there's huge range. But the fact that even within a population you can have variation from light green to dark orange suggests to me that it's just variability. We do see more variability in coat coloring in some species that has to do with camouflage. So there was a paper that came out particularly for the schaffak showing that they tend to be darker where the habitat is cooler and wetter, which makes sense.
Why do we see so many ringtailed lemurs in captivity.
Because they are a flexible generalist that adapts well to different habitat conditions, and they survive well in captivity and breed well in captivity, and they're very easy to care
for in captivity. They're sort of like the rabbits of the lemur world, I guess, whereas a lot of the other species are quite ecologically specialized, so they maybe only live in one geographic area, or they evolve to eat one particular type of food, and they're very locally adapted, So finding ways to them outside of the place where they're really evolved in that place, finding ways to maintain them outside of that can be very difficult.
They're just down to hang Yeah, Okay, what about you? How did you get yourself to Madagascar a life journey? I understand that you were a ballet dancer, before, can you tell me a little bit about how the world conspired to make you a lemur scientist?
Yeah, I think this is I mean, like the arrival of lemurs in Madagascar. I think my story is one of accident rather than intent. So I grew up in New York City in a household of classical musicians, and so I was a very energetic child that was not going to be playing an instrument. So I got put in dance instead, and ballet was the way by which I could connect to my family's love of classical music, but do it in my own way, I think, And so yeah, I trained to become a professional, which didn't
work out very well. And luckily my college advisor in high school had suggested that I applied to Duke as a reach school, and nobody thought I would get in, but I did very grateful for that still to this day. And so after a two year deferral, when I tried to make my ballet career happen that didn't happen, I came to Duke looking for something else to do with my life. And I had been out of school for a while. I couldn't remember how to do basic algebra.
I was very nervous about getting back into academics, but I signed up for classes that sounded interesting, which included an introduction to evolutionary anthropology. I feel like that sounded like a science class that I could handle. And also I really knew that I liked animals, and they talked a lot in the synopsis for that course about primates, and I knew that those were animals, so I kind
of lunched onto that. And then at the same time, I needed a work study job, and the then Duke University Primate Center, which has now become the Duke Leamur Center, was hiring undergraduate tour guides, and so I was simultaneously taking a class about lemurs and primates and the place of humans and nature while I was starting to lead tour of this facility to talk to the general public about lemurs. So I sort of talk about how my career as a science communicator sort of co evolved at
the same time as my career as a scientist. And then when I came time for graduate school, I knew I wanted to spend time in Madagascar. I like working with the lemurs in captivity, but I'm an ecologist. I study I mean, I'm a limerologist for the purpose of this episode, but I really think of myself as as an ecologist. I fundamentally study lemurs in the context of where they live, and so that environment becomes really important.
And so I wanted to base quite a lot of my dissertation work in Madagascar, and then I ended up meeting my wife in Madagascar. She's Argentinian but was also working at Duke and so together we've done quite a lot of field work and she's really the field expert in our family, and so I sort of like follow her around, kind of like a puppy a lot in Madagascar as she sorts things out. There was no master plan here. It was just like fumbling around and finding things that I thought were interesting.
Well, I was going to ask you mentioned that before we started recording, that you're there for a few months at a time, and I was like, what about your wife though, But she comes with you as well.
Yeah, actually, more often than not she leaves me behind. So she just got back this week from a three month trip where I stayed here and took care of our cat and our house, and she went off gallivanting through the countryside working with our colleagues and our students there and collecting some data that we needed to fill
in some gaps. So Marina has been working in Madagascar since two thousand and four, so coming up on her twenty year work aversary there, and she's got quite deep ties to the island, a really solid network of collaborators and students, and I think she really feels comfortable, really really comfortable in Madagascar. In a tent, I just follow her around.
How long is the flight?
It depends on which way you go, but usually will take us about twenty four hours door to door. You can fly through Paris, you can fly through Ethiopia, you can fly through Kenya. You don't fly through Johannesburg. Just depends on which flights are cheapest.
Do you just knock yourself out? Do you just bendadool it the whole time?
Uh? No, I wish I could. I don't sleep on flights. I usually end up watching like the entire extended edition of The Lord of the Rings. I think there was one year I got through like five of the seven Harry Potter or eight Harry Potter movies in a row. At some point you're so bored you sleep for a couple hours and then they wake you up with food and you just arrive usually pretty pretty knackered, and you sleep for a day. When you get there.
Oh my god, can I ask you questions from patrons?
Yeah, they're excited about it.
But first let's show some love for lemurs by donating to a cause of Lydia's choosing. And she would love a donation to go to the Mahaliana Labs, which is an NGO running a veterinary science and training lab in Madagascar's capital city. And Lydia says that Mahaliana Labs are training the next generation of wildlife scientists and vets in Madagascar and they're doing wonderful work. So to find out more about them, visit Mahaliana dot org, which would be
linked in the show notes. And that donation was made possible by sponsors of the show. Okay, if you're a Patreon member at Patreontic compashologies for a dollar a month, you may have submitted questions before this recording. So let's make some heads and tails of these, starting with a great one asked by patrons. Lovely Bites, Earl of grammele Kin, curly Fry Sadie Bi pond, Ali Brown, Keegan Newman, Colleen Selwood, and first time question askers how do you and cue tip?
I want to know what's going on with the ringed tail? Why the rings? Why is it so fashionable?
I mean, who doesn't love a bold fashion statement.
I love stripes, longtime stripe where but how did they get them?
So there's sort of two schools of thought, and probably they're both right in terms of function, because for something that exceptional to evolve, it's probably going to be functional in some way. And so one school talks about it being actually functioning for camouflage, much like we don't think zebras would be very camouflage with their stripes, but they are. And so there's an idea that the tale actually helps with camouflage. Another is that it helps with social communication.
So ringtailed lemurs are quite terrestrial. They're the most terrestrial of all the lemurs. They spend the most time on the ground, up to eighty percent of their time can really be on the ground, and so when the troop is coordinating movements, you'll often see the dominant female lift her tail in the air, and that's sort of a
symbol for everybody else to follow her. The males also use their tails in this sort of competition stink fighting thing that they do, and so as a prequel or maybe to stave off being physically aggressive with one another, they actually fight with each other by getting their tails full of their different smells from their different sinc lands and then wafting it at each other or wafting it at the females. Is like a come hither kind of
a thing. And so the tail serves definite communicative functions in ringtailed lemur societies, but also probably helps with camouflage.
A feather boa soaked in buck cologne, which also lets you go low profile in a tree. I must have accessory. Ali Brown wants to know what noises do?
Lemurs make so many noises, so all the species have a different vocal repertoire, and there are noises for all sorts of things like ah, predator and like ooh friend, and so also like come here and find this food with me. So there's a lot of group coordination that happens.
There's also a lot of like hey, let's tell that group to back off that happens, so territorial vocalizations, and it really just depends on the species, so probably the most iconic vocalizations come from the rough leamers, and these animals live upway in the tippy top canopy of the rainforest.
There used to be some aerial predators that were much larger than today's predators that could pick them off when they were at the top of the trees, and so they have a quite elaborate alarm call repertoire to warn each other of, say, an incoming aerial predator. And that eagle that used to pick them off no longer exists, but you know, airplanes still look kind of scary when flying overhead, and so they still maintain this elaborate vocal
repertoire to warn about predators. And then the other really iconic vocalization would be the injury, which is the largest living lemur today. And these animals live in pair bonded, so male female pairs with their offspring, so quite a small social group, but they maintain very large territories and they do that through vocal communications. So the male and the female pair will duet with each other in this sort of series of cascading and decascating whoops that they make,
especially early in the morning. And it's a way for the pair to maintain their bonds and also to tell other pairs nearby, like, hey, this is our territory, leave us alone.
It's like the good morning text that's so sweet. Yes, and you know, keep like swooning audibly because it's too much just adorability for me to handle. A bunch of people wanted to know, like in Abby Greebe's words, Lemur seems so cute and lovable. Are they actually as sweet and nice as they seem? And Mary and Thomas said, my wife heard that they will kick seven shades of shit out of an unfamiliar Lemur. Is this true? What's
going on with their behavior? This was also on the minds of Macy Abbott, Marie Ea Kay, Joshua Tazen, Matt Herschel's wife Jenna, who wanted to know about their talents. But yes in first time questionsker Maria Kay's words, omg literally fave animals ever. But I've heard that some of them are violent.
So I don't think that they're like nasty animals by nature, right. I think when there's no reason for anger or violence, tends to be actually very calm. Lemur societies tend to be very pro social. So there's a lot of beautiful affiliative interactions like grooming and play and huddling and snuggling, and so you do see all of those beautiful interactions
as well. However, they are wild animals, and so when there's competition over food, overbreeding, over territory, like, yeah, they'll cut a bitch when they need to, because that's just life in the wild, right, you can't. Life in the wild is not always this peaceful thing that we imagine. And so if there's a fight over dominance in a ringtiled leamer society, the females can get mean towards each other if there's a fight over who gets the best
sleeping spot or who gets the best food resources. Yeah, they can be mean, but I don't think they are nasty by nature. It's just sometimes the situation calls for a little bit of aggression, and they are certainly capable of throwing punches in shade when they need to.
They just have boundaries. People, You should try it sometimes. Oh, do they use their grooming claw as kind of like packing a blade?
Nah, they got teeth for that, Okay, Jemma.
Wants to know. Behaviorally, are lemurs, silly.
Guys, juveniles can be. So one of the most wonderful things about primates, all primates and including lemurs, is that we have this extended period of juvenility between when we're
infants and when we're adults. And that extended period of juvenility often serves as a place where animals can gain the social and the life skills that they need to survive in adulthood, because lemur societies are socially complex, and there's a lot of rules you've got to learn, and a lot of bonds you got to form, and a lot of things you got to try and figure out. And so in that period of juvenility, we see a
lot of things like play. We see gangly animals who haven't reached their adult size yet, but their limbs seem to have grown faster than their brains. We see big ears, and we see lots of falls, and we see a lot of silliness, and that sort of period of juvenility is a really wonderful time to watch animals grow and develop and you know, get their own little personalities and figure out their own place in their group.
Olivia Eliason wants to know is it true that they do drugs?
No, yes, no, yes, there are. There is this sort of famous situation of a pair or a group of common black leamers I usually really say a population of common black leamers in the northwest Madagascar that have a habit of using the toxin from centipedes or millipedes as a way to like coat their body in this toxin so that they are like maybe less attractive to predators or maybe more attractive to friends. But also maybe there is a little bit of a drug induced stupor that they seem to enjoy.
What is in these magic millipedes? I know you want to know. So according to the twenty eighteen study potential self medication using millipede secretions in red fronted lemurs combining anointment and ingestion for a joint action against gastro intestinal parasites. So it's bends aquino which helps ward off mosquitos, which caramelaria and bonus. It also helps with the worms that
live around their anus. So they chew these millipedes, then they rub them all over their body like a deodoran stick, and then many times they end up chewing them like a erpo licorice, eating the whole thing up, which induces, a narcotic type intoxication that involve naps and so much drooling. They're drooling all over the place like a bloodhound, but drunk. But humans do that with beer and it offers no
protection from malaria or anal worms. Oh, speaking of liquids, Christian Jones wants to know why do lemurs hate water so much? It seems like all it takes to contain them is a small moat.
They don't swim. They do like to drink water, but they're not great swimmers. So they definitely didn't get to madagascarba swimming and so they yeah, they're just the swimming is not their jam. But of course there are a lot of lemurs that live in a rainforest, so they can't hate water that much because it rains a lot in the rainforest. But certainly they're not, you know, doing high dives off the diving board.
Listen, some of us don't like anger heroin. Maybe lemurs are their dry shampoo type. They do a little styling with some millipede poison. They're good to go. But what about lady lemurs? Are these insular primates more evolved than the United States government? You want to know about social structures patrons Curly Fry, Hannegory, Olivia Elias and Holly Spencer and Emily Herbert wants to know how did they evolve to become a species quote run by women. I understand
you mentioned they might be matriarchal. Is that true?
Yeah, So, with the exception of one group of brown lemurs, lemurs are female dominant, and so they are matriarchal or the females are in charge. The females can be mean, actually more often than the males. The females run things. And it's funny when you give tours there are a lot of women who are like, that's the way it should be, and their husbands are like, that's the way things are well. And so what we see in lemurs
is this clear female dominance. And I think this question is a good one, which is not just is that the case, but if so, why why do we see female dominance in lemurs when you don't necessarily see this in other primate societies. And it goes back to Madagascar because one feature of Madagascar is that it is extraordinarily heterogeneous and stochastic, meaning that the environments are super super variable.
There is variation across seasons. We have a yearly rainy season and a yearly dry season, and so that means there's a time of plenty and a time of scarcity. We have variation across years into how strong those rains are or how dry the year might be, so some years you might have really bad fruit even in the season of plenty. And then Madagascar frequently gets hit with these stochastic sort of random climate events like cyclones, droughts, floods that are of course now getting more frequent and
more intense. And so what that means is for lemurs is they have to expect, at some point in their lifespan for there to be really bad times. And how our females supposed to support pregnancy and lactation if there's this expectation of not great food around. And so one idea for the evolution of female dominance and lemurs is that the females basically took control so they could be guaranteed access to food, to be able to support pregnancy and lactation, access.
To check childcare, reproductive rights. That's interesting, it's interesting stuff. Maybe in another fifty five million years, so no Piper Jones, Earl Grahmulkin Amanda, Mary, the Grapefruit, Ron, Dick and Crane and Raha are want to know what's their intelligence? Like Mary us, just how smart are they?
Yeah, I also get this question a lot, and I think it's a good question to unpack because I think we have to think about how we're defining intelligence. I think we as humans tend to really place emphasis on things like cognitive intelligence, on counting, on reasoning, on math, on puzzle solving, and so in some cases, lemurs do very well on those tasks. Ringtail lemurs can count up to, say, for about seven. They can do some level of transitive inference.
If A is bigger than B and B is bigger than C, they can infer the relationship between A and C. But if you're comparing their cognitive reasoning skills to that of an ape, they're always going to look dumb by compared. However, if we think about intelligence instead as an animal's ability to survive in its environment, and we get rid of this focus on cognitive capacity as being the thing that defines intelligence, if we think about it as an ability
to survive. Where they are, lemurs are really really smart. They're doing pretty well in their habitats. They know how to find food, they know how to find mates, they know how to live and thrive. So I think they're pretty smart. But each species has its own different intelligence because they each have different problems to solve.
Are you figuring out your shit? Because that's the smartest a person can be. Put different people in front of a subway map, wish them luck. Ask me to drive a wheat combine. Watch me cry at the dashboard. Intelligent at what if it's doing life? You're doing fine. And lemurs they have street smarts to help them survive. But for how long now? Lovely bites asking for their son Elliott and Alfi Holmes want to know how long do they live? What's their life expectancy.
Also super depends on the species. Generally, the larger animals live longer, and so the smallest animals, the mouse sleamers, I would think in the wild, you know, a seven year old mouse slamer would be pretty old. In captivity, we can extend that up to fifteen. There are slightly larger cousins. The dwarflemers can live up to twenty nine under human care. We have ey eyes under human care that are in their mid thirties, so they can live
pretty long lives. There are cases of animals in their thirties and the wild just kicking it, chilling, doing their thing. So they are not as long lived as the apes, but they are very long lived compared to other mammals of their size. And probably my wife would be angry. I mean if I didn't mention that. There's this correlation in the lineages that do hibernate between hibernation and longevity.
So there's a one genus of lemurs called the dwarf Lemers or the chiro Gallias, and they are obligate hibernators, meaning every individual of every population and every speed hibernates every year, no matter what.
So, according to a twenty twenty one paper titled on the Modulation and Maintenance of Hibernation and Captive dwarf Flemers published in the journal Nature, fat tailed Dwarflemers can hibernate for up to seven months out of the year. Bless them. How do they sleep so long without a snack or a bevy? Well, they don't call them fat tailed for nothing.
In the feeding season, they can strup to forty percent of their body weight in their chubby tail along with water so it's like just being hooked up to a nutrient hose. And if you've ever needed an inspiration to slow down, the fat tailed dwarf flemer's heart rate drops from one hundred and eighty beats a minute to about eight. And fun aside, one of the authors on this paper was doctor Lydia Green herself, and so was doctor Marina Biblanco,
who is Lydia's wife. Life love lemurs. Now, this next question came from Joshua Tazen and they say it rhymes with and problems. Are they hibernating in nests in trees? Are they in burrows like Austin Power suggested? Where are they sleeping?
Yes? And yes? Okay, So it depends on the habitat. So in the east, in the rainforests where you have really spongy, thick, you know, really nice soil, they bury themselves underground. In the west, where we're on dry deciduous forests, where the soil is much sandier, and they probably can't dig into that, they use tree holes. Oh, got everything so fascinating, I.
Can't handle it. Destiny Lamb wants to know how faster lemurs could they personally outrun one Olivia wants to know why do some of them run skip sideways? Mikhaela Marshall asks why it jump like that?
Though, that's my favorite one.
Jarms wants to know has there been any measurement of lemur leaps? These jerks can jump? How do they do it? How far do they leave?
Also depends on the size of the species. And this gets into sort of some of the variation in more fall because we have lemurs that are quadrupeds, so they run on all fours, just like your dog or your cat would, So think of your ringtailed lemurs always on all fours. They run pretty fast. They can outrun me. I'm not a runner, but they're pretty speedy. The animals to outrun predators, they got to be the ones that
why do they move it like that? Though? Are probably referencing the shaffak or the group of lemurs called the Indura day.
You'd know these lemurs. So they're this ivory white everywhere, except they're kind of deep purplish red colored bellies, and they're the ones skipping and leaping and bouncing around like a fourth grader with a belly full of monster energy drink.
And so these species, along with the sport of Lemurs practice a different style of locomotion called vertical clinging and leaping or VCL if you're in the know and so here, the animals are vertically oriented and they have very very long, very powerful, muscular back legs, and they move from tree trunk to tree trunk in an upright posture, sort of leaping off, pushing with their back feet rotating in mid air, and then coming into the next tree trunk facing forward.
Our leaf eaters tend to live mid canopy, and so being able to leap vertically when you're going from tree
trunk to tree trunk is really helpful. The problem for those vertical clingers and leapers is when they get on the ground because they are not quadrupeds, so they can't run like a dog or a cat, and they have to do this awkward hop and that's because their legs don't really swing in their hip sockets the same way that a quadruped would because they're adapted for this vertical clinging and leaping, and so they have to do this awkward sideways sachet you stay hop on the ground, and
they're much faster in the trees, but they can still out run a predator if they need to.
Now Sachet oh Way, Spencer j and nick aher wants to know, in Spencer's words, what role do lemurs play in Malagassy folklore.
That's also a great question. So lots of different roles because there are lots of different lemurs, and also Madagascar has more than one ethnic group, so it's a really diverse culture as well. There's no one thing is Malagasy culture necessarily, so it really depends on the region. I'm going to be weary about speaking for Malagasy society because of course I'm not Malagassy, but this is what I've
learned from my Malagasy friends and colleagues. It's basically a lot of Malagasy society is governed by what are called fati or taboos, and there are some fatties that protect wildlife. So in many places there's fatty against hunting lemurs, particularly shaffock and injury, in part because they feature heavily in the origin story of humans, and there's a lot of recognition of human like features in some of these vertical species.
So I've heard stories about how shaffak moms carry their babies on their back, the same way that many Malagasy women carry their babies on their back, so there's a recognition in some of those species that contributes to these fatties that protect them and being hunted. There are other fadies that say I eyes are evil and they should be killed on sight because they're a bad omen. So it's really varied in terms of how the folklore relates
to the lemurs and the region as well. But probably the most famous story, at least in Western culture has to do with the injury Babakutu or the son of Kutu, and there's a couple different stories of Babakutu and how the injury came to be. Some tell of man and injury being brothers. Some tell of a father and his son and the kid gets lost and his father becomes
the injury or becomes Babakutu. But all of them sort of share the sort of intertwining history between humans and lemurs as a recognition of each other.
So injuries side note are lemurs that are stark, black and white. They're like a dog sized panda that's mixed with a koala, with these two fuzzy pom pom ears and these light green eyes that just interrogate your being and they're voeations sound kind of like a surprised cowboy like who. And yes, there are folkloric tales about the
injury lemur saving someone and then becoming revered. And so many species of lemur are prey to poachers looking for bush meat, which feeds both malnourished folks below the poverty line all the way up to the wealthier classes who prefer exotic game. But it's considered taboo to hunt the injury because they can be looked at like our ancestors. Speaking of family lines, well you mentioned babies, Madisine Wolf for a first time question asker, I want to know
how many babies do they typically have. Alexandra Catoul wants to know Lemur's one to one sex ed, let's get the dirty. Sarah King wants to know do they mate for life? Storm has a question from their mom. Why do Lehmur moms just leave their young if they're not strong enough. She's still mad over that one David Attenborough episode where the Lemur mom abandons her baby because it couldn't hold on. So how are they making other tiny cue lemurs?
Yeah, so again this is going to go back to Madagascar, which is that when you evolve in a very very seasonal environment, your reproduction can become seasonal. And so basically all breeding in lemurs, with kind of the exception of the II, but excluding the II, the rest of the species, their breeding is timed such that the kids are weaning in the season of plenty, and different lemurs have different gestation periods or different periods of dependence on mom for nursing,
and so they all breed at different times. But basically then all the kids wean and start eating solid food at around the same time, regardless of species in the rainy season, because you want your kid to have the best chance of going up healthy and strong, and so that best chance would be when there's food around. And so it really depends when they're breeding, on when they're actually going to give birth, and how long the kids are going to nurse, so it's super variable as well.
The mouse and dwarf lemurs have only about a sixty day pregnancy is quirk. The chaffak it's more like five months five and a half months, so it's again super super variable. These smaller lemurs like the mouse and dwarf lemers will have anywhere from a singleton to triplets. I've also heard cases of quads, but that's pretty atypical. Your lemurrids, so your ringtail leamers, your brown lemurs, your bamboo lemers
usually have singletons or twins. Your rough sleamers can have the biggest litters of four, up to five I've heard cases of. And they do this fascinating thing where they have like these boom or bust years, so in really good years, basically all the females will reproduce and then they co raise their kids in kindergartens together where there's a lot of alo maternal care, so caring for other other mom's kids, and then she cares for your kids
as well. So that's sort of this fascinating system if you're going to be a really heavy fruit eater and you want to time everything for years of really really good fruiting. So there's a lot of variation in it, but basically it's very very very seasonal.
And how are they doing the nasty? Do they mate for life or do they have orgies in treetops.
It depends on the species. So we have some species that are pair bonded for life. The most classic and beautiful example, I think would be the red bellied leamer. They live in just these beautiful pairs that mate for life. A lot of dwarf flemers also will be in very very strongly bonded pairs that mate for life injury are the same.
Aw some are so romantic, others less so.
And then we have the other end of the spectrum, which is the ringtail leamer, which is a very promiscuous, multi male, multi female kind of like a frat party that happens around mating season where there's a lot of competition and there's a lot of female choice. There's even things like paternity confusion, so mating with multiple males so nobody knows whose kid is who's and yeah, it's just kind of a mess.
I mean, I'm feeling like, because they're so cute, they have tiny, tiny dicks. Is that true.
It depends on the species as well. So what we tend to see in primates and probably in other mammals as well, is that when there's intense competition for paternity, you tend to have much bigger testes and much bigger sperm competition. So, for example, male mouse lemers have just enormous testies in the breeding season.
Mouse lemurs, of course, smaller than a microwave burrito, about the size of a small squirrel. They're furry, they're golden brown, huge eyes. They could just sit right in your palm. But it's nardsac is the size of a walnut, the largest among all primates. The lead researcher on the job offered the visual if humans had testicles of an equivalent size, they would be as large as two grapefruits. All lamurs, we've got to know you so well.
And again, this season is a really short window. So outside of the breeding season they regress their testes and you can't really see them at all because it's a waste of energy to maintain those enormous testies. But we tend to see smaller testes in pair bonded species where the males are pretty confident that they're going to be the dad and they don't need to sort of fight for it at all. So once again, sociality and evolution go hand in hand.
I love that having big balls is actually the sign that you're a cock. Yeah, exactly one thing that a lot of people talk about. The obvious question that we have not yet answered was asked by Patron's Mouse, Mish the Fish, Amanda Camlet, Susan Singley, and Fi Cameron. No one talks about that so many people, which is why I've saved it to the end. Want to know Nova first time question asker, what do you think about King
Julian from Madagascar? How do you feel about the portrayal of lemurs in Madagascar movie?
I wish you could see the eye roll in my face right now. So I want to give the movie credit where credit I think is due, which is that over the course of my career, the questions went from what is a lemur? To oh, I know what lemurs are because of this movie, and now I want to know more. So I do think that the movie gave the general public an understanding of lemurs and where they come from in a way that wasn't present before the
movie franchise. However, I do think they could have gone things a bit more accurate, my favorite being, of course, that King Julian should be Queen Julian. Lemos are female dominant, and that was such a good opportunity to teach everybody that there is more than one way to structure a society, and that women can play and females can play a really important role in governance and being in charge based on a real life situation, and they missed.
That boat or that raft of vegetation.
So that's the part that makes I think a lot of us pretty annoyed. And also like, there are no giraffes in Madagascar, and none of the African megafauna is in Madagascar. They all missed the raft. None of them got from continental Africa over to Madagascar. So there's just also some misinformation that has resulted from the sort of poster of the movie being the title Madagascar with then like a giraffe and a hippo and like a penguin
and a lemur. So it gets some credit, but it also could have made things a bit more accurate.
I had no idea. Thank you for clearing that up. A bunch of people and Kyla c red seedar Lily, Jen McGillivray, Sarah piat Alia Myers, Katie Harris, Emily Hebert also wanted to know about Zoom Zoom Buddha the Boom. Thank you.
Yeah, this was a TV show for kids in the.
Sin Martin saw something strange. Leader who liked you bouncing.
I was a little bit too old to ride the Zaboomafoo bandwagon. But this was a show that was filmed for Wild Crats, And there's a lot of ties between the Crap Brothers and Duke because they went to Duke and they were involved out at the Lemur Center. And so they chose a cockroll Scheffac, which by the way, is the best Lemur species. They chose a cockroll Scheffak as their mascot, and it was this puppet named Zabu, and they did some filming for their entrance sequence using
a real Leamur whose name was Jovian. And so Jovian is actually Zabo and he lived his whole life at the Duke Leamer Center and has a bunch of kids and grandkids and I think even have great grandkids that are that are out there. And so Jovian actually was part of my senior thesis. He contributed to data for my dissertation. So I had a long history with that family outside of the TV franchise.
Did he pass away?
He did. He was I think twenty, so he got to be decent age.
A lot of people want to know Amy zm raina Adam Weaver, Connor Chapman wants to know our lemurs at risk are endangered, Becky the sasse Segrat scientist, how can we help the precious baby lemur loves? Do you need volunteers at the Lemur Center? Please? I'm begging you, says Taylor Wade. And also, of course Papuka thirty four wants to know what impact will climate change have on lehmur populations? How are they doing? How can we help them?
So lemurs are super endangered for a number of reasons, and part of it is just that, like a lot of lemurs are naturally geographically or ecologically specialized, meaning they only live in one place and they really only survive by eating, for example, one thing, And so for some of these species, there's not a whole lot of natural resilience or flexibility encoded in how they operate, and so those species tend to be quite at risk from habitat
loss or habitat fragmentation or also climate change. So there is this real pressure for many species in the wild that is just present and real, and where I would spend a little bit more time talking is not about the fact that they are endangered, because like most wildlife, they are endangered, but we tend to spin why they're endangered as being the fault of Malagasy people for destroying
their habitat. And I think that's the part where we need to have a change in conversation, which will also feedback into like how do we help, because the reality is that like Malagasy people also need land, it's also their country, and so there is this competition over space for farming Malagasy people. Many of them also have a deep respect for the forest and for the environment, and they rely on the forest and they don't want the
forest gone. There's a growing ecotourism industry in Madagascar that also is dependent on intact habitats and healthy habitats and healthy ecosystems and lemurs being there. And so we have to change how we talk about the conservation crisis in Madagascar and where we place blame because a lot of the problems actually developed as a consequence of colonialism on the island and not necessarily because of what the indigenous
population is doing. So to the answer of how can we help, I think we have to make sure that we are lifting up Malagasy leaders, conservation leaders and scientific leaders who are being agents of change in their own country and recognize that the voice of Westerners cannot be louder than the voice of Malagasy because it's not our country. And so making sure that we are donating to and supporting causes that are run by Malaeas leaders and Malagasy
experts that are providing training opportunities for Malagasy students. So if you can find organizations that are run by Malagasy leaders that are doing good work, even if it's small scale, I think that's a really really good way to help.
Yeah, wonderful, and thank you for the suggestion for where to donate.
Yeah, so can I give a particular shout out to Mahalina run by doctor Feede Russ and Bahnardiev and Elizabeth Toomey who are doing really good work in Madagascar to support veterinary and conservation students, basically teaching them all the things that a scientist needs as they're growing into their own.
And again we'll be linking those in the show notes. And this answer is shocking to me. I mean the underlying question I feel like we all have. It's like, why are they so cute? What's happening in our brains when we see them. Is it the gigantic eyes?
I think it probably is the gigantic eyes. So this is where me and other primatologists might differ, because the closer I get to human looking, the more scared I am, and the less like cute I find them. Like I am, I am very intimidated by baboons and macaques, and by like chimpanzees and gorillas. I'm really like, don't ever want to come in contact with any of those animals. I'm so great, like so happy that people are studying them,
but that is just not my jam. So for me, lemurs like are basically on the other end of the primate spectrum where they could almost not be primates, and they fall into sort of the bucket of cute mammals. But they still have fur and they're still like, you know, they're small, They're not terrifying. Maybe some of the extinct lemurs that were like the size of like female gorillas,
I would have felt more intimidated by. But there's something very not intimidating about a lemur, maybe unless you're another lemur. So for sure, it's the eyes, it's the fluffiness, it's the beautiful coat colorings. Often the pictures that we're seeing in the videos we're seeing are of animals, you know, that are eating really nutritious food and so look wonderful
and healthy and super fluffy. The are adorable. It's just, you know, I'm here being a scientist and talking about how cute they are, which just sounds very like not you know, objective, but it is. They are just adorable.
What about the hardest thing about studying lemurs? What sucks about your job? Other than maybe the flights.
The flights are not great for sure. It is working on an endangered system. Like sometimes you just have to put out of the back of your brain, like how endangered these animals are to focus on the task at hand. It can just be mentally exhausting. It is exhausting when a population you've been studying gets hit by a hunting wave or by cyclone. Seeing animals that you've spent a long time studying go missing or get lost is just
really really difficult. It's also just part of nature sometimes, I think recognizing that nature is just harsh is part of it. It can just take an emotional toll. So sometimes you need like a nice hot shower and a cup of tea to remind yourself of why you got into this. And then there's the other like physical aspect of it, like field work is really difficult. It is
physically difficult. It is emotionally difficult. Sleeping in a tent, not having access to running water or a bathroom, getting up early in the morning, not getting the data that you expected to get, worrying that you're not fulfilling your obligations to the community or to your grant that you promised because you can't find the animals that you thought was there. All of that takes a toll over time. But I mean what I do anything else, probably not.
What do you love the most about it or what is your favorite lemur? I feel like you maybe mentioned the chaffak, but I'm not sure.
Yeah, there are nine species of chaffak, and the best ones the cockroll chaffock, and I can hear people yelling at me through Instagram right now. For me, it's the cockroll chaffock just because it's a species I've been working on for working with I should say for close to seventeen years now, so there's just a familiarity with that
species that I have. I also think they're coloring is beautiful, the sort of warm maroon of their arms and legs, with the like luscious cream of their body, this variation and eye color that we talked about. They're just they're beautiful to look at. They're dopey and behavior, they're smart,
they just have it all. I think the best part is seeing them in the wild, and it's also recognizing that as many data as I generate and as many papers as I publish for students, as I mentor like, ultimately those animals are there just living their lives, having nothing to do with me, and just getting to see them do their thing without them caring at all that I exist is actually really rewarding. Like they're unforaging, they don't care that I'm there, they're up brooming, they don't
care that I'm there. Like, I just get to observe without disturbing, And that's sort of an extraordinary place to stand there and be in just to see thank.
You for taking us to Madagascar. From I'm an oral standpoint, I mean, this has been an absolute thrill to talk to you about this. It's been a long time coming, and you're just a gem in this field.
Oh that's so kind. Yeah, I think next stop is actually a collaborative trip to Madiascar.
Send me details. Honestly, I will go. Can I come too?
What month? I should tell you what month? Do not go in the rainy season? Okay, so sometime like between April to October is the best time of year.
Let me know when you're headed there next Yeah, seriously, we have it on record. Deal. Well, thank you so much, doc, This has just been the best.
It's my pleasure. Thank you very much for having me.
I love that.
Oh my god, it is that mad. So ask smart people, not smart questions, because you're going to remember the answer long after they had forgotten that you ever asked it. And huge, huge thanks to doctor Lendia Green for hopping
on episode with me. You can follow her and her wife, fellow limerologist, doctor Marina Blanco on Instagram at Leemur Scientist and we'll put more links, including one to the NGO charity, and we'll of course have more links to research on our website at aliward dot com slash ologies slash limerology. We are at ologies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm at
ali Ward with one L on both. We also have smologies which are shorter, classroom friendly episodes that are all available to download for free at aliward dot com slash Ssmologies that's linked in the show notes. Aaron Talbert is our Ologies podcast Facebook group admin. Emily White of the Ordery makes our professional transcripts. Noel Dilworth is our scheduling producer. Susan Hale is our managing director. Kelly R. Dwyer makes
our website and can make yours too. And the rare specimen who pieces the show together each week is lead editor Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio. Nick Thorburn wrote the theme music and if you stick around until the end of the episode, I tell you a secret. And this week it's that one of the ornaments on our Christmas tree this year is this rockhard bow decay show. I don't know how if I'm I think I'm pronouncing that right.
It's this Brazilian cheese roll. When we were decorating the tree like a year ago with our friend Chason, he strung this Trader Joe's appetizer cheese biscuit on a popcorn garland for us to find later and I was so touched. I kept it and I froze it for a whole year, and then now it's a holiday fixture. We've made it into an ornament. So far nothing else is trying to eat it. It really is like a geological specimen at this point. Also another secret, This is the quickest turnaround
I've ever managed on an episode. It's now midnight, and I recorded this with Lydia at seven point thirty this morning. But I shuffled some episodes around because I really wanted this one to go up. I think we all needed it. Okay. Also, my dog looks like an I I look it up forerebye.
Pacadermatology, homeology, ydo zoology, lithology, in zeroonology, meteorology, pactology, ethology, seiology, elinology.
Move it, move it