Speaker 1: Oh hey, it's the bird hanging out near your park bench,
Speaker 1: hoping that your sandwich crumbles into pieces. Alley, ward and listen.
Speaker 1: No matter what place in your life, lemurs have make
Speaker 1: some room because it's about to get bigger. What are
Speaker 1: these animals? Well, the most endangered mammals on earth, but
Speaker 1: also I'm going to be a little shallow. They're the cutest,
Speaker 1: and in that ven diagram of adorable and vulnerable, there
Speaker 1: exists pure relevance. So this guest is someone whose work
Speaker 1: I've loved for years. She's based at Duke University in
Speaker 1: North Carolina, where there is a world renowned Lemur Center.
Speaker 1: They got free range lemurs running all over the forests.
Speaker 1: As lemur ecologists assist with conservation breeding programs. They take notes,
Speaker 1: they watch them, they collect their poop, doing non invasive research.
Speaker 1: It's a dream. You can also visit the Duke Gleamer
Speaker 1: Center and you can look at lemurs if so inclined,
Speaker 1: which who wouldn't be. So this ologists did their undergrad
Speaker 1: at Duke in evolutionary anthropology and they did a PhD
Speaker 1: in ecology studying lemurs in Madagascar, and she's worked at
Speaker 1: the Duke Lemur Center did a postdoc at a lemur
Speaker 1: lab studying adaptation and hibernation, and she's an excellent science
Speaker 1: communicator and a champion of lemurs. We're going to get
Speaker 1: into it, including questions that you submitted via patreon dot
Speaker 1: com slash Ologies, which you can join for a hot
Speaker 1: dollar a month. Thank you to patrons and to everyone
Speaker 1: out there wearing ologies merch fromologiesmerch dot com. Thanks also
Speaker 1: to everyone who's ever written a review, which really helps
Speaker 1: keep us up in the charts where more people can
Speaker 1: find us. And I read everyone, including one this week
Speaker 1: from Haley, a cancer biologist, another from MM Marshall twenty,
Speaker 1: who wrote, if you need to reignite your sense of
Speaker 1: wonder and awe in the universe because hyper focusing on
Speaker 1: all your problems has made you forget that we are
Speaker 1: statistically anomalists flesh sas on a spinning rock in space.
Speaker 1: This podcast may help. M Marshall twenty. I'm right there
Speaker 1: with you. I'm on this rock. I'm ready to hear
Speaker 1: about lemurs. So, due to time zones, I got up
Speaker 1: a little early and this was recorded in pajamas Liio.
Speaker 1: Good morning, Good morning, seven thirty am Pacific time. We're
Speaker 1: talking lemurs.
Speaker 2: It's a good thing to talk about.
Speaker 1: First thing, Yes, it was so. First off, the word
Speaker 1: lemur comes from the Latin for ghosts or spirits of
Speaker 1: the dead, because of their nighttime prowlings. And yes, people
Speaker 1: who study lemurs are limerologists, just straight up. That's the word.
Speaker 1: It's on their LinkedIn bios. It's a term used in journals.
Speaker 1: Limerologist is a thing that you can be, and you
Speaker 1: might want to be after this, So tuck in or
Speaker 1: hop around to hear about dangerous, fateful journeys, button noses,
Speaker 1: saucer eyes, striped tales, movie flimplam, tiny demons, giant anatomy,
Speaker 1: weird toe claws, matriarchies, madagascar, landscapes, folklore, travel tale, and
Speaker 1: why intelligence is really all about how you use it.
Speaker 1: With wildlife ecologist and limerologist, doctor Lydia Green.
Speaker 2: My name is Lydia Green and I go by she.
Speaker 1: Her pronouns lemurs, lemurs, lemurs. I've known of you, We've
Speaker 1: been friends mutuals, as they say online, for quite some time.
Speaker 1: I've wanted to come down to the Lemur Center and
Speaker 1: have not been able to, and you so graciously let
Speaker 1: me interview you remotely Can I still come to the
Speaker 1: Lemur Center at some point.
Speaker 2: Yes, But what I would suggest would be even better
Speaker 2: if you came with me to Madagascar.
Speaker 1: Okay, great, what time? Put it in a give me
Speaker 1: a gcal invite. I'll just clicks without looking at detail.
Speaker 2: Sounds good. We got to make sure the time zone
Speaker 2: works out.
Speaker 1: But you know, how often do you go to Madagascar?
Speaker 2: As often as I can, But in a good year,
Speaker 2: I would say I try to go maybe once or
Speaker 2: twice a year for like a two to three month trip.
Speaker 2: It really just depends on the project and what we're
Speaker 2: trying to accomplish while we're there.
Speaker 1: What is Madagascar like? I have clearly never been, but
Speaker 1: I can't even picture it.
Speaker 2: It is extraordinary. It's a really large, diverse island. In fact,
Speaker 2: there's one argument to be made that it is so
Speaker 2: big and so diverse that we should really think about
Speaker 2: it more like a continent than we should like a country,
Speaker 2: just in terms of its geographic features. Mountains, you know, oceans, beaches, forests, rainforest,
Speaker 2: dry forests, highlands. It's just it's got everything you could
Speaker 2: possibly want. And so the biodiversity and also the cultural
Speaker 2: diversity is equally as diverse to match that geographic diversity.
Speaker 2: So there's no one way to describe Madagascar.
Speaker 1: It's just extraordinary, and our lemurs just Malagasy or do
Speaker 1: they live in other parts.
Speaker 2: So lemurs are endemic only to the island of Madagascar,
Speaker 2: and in fact, many of us define a feature of
Speaker 2: lemurs as they're living only endemically on Madagascar. There is
Speaker 2: a population of some lemurs on the Comoros Islands, but
Speaker 2: there is a pretty strong evidence that they were introduced
Speaker 2: by people and do not naturally live there.
Speaker 1: How many species of lemur, so.
Speaker 2: We currently recognize one hundred and eight species of lemur.
Speaker 2: There are also subspecies that push that number up so many,
Speaker 2: but it really kind of changes across years, and that's
Speaker 2: in part due to advancement in genetic sequencing, because there's
Speaker 2: quite a lot of diversity in lemurs that we can't
Speaker 2: necessarily see with our own eyes, because that diversity isn't
Speaker 2: present in how the animals look, but that diversity is
Speaker 2: present in their genomes, and so we need to do
Speaker 2: the genetic sequencing to see the diversity that we can't
Speaker 2: visually see. And so as the community is sequencing more
Speaker 2: and more animals, they're gaining more clarity about how much
Speaker 2: diversity there really is, and so that's been causing a
Speaker 2: big increase in the number of species, which is why
Speaker 2: we keep seeing new lemur species discovered. We of course
Speaker 2: knew that animal lived there, but it's through understanding changes
Speaker 2: or differences in the genomes that we're understanding how many
Speaker 2: species there actually are.
Speaker 1: So yes, genetic testing helps limerologists take a head count
Speaker 1: of how many species are roving about in this over
Speaker 1: two hundred thousand square mile island nation, which is about
Speaker 1: two and a half times the size of the UK.
Speaker 1: And if you're trying to get a visual picture, who
Speaker 1: think rocky deserts, brilliant blue lagoons, rainforests, mountains and savannahs
Speaker 1: silhouetted with Madagascar's iconic towering, thick trunk baobab trees. I
Speaker 1: have never Google image search Madagascar, but my heavens, it's
Speaker 1: a gorgeous place. Also, it's filled with a primate that,
Speaker 1: for some reason just burn into my very heart. Every
Speaker 1: photo of a lemur hits you like it's your favorite child.
Speaker 1: And there are again one hundred and eight species plus
Speaker 1: more subspecies, which Lydia helps keep track of. How does
Speaker 1: that work. Do you like meat a lemur, you make
Speaker 1: friends with it, you're like a little bit of sleepy time,
Speaker 1: And then do you do a cheek swab like they
Speaker 1: do for like twenty three and meters.
Speaker 2: So it really would depend on the species and the
Speaker 2: size of the lemur. From the bigger animals, where we
Speaker 2: can do really close behavioral observations because we can see
Speaker 2: them and they're active during the day, a lot of
Speaker 2: the genetics is done through fecal samples that are just
Speaker 2: collected off the forest floor. For the small nocturnal lemurs,
Speaker 2: particularly the mouse lemurs that are as their name implies
Speaker 2: the size of a mouse, Being able to collect fecal
Speaker 2: samples from that animal as it's leaping through the tree
Speaker 2: tops at night is near and possible. So for those species,
Speaker 2: we tend to use live traps like sherman traps or
Speaker 2: tomahawk traps baited with banana or peanut butter, and then
Speaker 2: we'll give the animal a brief physical exam under anesthesia
Speaker 2: so they're super comfortable and don't know what's going on,
Speaker 2: and then we'll usually take a small skin punch, like
Speaker 2: a little ear clip or something that they don't even
Speaker 2: really notice. And grows back pretty well. And then after
Speaker 2: they recover from anesthesia, we'll give them another snack and
Speaker 2: then we'll release them that evening to their home territory,
Speaker 2: so they're removed from the forest for less than twenty
Speaker 2: four hours, and we make sure that they have a
Speaker 2: safe place to sleep at camp during the day.
Speaker 1: Oh, mouse levers, Yeah, what do they look like?
Speaker 2: They look like primate mice. I guess would be the
Speaker 2: So there are about twenty five species of mouse leamers,
Speaker 2: so there's actually quite a lot of diversity within that genus.
Speaker 2: But they're about forty to eighty grams at adult weight,
Speaker 2: so they're super small.
Speaker 1: So they have a round body like a little pair
Speaker 1: and even with their furry tail, a mouse leamer is
Speaker 1: shorter than a human foot most human feet and many
Speaker 1: species of mouselemer have these little pointy elf ears. Sometimes
Speaker 1: they got a tiny tongue sticking out of their mouth,
Speaker 1: and of course a set of these gorgeous hazel eyes.
Speaker 1: They look like marbles shoved into a slipper.
Speaker 2: And they have very large eyes, and they have quite
Speaker 2: the Napoleon complex because they're so tiny, they can be
Speaker 2: they can be quite feisty, but they're they're pretty remarkable
Speaker 2: in how they just navigate treetops being so small.
Speaker 1: I mean, if you had asked me, like a pub
Speaker 1: quiz how many species of lemurs, I would have said,
Speaker 1: max four, three to four. I'm shocked by this.
Speaker 2: That is incorrect. On your pub quiz, you would not
Speaker 2: gain that point. There are in fact five families of
Speaker 2: lemurs that diversify into fifteen genera and then over one
Speaker 2: hundred species. And I think what happens in sort of
Speaker 2: the American public knowledge is that we see images of
Speaker 2: a select few species that tend to be overrepresented in
Speaker 2: captive institution or that are really easy for people to
Speaker 2: see in the wild and then get photographs of. But
Speaker 2: there are also all these other species, like the sport
Speaker 2: of lemurs, the wooly lemurs, all these different species of
Speaker 2: mouse sleamers, the fork marked lemurs that people don't really
Speaker 2: see or have as much connection to because some of
Speaker 2: them don't live in captivity or that wouldn't be the
Speaker 2: thing you would go see on a tour in Madagascar,
Speaker 2: and so we're just less familiar with those species in
Speaker 2: pop culture compared to say the ringtailed lemur.
Speaker 1: Mm hmm, I gotta say, I'm shocked that there aren't
Speaker 1: more influencers that have mouse sleamers just as an exotic pet.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, I'm so glad they don't.
Speaker 1: I imagine if they have a Napoleon complex and jump around,
Speaker 1: it might be a little more difficult than having a squirrel.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think you know. Lemurs are primates, they're smart,
Speaker 2: they're social, They live their best lives in the environments
Speaker 2: in which they evolve to live, and so it's just
Speaker 2: not a great life for a lemur to be living
Speaker 2: by itself in somebody's house eating food. Didn't evolved to
Speaker 2: eat dog. So we tend to think about lemurs as
Speaker 2: living their best lives out in nature, in a nice
Speaker 2: quality habitat where there's plenty of fresh figs on the trees.
Speaker 1: Do you say figs?
Speaker 2: Yeah, the ficus trees are a big part of the
Speaker 2: diet of a lot of the fruit eating lemurs.
Speaker 1: Well, let's backtrack a little and get into basics. What
Speaker 1: even is a lemur? In an email setting this up,
Speaker 1: I wrote to Lydia, I was like, Hey, the ologies
Speaker 1: feed is just screaming for a good monkey episode. Are
Speaker 1: lemurs monkeys? Just one of my many questions to which
Speaker 1: she was forced to reply, well, no, lemurs are decidedly
Speaker 1: not monkeys. I was kidding when I asked that, because
Speaker 1: they have long, curly tails and they bounce around in
Speaker 1: forest canopies, they're fuzzy. They live off the coast of Africa.
Speaker 1: Of course, the monkeys, what else are they going to be? Hairy? Alligators,
Speaker 1: tree elephants, not monkeys. And here we are lemurs are
Speaker 1: not monkeys and they live in one island in the world.
Speaker 1: What is going on? What are they describe them? Thank you?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so lemurs are not monkeys, but they're relatives of monkeys.
Speaker 2: So like monkeys, lemurs are primates. So they are one
Speaker 2: lineage within the order primates, that's the mammalian order that
Speaker 2: we belong to as well. And so the primates really
Speaker 2: split into two major groups. That's the strep serines and
Speaker 2: the halflarines. Now we humans are halflarines apes or halflarines.
Speaker 2: Monkeys are halflarines, and the lemurs, along with the lorises
Speaker 2: and the bush babies, clump over in the strepserine category.
Speaker 2: And those words strepserine and halflarine actually have to do
Speaker 2: with the shape of the nose, and so you can
Speaker 2: classify primates first and foremost by what type of nose
Speaker 2: they have. So strepsis for turning in and rhine for
Speaker 2: nose in Greek, so they have sort of these sort
Speaker 2: of curlicue noses on their ends the strip serines do.
Speaker 2: They're also known as the wet nose primates because lemurs
Speaker 2: have a wet, fleshy tip at the end of their nose,
Speaker 2: called a wet rhinarium, just like your dog or your
Speaker 2: cat would have, whereas the halflarines like us are the
Speaker 2: dry nose frimemates, And so as that name implies, they
Speaker 2: have a pretty good sense of smell and are much
Speaker 2: more sensitive to odors than we humans are.
Speaker 1: So if I hid a cantelope and you loved cantelope,
Speaker 1: could you find the cantelope? You could if you were
Speaker 1: a ringtailed lemur. According to the twenty twenty one paper,
Speaker 1: ringtailed leamurs use old faction to locate distant fruit and
Speaker 1: researchers launched essentially like an Easter egg hunt with melons,
Speaker 1: but also hit some melon like objects that the paper
Speaker 1: called sham cantelopes, and the results our ringtailed friends could
Speaker 1: sniff out the real cantalope from nearly fifty feet away.
Speaker 1: When the breeze drifted their direction, the sham telope remained unfound.
Speaker 1: But also reading the study, I learned that clinotaxis is
Speaker 1: a term that means to snoot around, sniff in the
Speaker 1: breeze until you find treasure. Just twitch in your little
Speaker 1: snooty snout sniffer. Total little snacky clinotaxis. But it's not
Speaker 1: all sweetness or juicy melons. So a twenty eighteen press
Speaker 1: publication out of Lydia's own Duke University was titled in
Speaker 1: all caps, lemurs can smell weakness in each other, and
Speaker 1: it referenced the study costs of injury for scent signaling
Speaker 1: in a strep serene primate, and the researchers found the
Speaker 1: first off, lemurs can get into little tussles, little fights,
Speaker 1: especially when everyone's hornt up wants to bang. But sometimes
Speaker 1: when lemurs get intovites. If one male is injured, others
Speaker 1: can tell just by his smell, and the paper detailed
Speaker 1: quote lemur genital secretions were significantly diminished and altered during injury,
Speaker 1: so smelling the wounded male's secretions mean he'd be picked
Speaker 1: on more because the other males knew he felt like shit.
Speaker 1: But wait back, I'm sorry, back up, what are what secretions? Oh? Yes, coo.
Speaker 1: So male and female lemurs have glands in their crotches
Speaker 1: that ooze out sexy juices made up of up to
Speaker 1: three hundred different chemical compounds, and then they rubbed that
Speaker 1: stuff on branches like grif. That's a hinge profile. And
Speaker 1: one researcher at Duke said that this love butter is
Speaker 1: quite pungent and musky and quote not something you'd want
Speaker 1: to get a big whiff of. But luckily, as simple
Speaker 1: nosed haflarines, we wouldn't be able to smell as well
Speaker 1: as our lemeri wet nosed strip c arine friends, would.
Speaker 2: We, especially me? And so then within the strip Serines,
Speaker 2: the lemurs are the sort of most diverse group within
Speaker 2: the strip Serines, and they live only on Madagascar, but
Speaker 2: they're also bush babies or galagos and lorises that live
Speaker 2: in continental Africa and then over in Asia, and they
Speaker 2: belong to the same group the strip Serinds. But monkeys
Speaker 2: are all the way over in the half Larines, so
Speaker 2: they're quite quite divergent from the lemurs.
Speaker 1: I had no idea, does that come up? A lot.
Speaker 1: Is that the biggest question that you're having to correct.
Speaker 1: Do people just say, look at that monkey with the
Speaker 1: big eyes?
Speaker 2: I would think that was the case maybe about ten
Speaker 2: years ago. The other big one for people who study
Speaker 2: anthropology or primatologies, that chimpanzees are not monkeys. That's a
Speaker 2: big one. And pop culture that people get cranky about
Speaker 2: as well. But I would say right now, the biggest
Speaker 2: question I get is, quote, do they like to move it?
Speaker 2: Move it?
Speaker 1: Iruct, don't move it? Movement? I duck, don't move it movement?
Speaker 2: That is the Madagascar movie. That is the dance that
Speaker 2: they do. And I have to clarify that lemurs, in fact,
Speaker 2: do not like to move it, move it.
Speaker 1: This is good to know. And how did they all
Speaker 1: wind up on Madagascar?
Speaker 2: Okay, so now we're getting into one of my favorite
Speaker 2: things on earth to talk about, and you're gonna have
Speaker 2: to cut me off when I ramble too much. No, never,
Speaker 2: because actually people usually ask me what's my favorite thing
Speaker 2: about lemurs, and I say it's the diversity of species
Speaker 2: and how that diversity came to be because it's actually
Speaker 2: a rather extraordinary story. And so we have to go
Speaker 2: back to Pangaea when all of Earth's land masses were
Speaker 2: schmushed together in one land mass sandwich, and Madagascar was
Speaker 2: sandwiched between continental affor in India and was actually attached
Speaker 2: to Antarctica as well. And this was of course the
Speaker 2: age of the dinosaurs. Primates had not yet started evolving,
Speaker 2: but Madagascar had this connectivity to both continental Africa and
Speaker 2: to India. And as Pangaea separates, Madagascar separates first from
Speaker 2: mainland Africa about one hundred and thirty million years ago
Speaker 2: and then separates from India about eighty to ninety million
Speaker 2: years ago, which means that it's been an island for
Speaker 2: eighty to ninety million years, which makes it one of
Speaker 2: the oldest standing islands that's left around today. And for
Speaker 2: those of us who learned about the dinosaur extinction and
Speaker 2: the rise of the mammals, and like middle school science,
Speaker 2: you might have the number of sixty five million years
Speaker 2: ago in your brain. That is the asteroid that killed everything,
Speaker 2: and like fire and brimstone and dinosaurs going extinct, and
Speaker 2: from there, that mass extinction event is what allowed the
Speaker 2: mammals to sort of take dominance over the planet, including
Speaker 2: the rise of the primates. And so we see primate
Speaker 2: evolution in the fossil record as really taking off around
Speaker 2: fifty five to sixty five million years ago, but Madagascar
Speaker 2: had already been an island for fifteen million years, and
Speaker 2: primate evolution is taking off in mainland Africa. So this
Speaker 2: big question in lemur biology had always been how did
Speaker 2: they get to Madagascar because there's this huge time gap
Speaker 2: in between when primates are evolving in Africa and when
Speaker 2: Madagascar became an island.
Speaker 1: So Madagascar kind of chunked off of Africa like a
Speaker 1: bite out of a cookie. And then India sailed off
Speaker 1: to its current place as well, but very very slowly,
Speaker 1: and again roughly ninety million years ago.
Speaker 2: And one of the unfortunate things about Madagascar is we
Speaker 2: don't really have a great fossil record around fifty five
Speaker 2: to sixty five million years, this exact window when lemurs
Speaker 2: would have first been getting to Madagascar, we don't have
Speaker 2: a fossil record. So we were all as a community
Speaker 2: pretty stumped by this question for a while. And I like,
Speaker 2: how I'm calling myself we as if I were part
Speaker 2: of this community. This all got done way before I
Speaker 2: got to college. But I'm going to get by self
Speaker 2: a little credit here. And so the first thing that
Speaker 2: happened is people like doctor An Yoder, who use genetics
Speaker 2: as a sort of a puzzle solving technique, started to
Speaker 2: ask the question, well, can we place a molecular clock
Speaker 2: on the time at which lemurs got to Madagascar by
Speaker 2: comparing the genes of today's lemurs to their relatives in Africa,
Speaker 2: say the bush babies or called the Galagos, and can
Speaker 2: we figure out the date when these guys split from
Speaker 2: each other? And also if all lemurs stem from one ancestor,
Speaker 2: or if we think there were multiple colonizing events.
Speaker 1: So by looking at their sweet faced bush baby cousins
Speaker 1: on the African continent from a molecular genetic standpoint, they
Speaker 1: can figure out how many times groups of lamurs I
Speaker 1: guess they're called a conspiracy of lemurs came to this
Speaker 1: island to then branch off into over one hundred different species. So, okay,
Speaker 1: listen up, this is so cool. I love lemur origin
Speaker 1: story gossip.
Speaker 2: And those data demonstrated a date around fifty eight million
Speaker 2: years ago plus or minus. And also that all lemurs
Speaker 2: stem from one colonizing event, So we know from genetics
Speaker 2: that lemurs got to Madagascar once and it happened about
Speaker 2: fifty eight million years ago, which is a pretty good
Speaker 2: window on when we think things were happening.
Speaker 1: How far off the coast of mainland is Madagascar.
Speaker 2: It's a couple hundred miles. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Do you have to look to the Galapagos to try
Speaker 1: to figure out similar islands with a lot of diversity,
Speaker 1: Any correlations there?
Speaker 2: Do you think I think there could be in that island.
Speaker 2: Systems often operate under similar dynamics. But where we really
Speaker 2: need to give credit is to a guy named George
Speaker 2: Gaillard Simpson, who in the nineteen forties, before genetic dating,
Speaker 2: before all of these sort of modern techniques, said well
Speaker 2: what if they rafted? And he came up with this
Speaker 2: idea of rafting as a way that animals would move
Speaker 2: between land masses and across oceans. And so this is
Speaker 2: where the genetic data get combined with the ocean current
Speaker 2: data with Simpson's hypothesis about rafting and actually help us
Speaker 2: tell the story that we think what happened is some
Speaker 2: fifty eight million years ago, some small family group of
Speaker 2: early primates got washed out into the Mozambique Channel on
Speaker 2: a giant mat of floating vegetation in the middle of
Speaker 2: a cyclone, and the way the ocean currents worked back then,
Speaker 2: it would have blown this vegetative matt from Mozambique over
Speaker 2: to Madagascar. And this happened probably once for lemurs, and
Speaker 2: it's just by luck that they got there. And what's
Speaker 2: extraordinary as well is that the same thing seems to
Speaker 2: have happened in more recent history with the rodents, the
Speaker 2: ten res, and the carnivores.
Speaker 1: Some of those other mammals include a narrow striped mongoose,
Speaker 1: some flying fox, bats, and ten res which ps. When
Speaker 1: she said that I didn't know what a tenreck was,
Speaker 1: I thought it sounded like a mid size suv like
Speaker 1: Hyundai Tenreck. But no, it's a little pointy snouted mammal
Speaker 1: and their closest relative is an africans. True, So imagine
Speaker 1: all these critters' ancestors, each on their own journey, just
Speaker 1: swept to see on a plant boat, just hope and
Speaker 1: for the best. That's some real main character stuff right there.
Speaker 2: So there were in fact four rafting events that gave
Speaker 2: rise to the mammalian biodiversity of Madagascar that we see today.
Speaker 2: Because of course, mammals were starting to evolve after Madagascar
Speaker 2: was already an island.
Speaker 1: I wonder how long it would take in a cyclone
Speaker 1: to make it from the coast to an island on
Speaker 1: a mat of vegetation.
Speaker 2: So I have heard of estimates as short as three days.
Speaker 2: I think I've heard ones as long as a month.
Speaker 2: There is one camp that suggests that those early primates
Speaker 2: that made that journey must have been hibernators in order
Speaker 2: to survive that. There's another camp that says hibernation and
Speaker 2: lemurs evolved de novo or newly evolved once they arrived
Speaker 2: in Madagascar. So there's sort of a lot of playtime
Speaker 2: and trying us trying to understand how this could have happened.
Speaker 2: But of course without a fossil record, it's all just
Speaker 2: sort of like everyone making their best educated guests.
Speaker 1: And does it not have a fossil record just because
Speaker 1: it doesn't have certain sedimentary rock climates.
Speaker 2: So my sister's a geologist, and she's gonna roll her
Speaker 2: eyes really hard when she hears me try to explain this.
Speaker 2: So I apologize, Sarah. But from my understanding is that
Speaker 2: for the past sixty five million years, Madagascar has sort
Speaker 2: of been favoring erosion rather than deposition of soils, and
Speaker 2: so there's just not really good rock preservation for what
Speaker 2: was happening at the time when the first lemur would
Speaker 2: have arrived to Madagascar.
Speaker 1: And if you had to describe a lemur, what are
Speaker 1: some features that are common. Let's say that you're looking
Speaker 1: at a lineup of fictitious and real lemurs. What makes
Speaker 1: a real lemur?
Speaker 2: So they have a lot of primate traits, forward facing eyes,
Speaker 2: three D vision, five fingers, and opposable thumbs. Also a
Speaker 2: posable toes, big toes, that is, fingernails instead of claws.
Speaker 2: So all of these sort of characteristic primate traits. They
Speaker 2: also have a couple of things that make them distinct
Speaker 2: from the other type of primates, the monkeys and the apes,
Speaker 2: including us the haplarines. They have this thing called a
Speaker 2: grooming claw, which is that the second toe is has
Speaker 2: a claw on the end of it instead of a nail,
Speaker 2: and that's for you know, scratching in your ear, and
Speaker 2: some of the older literature they call it a toilet claw,
Speaker 2: which I just think doesn't sound that nice to say anymore.
Speaker 2: So we've upgraded it to a grooming claw. And then
Speaker 2: they also have some weird things. Most lemurs, not all
Speaker 2: of them, have some weird things with their bottom front teeth.
Speaker 2: So their incisors and their canines are sort of fused
Speaker 2: together and they lay flat and it looks like a comb.
Speaker 2: And this is how they groom their fur because lemurs
Speaker 2: do have opposable thumbs, but they do not have the
Speaker 2: manual dexterity that a monkey has, and so they're not
Speaker 2: very good at pinching, and so they end up using
Speaker 2: their teeth to groom the sort of grooming toothcomb in
Speaker 2: their in their jaws end upath. They clean their fur
Speaker 2: and their their groupmates fur. So not some with the hands.
Speaker 1: Hey, if I like you and we're buds, I'll rake
Speaker 1: my teeth through your hair and maybe I'll eat what
Speaker 1: I find. What does leamur fur feel like?
Speaker 2: They look so fuzzy, So don't touch wild lemers just
Speaker 2: as a preface, this gotcha. But there's a lot of
Speaker 2: variation in their fur. So some fur is super thin
Speaker 2: and super soft, so for animals that live in a
Speaker 2: warmer climate. For animals that are living in a colder climate,
Speaker 2: say the central Highlands where it's really cold in winter,
Speaker 2: they have really big thick, fluffy fur to keep them warm.
Speaker 2: The rough leamers that live on the very canopy of
Speaker 2: the rainforests where it's quite wet because it rains a lot.
Speaker 2: It's also cold, have a very very thick coat that
Speaker 2: helps protect them from water. E eyes have very wiry,
Speaker 2: sort of bushy fur. So it really you know, different
Speaker 2: furs for different animals and different habitats for different functions.
Speaker 2: That's the story of lemurs, is a story of diversity.
Speaker 1: Why do I eyes look like you put a demon
Speaker 1: in the wash and it's shrunk.
Speaker 2: That's what we did. That was the evolution. That was
Speaker 2: the evolutionary process by which we got I eyes. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I can say that for sure. Washing machine.
Speaker 1: Okay. Side note if you need a visual on these,
Speaker 1: picture something the size of a small cat but resembling
Speaker 1: a wingless bat with possom ears and a shock of
Speaker 1: black and silver hair that looks like a middle aged hangover.
Speaker 1: And the name II, which is spelled aye aye. It's
Speaker 1: thought to come from a Malagasy term for I don't
Speaker 1: know what the fuck that is. It literally means I
Speaker 1: don't know, imagine a creature so weird, so unsettlingly, horrifying
Speaker 1: and cute that its name translates to idkidk. On top
Speaker 1: of that, they have long, beef jerky fingers that look
Speaker 1: like twigs but alive, and they use one skinnier finger
Speaker 1: to drum on branches and then they lean their ear
Speaker 1: on the wood to listen for some chubby maggot snacks inside,
Speaker 1: and then they use a different thicker finger to dig
Speaker 1: them out, like a toddler would plumb a nostril. So yeah,
Speaker 1: saying that iiyes, fulfill a particular niche in Madagascar, it's
Speaker 1: one way to put it.
Speaker 2: No, So some things about eyes are just undescribable in
Speaker 2: terms of why, but basically, eyes evolve to fill a
Speaker 2: very particular niche in Madagascar, which is that they specialize
Speaker 2: on resources that are hard to extract, so think grubs
Speaker 2: inside trees or really fleshy nuts inside very very hard cases,
Speaker 2: or for example, coconut fruit, and so they are anatomically
Speaker 2: set up to be able to extract these resources. So
Speaker 2: they have very very like strong, ever growing teeth that
Speaker 2: can just gnaw into anything, including like a padlock in
Speaker 2: captivity I've seen, or cement in captivity. They're extraordinarily strong
Speaker 2: in their jaws. But then they have this delicate, flexible, sensitive,
Speaker 2: long middle finger that can scoop out resources. So they
Speaker 2: can scoop out, for example, a soft boiled egg out
Speaker 2: of its shell, and they can also scoop out the
Speaker 2: flesh of an orange or the flesh of a coconut
Speaker 2: after they've made a hole or a grub from inside
Speaker 2: a hole that they've not in a tree. So they
Speaker 2: just have this morphological toolkit to extract the resources that
Speaker 2: they need. And you see commonalities with other primates, So
Speaker 2: chimpanzees using a stick to fish for termites. I eyes
Speaker 2: have their stick just in their body. It's their finger.
Speaker 2: But if you'd like to be extra horrified, there was
Speaker 2: actually an extinct giant II Daubintonia robusta that I'm actually
Speaker 2: kind of glad is extinct because I think it would
Speaker 2: be absolutely traumatizing to see that thing in the wild
Speaker 2: at night. But there's this very, very large cousin to
Speaker 2: today's II that that has now since gone extinct. Like
Speaker 2: the rest of the giant lemurs.
Speaker 1: Lydia says that the vast majority of lemurs are nocturnal,
Speaker 1: but not all of them. So what's up with their
Speaker 1: big oldhead lights, orange eyes, huge eyes, what do we
Speaker 1: know about that?
Speaker 2: So not all lemurs have orange eyes. So I would
Speaker 2: say lemurs do have huge eyes, particularly the nocturnal species,
Speaker 2: because seeing at night is difficult, and so the bigger
Speaker 2: the eyes, the more light they can capture. And so
Speaker 2: probably because early lemurs were likely nocturnal. And I can
Speaker 2: already hear people yelling at me that we don't know
Speaker 2: that for sure, which is the case, but it's possible
Speaker 2: that early lemurs were nocturnal, and so the sort of
Speaker 2: big eyes was sort of built into them as a
Speaker 2: thing to help them survive. And you see even bigger
Speaker 2: eyes in primates like tarsiers, which is just go spend
Speaker 2: an hour on YouTube looking up tarsier eye videos and
Speaker 2: you'll be astonished.
Speaker 1: So okay, all right, think of a ferbie that got
Speaker 1: photoshopped to have eyes twice as big but a nose
Speaker 1: half the size, So a tarsi. It's not a lemur,
Speaker 1: but rather it's a small camel colored angel that hugs
Speaker 1: tree branches and whose eye to face proportion is much
Speaker 1: closer to a roswell New Mexico alien head than any
Speaker 1: mammal on the planet.
Speaker 2: And so I think part of it just has to
Speaker 2: with capturing light. Even the species that we think of
Speaker 2: as diurnal, like ringtail leamers, and particularly the brown lemurs,
Speaker 2: are actually casemeral, which means they can be active at
Speaker 2: night or during the day, depending on what's better for them.
Speaker 2: So we see a lot of brown lemurs foraging at
Speaker 2: night during the warmest parts of the year when it's
Speaker 2: just really really energetically expensive to forage in the heat,
Speaker 2: so the forage at night instead, and so for them,
Speaker 2: there is a really good reason to maintain big eyes
Speaker 2: that capture a lot of light. So it probably just
Speaker 2: has to do with functionality, But you do see a
Speaker 2: range and eye color across species from very very dark,
Speaker 2: like if you look at the all black chaffock, they
Speaker 2: have very very dark eyes, and then if you look
Speaker 2: at the cockrell chaffock, their eyes can be deep orange
Speaker 2: to light orange too yellow, to even light green. And
Speaker 2: then you have the blue eyed lemurs, who of course
Speaker 2: have blue eyes and they're like sapphire blue. So you
Speaker 2: just get with everything in lemurs. It really depends on
Speaker 2: the species, and there's huge range. But the fact that
Speaker 2: even within a population you can have variation from light
Speaker 2: green to dark orange suggests to me that it's just variability.
Speaker 2: We do see more variability in coat coloring in some
Speaker 2: species that has to do with camouflage. So there was
Speaker 2: a paper that came out particularly for the schaffak showing
Speaker 2: that they tend to be darker where the habitat is
Speaker 2: cooler and wetter, which makes sense.
Speaker 1: Why do we see so many ringtailed lemurs in captivity.
Speaker 2: Because they are a flexible generalist that adapts well to
Speaker 2: different habitat conditions, and they survive well in captivity and
Speaker 2: breed well in captivity, and they're very easy to care
Speaker 2: for in captivity. They're sort of like the rabbits of
Speaker 2: the lemur world, I guess, whereas a lot of the
Speaker 2: other species are quite ecologically specialized, so they maybe only
Speaker 2: live in one geographic area, or they evolve to eat
Speaker 2: one particular type of food, and they're very locally adapted,
Speaker 2: So finding ways to them outside of the place where
Speaker 2: they're really evolved in that place, finding ways to maintain
Speaker 2: them outside of that can be very difficult.
Speaker 1: They're just down to hang Yeah, Okay, what about you?
Speaker 1: How did you get yourself to Madagascar a life journey?
Speaker 1: I understand that you were a ballet dancer, before, can
Speaker 1: you tell me a little bit about how the world
Speaker 1: conspired to make you a lemur scientist?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think this is I mean, like the arrival
Speaker 2: of lemurs in Madagascar. I think my story is one
Speaker 2: of accident rather than intent. So I grew up in
Speaker 2: New York City in a household of classical musicians, and
Speaker 2: so I was a very energetic child that was not
Speaker 2: going to be playing an instrument. So I got put
Speaker 2: in dance instead, and ballet was the way by which
Speaker 2: I could connect to my family's love of classical music,
Speaker 2: but do it in my own way, I think, And
Speaker 2: so yeah, I trained to become a professional, which didn't
Speaker 2: work out very well. And luckily my college advisor in
Speaker 2: high school had suggested that I applied to Duke as
Speaker 2: a reach school, and nobody thought I would get in,
Speaker 2: but I did very grateful for that still to this day.
Speaker 2: And so after a two year deferral, when I tried
Speaker 2: to make my ballet career happen that didn't happen, I
Speaker 2: came to Duke looking for something else to do with
Speaker 2: my life. And I had been out of school for
Speaker 2: a while. I couldn't remember how to do basic algebra.
Speaker 2: I was very nervous about getting back into academics, but
Speaker 2: I signed up for classes that sounded interesting, which included
Speaker 2: an introduction to evolutionary anthropology. I feel like that sounded
Speaker 2: like a science class that I could handle. And also
Speaker 2: I really knew that I liked animals, and they talked
Speaker 2: a lot in the synopsis for that course about primates,
Speaker 2: and I knew that those were animals, so I kind
Speaker 2: of lunched onto that. And then at the same time,
Speaker 2: I needed a work study job, and the then Duke
Speaker 2: University Primate Center, which has now become the Duke Leamur Center,
Speaker 2: was hiring undergraduate tour guides, and so I was simultaneously
Speaker 2: taking a class about lemurs and primates and the place
Speaker 2: of humans and nature while I was starting to lead
Speaker 2: tour of this facility to talk to the general public
Speaker 2: about lemurs. So I sort of talk about how my
Speaker 2: career as a science communicator sort of co evolved at
Speaker 2: the same time as my career as a scientist. And
Speaker 2: then when I came time for graduate school, I knew
Speaker 2: I wanted to spend time in Madagascar. I like working
Speaker 2: with the lemurs in captivity, but I'm an ecologist. I
Speaker 2: study I mean, I'm a limerologist for the purpose of
Speaker 2: this episode, but I really think of myself as as
Speaker 2: an ecologist. I fundamentally study lemurs in the context of
Speaker 2: where they live, and so that environment becomes really important.
Speaker 2: And so I wanted to base quite a lot of
Speaker 2: my dissertation work in Madagascar, and then I ended up
Speaker 2: meeting my wife in Madagascar. She's Argentinian but was also
Speaker 2: working at Duke and so together we've done quite a
Speaker 2: lot of field work and she's really the field expert
Speaker 2: in our family, and so I sort of like follow
Speaker 2: her around, kind of like a puppy a lot in
Speaker 2: Madagascar as she sorts things out. There was no master
Speaker 2: plan here. It was just like fumbling around and finding
Speaker 2: things that I thought were interesting.
Speaker 1: Well, I was going to ask you mentioned that before
Speaker 1: we started recording, that you're there for a few months
Speaker 1: at a time, and I was like, what about your
Speaker 1: wife though, But she comes with you as well.
Speaker 2: Yeah, actually, more often than not she leaves me behind.
Speaker 2: So she just got back this week from a three
Speaker 2: month trip where I stayed here and took care of
Speaker 2: our cat and our house, and she went off gallivanting
Speaker 2: through the countryside working with our colleagues and our students
Speaker 2: there and collecting some data that we needed to fill
Speaker 2: in some gaps. So Marina has been working in Madagascar
Speaker 2: since two thousand and four, so coming up on her
Speaker 2: twenty year work aversary there, and she's got quite deep
Speaker 2: ties to the island, a really solid network of collaborators
Speaker 2: and students, and I think she really feels comfortable, really
Speaker 2: really comfortable in Madagascar. In a tent, I just follow
Speaker 2: her around.
Speaker 1: How long is the flight?
Speaker 2: It depends on which way you go, but usually will
Speaker 2: take us about twenty four hours door to door. You
Speaker 2: can fly through Paris, you can fly through Ethiopia, you
Speaker 2: can fly through Kenya. You don't fly through Johannesburg. Just
Speaker 2: depends on which flights are cheapest.
Speaker 1: Do you just knock yourself out? Do you just bendadool
Speaker 1: it the whole time?
Speaker 2: Uh? No, I wish I could. I don't sleep on flights.
Speaker 2: I usually end up watching like the entire extended edition
Speaker 2: of The Lord of the Rings. I think there was
Speaker 2: one year I got through like five of the seven
Speaker 2: Harry Potter or eight Harry Potter movies in a row.
Speaker 2: At some point you're so bored you sleep for a
Speaker 2: couple hours and then they wake you up with food
Speaker 2: and you just arrive usually pretty pretty knackered, and you
Speaker 2: sleep for a day. When you get there.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, can I ask you questions from patrons?
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're excited about it.
Speaker 1: But first let's show some love for lemurs by donating
Speaker 1: to a cause of Lydia's choosing. And she would love
Speaker 1: a donation to go to the Mahaliana Labs, which is
Speaker 1: an NGO running a veterinary science and training lab in
Speaker 1: Madagascar's capital city. And Lydia says that Mahaliana Labs are
Speaker 1: training the next generation of wildlife scientists and vets in
Speaker 1: Madagascar and they're doing wonderful work. So to find out
Speaker 1: more about them, visit Mahaliana dot org, which would be
Speaker 1: linked in the show notes. And that donation was made
Speaker 1: possible by sponsors of the show. Okay, if you're a
Speaker 1: Patreon member at Patreontic compashologies for a dollar a month,
Speaker 1: you may have submitted questions before this recording. So let's
Speaker 1: make some heads and tails of these, starting with a
Speaker 1: great one asked by patrons. Lovely Bites, Earl of grammele Kin,
Speaker 1: curly Fry Sadie Bi pond, Ali Brown, Keegan Newman, Colleen Selwood,
Speaker 1: and first time question askers how do you and cue tip?
Speaker 1: I want to know what's going on with the ringed tail?
Speaker 1: Why the rings? Why is it so fashionable?
Speaker 2: I mean, who doesn't love a bold fashion statement.
Speaker 1: I love stripes, longtime stripe where but how did they
Speaker 1: get them?
Speaker 2: So there's sort of two schools of thought, and probably
Speaker 2: they're both right in terms of function, because for something
Speaker 2: that exceptional to evolve, it's probably going to be functional
Speaker 2: in some way. And so one school talks about it
Speaker 2: being actually functioning for camouflage, much like we don't think
Speaker 2: zebras would be very camouflage with their stripes, but they are.
Speaker 2: And so there's an idea that the tale actually helps
Speaker 2: with camouflage. Another is that it helps with social communication.
Speaker 2: So ringtailed lemurs are quite terrestrial. They're the most terrestrial
Speaker 2: of all the lemurs. They spend the most time on
Speaker 2: the ground, up to eighty percent of their time can
Speaker 2: really be on the ground, and so when the troop
Speaker 2: is coordinating movements, you'll often see the dominant female lift
Speaker 2: her tail in the air, and that's sort of a
Speaker 2: symbol for everybody else to follow her. The males also
Speaker 2: use their tails in this sort of competition stink fighting
Speaker 2: thing that they do, and so as a prequel or
Speaker 2: maybe to stave off being physically aggressive with one another,
Speaker 2: they actually fight with each other by getting their tails
Speaker 2: full of their different smells from their different sinc lands
Speaker 2: and then wafting it at each other or wafting it
Speaker 2: at the females. Is like a come hither kind of
Speaker 2: a thing. And so the tail serves definite communicative functions
Speaker 2: in ringtailed lemur societies, but also probably helps with camouflage.
Speaker 1: A feather boa soaked in buck cologne, which also lets
Speaker 1: you go low profile in a tree. I must have accessory.
Speaker 1: Ali Brown wants to know what noises do?
Speaker 2: Lemurs make so many noises, so all the species have
Speaker 2: a different vocal repertoire, and there are noises for all
Speaker 2: sorts of things like ah, predator and like ooh friend,
Speaker 2: and so also like come here and find this food
Speaker 2: with me. So there's a lot of group coordination that happens.
Speaker 2: There's also a lot of like hey, let's tell that
Speaker 2: group to back off that happens, so territorial vocalizations, and
Speaker 2: it really just depends on the species, so probably the
Speaker 2: most iconic vocalizations come from the rough leamers, and these
Speaker 2: animals live upway in the tippy top canopy of the rainforest.
Speaker 2: There used to be some aerial predators that were much
Speaker 2: larger than today's predators that could pick them off when
Speaker 2: they were at the top of the trees, and so
Speaker 2: they have a quite elaborate alarm call repertoire to warn
Speaker 2: each other of, say, an incoming aerial predator. And that
Speaker 2: eagle that used to pick them off no longer exists,
Speaker 2: but you know, airplanes still look kind of scary when
Speaker 2: flying overhead, and so they still maintain this elaborate vocal
Speaker 2: repertoire to warn about predators. And then the other really
Speaker 2: iconic vocalization would be the injury, which is the largest
Speaker 2: living lemur today. And these animals live in pair bonded,
Speaker 2: so male female pairs with their offspring, so quite a
Speaker 2: small social group, but they maintain very large territories and
Speaker 2: they do that through vocal communications. So the male and
Speaker 2: the female pair will duet with each other in this
Speaker 2: sort of series of cascading and decascating whoops that they make,
Speaker 2: especially early in the morning. And it's a way for
Speaker 2: the pair to maintain their bonds and also to tell
Speaker 2: other pairs nearby, like, hey, this is our territory, leave
Speaker 2: us alone.
Speaker 1: It's like the good morning text that's so sweet. Yes,
Speaker 1: and you know, keep like swooning audibly because it's too
Speaker 1: much just adorability for me to handle. A bunch of
Speaker 1: people wanted to know, like in Abby Greebe's words, Lemur
Speaker 1: seems so cute and lovable. Are they actually as sweet
Speaker 1: and nice as they seem? And Mary and Thomas said,
Speaker 1: my wife heard that they will kick seven shades of
Speaker 1: shit out of an unfamiliar Lemur. Is this true? What's
Speaker 1: going on with their behavior? This was also on the
Speaker 1: minds of Macy Abbott, Marie Ea Kay, Joshua Tazen, Matt
Speaker 1: Herschel's wife Jenna, who wanted to know about their talents.
Speaker 1: But yes in first time questionsker Maria Kay's words, omg
Speaker 1: literally fave animals ever. But I've heard that some of
Speaker 1: them are violent.
Speaker 2: So I don't think that they're like nasty animals by nature, right.
Speaker 2: I think when there's no reason for anger or violence,
Speaker 2: tends to be actually very calm. Lemur societies tend to
Speaker 2: be very pro social. So there's a lot of beautiful
Speaker 2: affiliative interactions like grooming and play and huddling and snuggling,
Speaker 2: and so you do see all of those beautiful interactions
Speaker 2: as well. However, they are wild animals, and so when
Speaker 2: there's competition over food, overbreeding, over territory, like, yeah, they'll
Speaker 2: cut a bitch when they need to, because that's just
Speaker 2: life in the wild, right, you can't. Life in the
Speaker 2: wild is not always this peaceful thing that we imagine.
Speaker 2: And so if there's a fight over dominance in a
Speaker 2: ringtiled leamer society, the females can get mean towards each
Speaker 2: other if there's a fight over who gets the best
Speaker 2: sleeping spot or who gets the best food resources. Yeah,
Speaker 2: they can be mean, but I don't think they are
Speaker 2: nasty by nature. It's just sometimes the situation calls for
Speaker 2: a little bit of aggression, and they are certainly capable
Speaker 2: of throwing punches in shade when they need to.
Speaker 1: They just have boundaries. People, You should try it sometimes. Oh,
Speaker 1: do they use their grooming claw as kind of like
Speaker 1: packing a blade?
Speaker 2: Nah, they got teeth for that, Okay, Jemma.
Speaker 1: Wants to know. Behaviorally, are lemurs, silly.
Speaker 2: Guys, juveniles can be. So one of the most wonderful
Speaker 2: things about primates, all primates and including lemurs, is that
Speaker 2: we have this extended period of juvenility between when we're
Speaker 2: infants and when we're adults. And that extended period of
Speaker 2: juvenility often serves as a place where animals can gain
Speaker 2: the social and the life skills that they need to
Speaker 2: survive in adulthood, because lemur societies are socially complex, and
Speaker 2: there's a lot of rules you've got to learn, and
Speaker 2: a lot of bonds you got to form, and a
Speaker 2: lot of things you got to try and figure out.
Speaker 2: And so in that period of juvenility, we see a
Speaker 2: lot of things like play. We see gangly animals who
Speaker 2: haven't reached their adult size yet, but their limbs seem
Speaker 2: to have grown faster than their brains. We see big ears,
Speaker 2: and we see lots of falls, and we see a
Speaker 2: lot of silliness, and that sort of period of juvenility
Speaker 2: is a really wonderful time to watch animals grow and
Speaker 2: develop and you know, get their own little personalities and
Speaker 2: figure out their own place in their group.
Speaker 1: Olivia Eliason wants to know is it true that they
Speaker 1: do drugs?
Speaker 2: No, yes, no, yes, there are. There is this sort
Speaker 2: of famous situation of a pair or a group of
Speaker 2: common black leamers I usually really say a population of
Speaker 2: common black leamers in the northwest Madagascar that have a
Speaker 2: habit of using the toxin from centipedes or millipedes as
Speaker 2: a way to like coat their body in this toxin
Speaker 2: so that they are like maybe less attractive to predators
Speaker 2: or maybe more attractive to friends. But also maybe there
Speaker 2: is a little bit of a drug induced stupor that
Speaker 2: they seem to enjoy.
Speaker 1: What is in these magic millipedes? I know you want
Speaker 1: to know. So according to the twenty eighteen study potential
Speaker 1: self medication using millipede secretions in red fronted lemurs combining
Speaker 1: anointment and ingestion for a joint action against gastro intestinal parasites.
Speaker 1: So it's bends aquino which helps ward off mosquitos, which
Speaker 1: caramelaria and bonus. It also helps with the worms that
Speaker 1: live around their anus. So they chew these millipedes, then
Speaker 1: they rub them all over their body like a deodoran stick,
Speaker 1: and then many times they end up chewing them like
Speaker 1: a erpo licorice, eating the whole thing up, which induces,
Speaker 1: a narcotic type intoxication that involve naps and so much drooling.
Speaker 1: They're drooling all over the place like a bloodhound, but drunk.
Speaker 1: But humans do that with beer and it offers no
Speaker 1: protection from malaria or anal worms. Oh, speaking of liquids,
Speaker 1: Christian Jones wants to know why do lemurs hate water
Speaker 1: so much? It seems like all it takes to contain
Speaker 1: them is a small moat.
Speaker 2: They don't swim. They do like to drink water, but
Speaker 2: they're not great swimmers. So they definitely didn't get to
Speaker 2: madagascarba swimming and so they yeah, they're just the swimming
Speaker 2: is not their jam. But of course there are a
Speaker 2: lot of lemurs that live in a rainforest, so they
Speaker 2: can't hate water that much because it rains a lot
Speaker 2: in the rainforest. But certainly they're not, you know, doing
Speaker 2: high dives off the diving board.
Speaker 1: Listen, some of us don't like anger heroin. Maybe lemurs
Speaker 1: are their dry shampoo type. They do a little styling
Speaker 1: with some millipede poison. They're good to go. But what
Speaker 1: about lady lemurs? Are these insular primates more evolved than
Speaker 1: the United States government? You want to know about social
Speaker 1: structures patrons Curly Fry, Hannegory, Olivia Elias and Holly Spencer
Speaker 1: and Emily Herbert wants to know how did they evolve
Speaker 1: to become a species quote run by women. I understand
Speaker 1: you mentioned they might be matriarchal. Is that true?
Speaker 2: Yeah, So, with the exception of one group of brown lemurs,
Speaker 2: lemurs are female dominant, and so they are matriarchal or
Speaker 2: the females are in charge. The females can be mean,
Speaker 2: actually more often than the males. The females run things.
Speaker 2: And it's funny when you give tours there are a
Speaker 2: lot of women who are like, that's the way it
Speaker 2: should be, and their husbands are like, that's the way
Speaker 2: things are well. And so what we see in lemurs
Speaker 2: is this clear female dominance. And I think this question
Speaker 2: is a good one, which is not just is that
Speaker 2: the case, but if so, why why do we see
Speaker 2: female dominance in lemurs when you don't necessarily see this
Speaker 2: in other primate societies. And it goes back to Madagascar
Speaker 2: because one feature of Madagascar is that it is extraordinarily
Speaker 2: heterogeneous and stochastic, meaning that the environments are super super variable.
Speaker 2: There is variation across seasons. We have a yearly rainy
Speaker 2: season and a yearly dry season, and so that means
Speaker 2: there's a time of plenty and a time of scarcity.
Speaker 2: We have variation across years into how strong those rains
Speaker 2: are or how dry the year might be, so some
Speaker 2: years you might have really bad fruit even in the
Speaker 2: season of plenty. And then Madagascar frequently gets hit with
Speaker 2: these stochastic sort of random climate events like cyclones, droughts,
Speaker 2: floods that are of course now getting more frequent and
Speaker 2: more intense. And so what that means is for lemurs
Speaker 2: is they have to expect, at some point in their
Speaker 2: lifespan for there to be really bad times. And how
Speaker 2: our females supposed to support pregnancy and lactation if there's
Speaker 2: this expectation of not great food around. And so one
Speaker 2: idea for the evolution of female dominance and lemurs is
Speaker 2: that the females basically took control so they could be
Speaker 2: guaranteed access to food, to be able to support pregnancy
Speaker 2: and lactation, access.
Speaker 1: To check childcare, reproductive rights. That's interesting, it's interesting stuff.
Speaker 1: Maybe in another fifty five million years, so no Piper Jones,
Speaker 1: Earl Grahmulkin Amanda, Mary, the Grapefruit, Ron, Dick and Crane
Speaker 1: and Raha are want to know what's their intelligence? Like
Speaker 1: Mary us, just how smart are they?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I also get this question a lot, and I
Speaker 2: think it's a good question to unpack because I think
Speaker 2: we have to think about how we're defining intelligence. I
Speaker 2: think we as humans tend to really place emphasis on
Speaker 2: things like cognitive intelligence, on counting, on reasoning, on math,
Speaker 2: on puzzle solving, and so in some cases, lemurs do
Speaker 2: very well on those tasks. Ringtail lemurs can count up to, say,
Speaker 2: for about seven. They can do some level of transitive inference.
Speaker 2: If A is bigger than B and B is bigger
Speaker 2: than C, they can infer the relationship between A and C.
Speaker 2: But if you're comparing their cognitive reasoning skills to that
Speaker 2: of an ape, they're always going to look dumb by compared. However,
Speaker 2: if we think about intelligence instead as an animal's ability
Speaker 2: to survive in its environment, and we get rid of
Speaker 2: this focus on cognitive capacity as being the thing that
Speaker 2: defines intelligence, if we think about it as an ability
Speaker 2: to survive. Where they are, lemurs are really really smart.
Speaker 2: They're doing pretty well in their habitats. They know how
Speaker 2: to find food, they know how to find mates, they
Speaker 2: know how to live and thrive. So I think they're
Speaker 2: pretty smart. But each species has its own different intelligence
Speaker 2: because they each have different problems to solve.
Speaker 1: Are you figuring out your shit? Because that's the smartest
Speaker 1: a person can be. Put different people in front of
Speaker 1: a subway map, wish them luck. Ask me to drive
Speaker 1: a wheat combine. Watch me cry at the dashboard. Intelligent
Speaker 1: at what if it's doing life? You're doing fine. And
Speaker 1: lemurs they have street smarts to help them survive. But
Speaker 1: for how long now? Lovely bites asking for their son
Speaker 1: Elliott and Alfi Holmes want to know how long do
Speaker 1: they live? What's their life expectancy.
Speaker 2: Also super depends on the species. Generally, the larger animals
Speaker 2: live longer, and so the smallest animals, the mouse sleamers,
Speaker 2: I would think in the wild, you know, a seven
Speaker 2: year old mouse slamer would be pretty old. In captivity,
Speaker 2: we can extend that up to fifteen. There are slightly
Speaker 2: larger cousins. The dwarflemers can live up to twenty nine
Speaker 2: under human care. We have ey eyes under human care
Speaker 2: that are in their mid thirties, so they can live
Speaker 2: pretty long lives. There are cases of animals in their
Speaker 2: thirties and the wild just kicking it, chilling, doing their thing.
Speaker 2: So they are not as long lived as the apes,
Speaker 2: but they are very long lived compared to other mammals
Speaker 2: of their size. And probably my wife would be angry.
Speaker 2: I mean if I didn't mention that. There's this correlation
Speaker 2: in the lineages that do hibernate between hibernation and longevity.
Speaker 2: So there's a one genus of lemurs called the dwarf
Speaker 2: Lemers or the chiro Gallias, and they are obligate hibernators,
Speaker 2: meaning every individual of every population and every speed hibernates
Speaker 2: every year, no matter what.
Speaker 1: So, according to a twenty twenty one paper titled on
Speaker 1: the Modulation and Maintenance of Hibernation and Captive dwarf Flemers
Speaker 1: published in the journal Nature, fat tailed Dwarflemers can hibernate
Speaker 1: for up to seven months out of the year. Bless them.
Speaker 1: How do they sleep so long without a snack or
Speaker 1: a bevy? Well, they don't call them fat tailed for nothing.
Speaker 1: In the feeding season, they can strup to forty percent
Speaker 1: of their body weight in their chubby tail along with
Speaker 1: water so it's like just being hooked up to a
Speaker 1: nutrient hose. And if you've ever needed an inspiration to
Speaker 1: slow down, the fat tailed dwarf flemer's heart rate drops
Speaker 1: from one hundred and eighty beats a minute to about eight.
Speaker 1: And fun aside, one of the authors on this paper
Speaker 1: was doctor Lydia Green herself, and so was doctor Marina Biblanco,
Speaker 1: who is Lydia's wife. Life love lemurs. Now, this next
Speaker 1: question came from Joshua Tazen and they say it rhymes
Speaker 1: with and problems. Are they hibernating in nests in trees?
Speaker 1: Are they in burrows like Austin Power suggested? Where are
Speaker 1: they sleeping?
Speaker 2: Yes? And yes? Okay, So it depends on the habitat.
Speaker 2: So in the east, in the rainforests where you have
Speaker 2: really spongy, thick, you know, really nice soil, they bury
Speaker 2: themselves underground. In the west, where we're on dry deciduous forests,
Speaker 2: where the soil is much sandier, and they probably can't
Speaker 2: dig into that, they use tree holes. Oh, got everything
Speaker 2: so fascinating, I.
Speaker 1: Can't handle it. Destiny Lamb wants to know how faster
Speaker 1: lemurs could they personally outrun one Olivia wants to know
Speaker 1: why do some of them run skip sideways? Mikhaela Marshall
Speaker 1: asks why it jump like that?
Speaker 2: Though, that's my favorite one.
Speaker 1: Jarms wants to know has there been any measurement of
Speaker 1: lemur leaps? These jerks can jump? How do they do it?
Speaker 1: How far do they leave?
Speaker 2: Also depends on the size of the species. And this
Speaker 2: gets into sort of some of the variation in more
Speaker 2: fall because we have lemurs that are quadrupeds, so they
Speaker 2: run on all fours, just like your dog or your
Speaker 2: cat would, So think of your ringtailed lemurs always on
Speaker 2: all fours. They run pretty fast. They can outrun me.
Speaker 2: I'm not a runner, but they're pretty speedy. The animals
Speaker 2: to outrun predators, they got to be the ones that
Speaker 2: why do they move it like that? Though? Are probably
Speaker 2: referencing the shaffak or the group of lemurs called the
Speaker 2: Indura day.
Speaker 1: You'd know these lemurs. So they're this ivory white everywhere,
Speaker 1: except they're kind of deep purplish red colored bellies, and
Speaker 1: they're the ones skipping and leaping and bouncing around like
Speaker 1: a fourth grader with a belly full of monster energy drink.
Speaker 2: And so these species, along with the sport of Lemurs
Speaker 2: practice a different style of locomotion called vertical clinging and
Speaker 2: leaping or VCL if you're in the know and so here,
Speaker 2: the animals are vertically oriented and they have very very long,
Speaker 2: very powerful, muscular back legs, and they move from tree
Speaker 2: trunk to tree trunk in an upright posture, sort of
Speaker 2: leaping off, pushing with their back feet rotating in mid air,
Speaker 2: and then coming into the next tree trunk facing forward.
Speaker 2: Our leaf eaters tend to live mid canopy, and so
Speaker 2: being able to leap vertically when you're going from tree
Speaker 2: trunk to tree trunk is really helpful. The problem for
Speaker 2: those vertical clingers and leapers is when they get on
Speaker 2: the ground because they are not quadrupeds, so they can't
Speaker 2: run like a dog or a cat, and they have
Speaker 2: to do this awkward hop and that's because their legs
Speaker 2: don't really swing in their hip sockets the same way
Speaker 2: that a quadruped would because they're adapted for this vertical
Speaker 2: clinging and leaping, and so they have to do this
Speaker 2: awkward sideways sachet you stay hop on the ground, and
Speaker 2: they're much faster in the trees, but they can still
Speaker 2: out run a predator if they need to.
Speaker 1: Now Sachet oh Way, Spencer j and nick aher wants
Speaker 1: to know, in Spencer's words, what role do lemurs play
Speaker 1: in Malagassy folklore.
Speaker 2: That's also a great question. So lots of different roles
Speaker 2: because there are lots of different lemurs, and also Madagascar
Speaker 2: has more than one ethnic group, so it's a really
Speaker 2: diverse culture as well. There's no one thing is Malagasy
Speaker 2: culture necessarily, so it really depends on the region. I'm
Speaker 2: going to be weary about speaking for Malagasy society because
Speaker 2: of course I'm not Malagassy, but this is what I've
Speaker 2: learned from my Malagasy friends and colleagues. It's basically a
Speaker 2: lot of Malagasy society is governed by what are called
Speaker 2: fati or taboos, and there are some fatties that protect wildlife.
Speaker 2: So in many places there's fatty against hunting lemurs, particularly
Speaker 2: shaffock and injury, in part because they feature heavily in
Speaker 2: the origin story of humans, and there's a lot of
Speaker 2: recognition of human like features in some of these vertical species.
Speaker 2: So I've heard stories about how shaffak moms carry their
Speaker 2: babies on their back, the same way that many Malagasy
Speaker 2: women carry their babies on their back, so there's a
Speaker 2: recognition in some of those species that contributes to these
Speaker 2: fatties that protect them and being hunted. There are other
Speaker 2: fadies that say I eyes are evil and they should
Speaker 2: be killed on sight because they're a bad omen. So
Speaker 2: it's really varied in terms of how the folklore relates
Speaker 2: to the lemurs and the region as well. But probably
Speaker 2: the most famous story, at least in Western culture has
Speaker 2: to do with the injury Babakutu or the son of Kutu,
Speaker 2: and there's a couple different stories of Babakutu and how
Speaker 2: the injury came to be. Some tell of man and
Speaker 2: injury being brothers. Some tell of a father and his
Speaker 2: son and the kid gets lost and his father becomes
Speaker 2: the injury or becomes Babakutu. But all of them sort
Speaker 2: of share the sort of intertwining history between humans and
Speaker 2: lemurs as a recognition of each other.
Speaker 1: So injuries side note are lemurs that are stark, black
Speaker 1: and white. They're like a dog sized panda that's mixed
Speaker 1: with a koala, with these two fuzzy pom pom ears
Speaker 1: and these light green eyes that just interrogate your being
Speaker 1: and they're voeations sound kind of like a surprised cowboy
Speaker 1: like who. And yes, there are folkloric tales about the
Speaker 1: injury lemur saving someone and then becoming revered. And so
Speaker 1: many species of lemur are prey to poachers looking for
Speaker 1: bush meat, which feeds both malnourished folks below the poverty
Speaker 1: line all the way up to the wealthier classes who
Speaker 1: prefer exotic game. But it's considered taboo to hunt the
Speaker 1: injury because they can be looked at like our ancestors.
Speaker 1: Speaking of family lines, well you mentioned babies, Madisine Wolf
Speaker 1: for a first time question asker, I want to know
Speaker 1: how many babies do they typically have. Alexandra Catoul wants
Speaker 1: to know Lemur's one to one sex ed, let's get
Speaker 1: the dirty. Sarah King wants to know do they mate
Speaker 1: for life? Storm has a question from their mom. Why
Speaker 1: do Lehmur moms just leave their young if they're not
Speaker 1: strong enough. She's still mad over that one David Attenborough
Speaker 1: episode where the Lemur mom abandons her baby because it
Speaker 1: couldn't hold on. So how are they making other tiny
Speaker 1: cue lemurs?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so again this is going to go back to Madagascar,
Speaker 2: which is that when you evolve in a very very
Speaker 2: seasonal environment, your reproduction can become seasonal. And so basically
Speaker 2: all breeding in lemurs, with kind of the exception of
Speaker 2: the II, but excluding the II, the rest of the species,
Speaker 2: their breeding is timed such that the kids are weaning
Speaker 2: in the season of plenty, and different lemurs have different
Speaker 2: gestation periods or different periods of dependence on mom for nursing,
Speaker 2: and so they all breed at different times. But basically
Speaker 2: then all the kids wean and start eating solid food
Speaker 2: at around the same time, regardless of species in the
Speaker 2: rainy season, because you want your kid to have the
Speaker 2: best chance of going up healthy and strong, and so
Speaker 2: that best chance would be when there's food around. And
Speaker 2: so it really depends when they're breeding, on when they're
Speaker 2: actually going to give birth, and how long the kids
Speaker 2: are going to nurse, so it's super variable as well.
Speaker 2: The mouse and dwarf lemurs have only about a sixty
Speaker 2: day pregnancy is quirk. The chaffak it's more like five
Speaker 2: months five and a half months, so it's again super
Speaker 2: super variable. These smaller lemurs like the mouse and dwarf
Speaker 2: lemers will have anywhere from a singleton to triplets. I've
Speaker 2: also heard cases of quads, but that's pretty atypical. Your lemurrids,
Speaker 2: so your ringtail leamers, your brown lemurs, your bamboo lemers
Speaker 2: usually have singletons or twins. Your rough sleamers can have
Speaker 2: the biggest litters of four, up to five I've heard
Speaker 2: cases of. And they do this fascinating thing where they
Speaker 2: have like these boom or bust years, so in really
Speaker 2: good years, basically all the females will reproduce and then
Speaker 2: they co raise their kids in kindergartens together where there's
Speaker 2: a lot of alo maternal care, so caring for other
Speaker 2: other mom's kids, and then she cares for your kids
Speaker 2: as well. So that's sort of this fascinating system if
Speaker 2: you're going to be a really heavy fruit eater and
Speaker 2: you want to time everything for years of really really
Speaker 2: good fruiting. So there's a lot of variation in it,
Speaker 2: but basically it's very very very seasonal.
Speaker 1: And how are they doing the nasty? Do they mate
Speaker 1: for life or do they have orgies in treetops.
Speaker 2: It depends on the species. So we have some species
Speaker 2: that are pair bonded for life. The most classic and
Speaker 2: beautiful example, I think would be the red bellied leamer.
Speaker 2: They live in just these beautiful pairs that mate for life.
Speaker 2: A lot of dwarf flemers also will be in very
Speaker 2: very strongly bonded pairs that mate for life injury are
Speaker 2: the same.
Speaker 1: Aw some are so romantic, others less so.
Speaker 2: And then we have the other end of the spectrum,
Speaker 2: which is the ringtail leamer, which is a very promiscuous,
Speaker 2: multi male, multi female kind of like a frat party
Speaker 2: that happens around mating season where there's a lot of
Speaker 2: competition and there's a lot of female choice. There's even
Speaker 2: things like paternity confusion, so mating with multiple males so
Speaker 2: nobody knows whose kid is who's and yeah, it's just
Speaker 2: kind of a mess.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm feeling like, because they're so cute, they
Speaker 1: have tiny, tiny dicks. Is that true.
Speaker 2: It depends on the species as well. So what we
Speaker 2: tend to see in primates and probably in other mammals
Speaker 2: as well, is that when there's intense competition for paternity,
Speaker 2: you tend to have much bigger testes and much bigger
Speaker 2: sperm competition. So, for example, male mouse lemers have just
Speaker 2: enormous testies in the breeding season.
Speaker 1: Mouse lemurs, of course, smaller than a microwave burrito, about
Speaker 1: the size of a small squirrel. They're furry, they're golden brown,
Speaker 1: huge eyes. They could just sit right in your palm.
Speaker 1: But it's nardsac is the size of a walnut, the
Speaker 1: largest among all primates. The lead researcher on the job
Speaker 1: offered the visual if humans had testicles of an equivalent size,
Speaker 1: they would be as large as two grapefruits. All lamurs,
Speaker 1: we've got to know you so well.
Speaker 2: And again, this season is a really short window. So
Speaker 2: outside of the breeding season they regress their testes and
Speaker 2: you can't really see them at all because it's a
Speaker 2: waste of energy to maintain those enormous testies. But we
Speaker 2: tend to see smaller testes in pair bonded species where
Speaker 2: the males are pretty confident that they're going to be
Speaker 2: the dad and they don't need to sort of fight
Speaker 2: for it at all. So once again, sociality and evolution
Speaker 2: go hand in hand.
Speaker 1: I love that having big balls is actually the sign
Speaker 1: that you're a cock. Yeah, exactly one thing that a
Speaker 1: lot of people talk about. The obvious question that we
Speaker 1: have not yet answered was asked by Patron's Mouse, Mish
Speaker 1: the Fish, Amanda Camlet, Susan Singley, and Fi Cameron. No
Speaker 1: one talks about that so many people, which is why
Speaker 1: I've saved it to the end. Want to know Nova
Speaker 1: first time question asker, what do you think about King
Speaker 1: Julian from Madagascar? How do you feel about the portrayal
Speaker 1: of lemurs in Madagascar movie?
Speaker 2: I wish you could see the eye roll in my
Speaker 2: face right now. So I want to give the movie
Speaker 2: credit where credit I think is due, which is that
Speaker 2: over the course of my career, the questions went from
Speaker 2: what is a lemur? To oh, I know what lemurs
Speaker 2: are because of this movie, and now I want to
Speaker 2: know more. So I do think that the movie gave
Speaker 2: the general public an understanding of lemurs and where they
Speaker 2: come from in a way that wasn't present before the
Speaker 2: movie franchise. However, I do think they could have gone
Speaker 2: things a bit more accurate, my favorite being, of course,
Speaker 2: that King Julian should be Queen Julian. Lemos are female dominant,
Speaker 2: and that was such a good opportunity to teach everybody
Speaker 2: that there is more than one way to structure a society,
Speaker 2: and that women can play and females can play a
Speaker 2: really important role in governance and being in charge based
Speaker 2: on a real life situation, and they missed.
Speaker 1: That boat or that raft of vegetation.
Speaker 2: So that's the part that makes I think a lot
Speaker 2: of us pretty annoyed. And also like, there are no
Speaker 2: giraffes in Madagascar, and none of the African megafauna is
Speaker 2: in Madagascar. They all missed the raft. None of them
Speaker 2: got from continental Africa over to Madagascar. So there's just
Speaker 2: also some misinformation that has resulted from the sort of
Speaker 2: poster of the movie being the title Madagascar with then
Speaker 2: like a giraffe and a hippo and like a penguin
Speaker 2: and a lemur. So it gets some credit, but it
Speaker 2: also could have made things a bit more accurate.
Speaker 1: I had no idea. Thank you for clearing that up.
Speaker 1: A bunch of people and Kyla c red seedar Lily,
Speaker 1: Jen McGillivray, Sarah piat Alia Myers, Katie Harris, Emily Hebert
Speaker 1: also wanted to know about Zoom Zoom Buddha the Boom.
Speaker 1: Thank you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this was a TV show for kids in the.
Speaker 3: Sin Martin saw something strange. Leader who liked you bouncing.
Speaker 2: I was a little bit too old to ride the
Speaker 2: Zaboomafoo bandwagon. But this was a show that was filmed
Speaker 2: for Wild Crats, And there's a lot of ties between
Speaker 2: the Crap Brothers and Duke because they went to Duke
Speaker 2: and they were involved out at the Lemur Center. And
Speaker 2: so they chose a cockroll Scheffac, which by the way,
Speaker 2: is the best Lemur species. They chose a cockroll Scheffak
Speaker 2: as their mascot, and it was this puppet named Zabu,
Speaker 2: and they did some filming for their entrance sequence using
Speaker 2: a real Leamur whose name was Jovian. And so Jovian
Speaker 2: is actually Zabo and he lived his whole life at
Speaker 2: the Duke Leamer Center and has a bunch of kids
Speaker 2: and grandkids and I think even have great grandkids that
Speaker 2: are that are out there. And so Jovian actually was
Speaker 2: part of my senior thesis. He contributed to data for
Speaker 2: my dissertation. So I had a long history with that
Speaker 2: family outside of the TV franchise.
Speaker 1: Did he pass away?
Speaker 2: He did. He was I think twenty, so he got
Speaker 2: to be decent age.
Speaker 1: A lot of people want to know Amy zm raina
Speaker 1: Adam Weaver, Connor Chapman wants to know our lemurs at
Speaker 1: risk are endangered, Becky the sasse Segrat scientist, how can
Speaker 1: we help the precious baby lemur loves? Do you need
Speaker 1: volunteers at the Lemur Center? Please? I'm begging you, says
Speaker 1: Taylor Wade. And also, of course Papuka thirty four wants
Speaker 1: to know what impact will climate change have on lehmur populations?
Speaker 1: How are they doing? How can we help them?
Speaker 2: So lemurs are super endangered for a number of reasons,
Speaker 2: and part of it is just that, like a lot
Speaker 2: of lemurs are naturally geographically or ecologically specialized, meaning they
Speaker 2: only live in one place and they really only survive
Speaker 2: by eating, for example, one thing, And so for some
Speaker 2: of these species, there's not a whole lot of natural
Speaker 2: resilience or flexibility encoded in how they operate, and so
Speaker 2: those species tend to be quite at risk from habitat
Speaker 2: loss or habitat fragmentation or also climate change. So there
Speaker 2: is this real pressure for many species in the wild
Speaker 2: that is just present and real, and where I would
Speaker 2: spend a little bit more time talking is not about
Speaker 2: the fact that they are endangered, because like most wildlife,
Speaker 2: they are endangered, but we tend to spin why they're
Speaker 2: endangered as being the fault of Malagasy people for destroying
Speaker 2: their habitat. And I think that's the part where we
Speaker 2: need to have a change in conversation, which will also
Speaker 2: feedback into like how do we help, because the reality
Speaker 2: is that like Malagasy people also need land, it's also
Speaker 2: their country, and so there is this competition over space
Speaker 2: for farming Malagasy people. Many of them also have a
Speaker 2: deep respect for the forest and for the environment, and
Speaker 2: they rely on the forest and they don't want the
Speaker 2: forest gone. There's a growing ecotourism industry in Madagascar that
Speaker 2: also is dependent on intact habitats and healthy habitats and
Speaker 2: healthy ecosystems and lemurs being there. And so we have
Speaker 2: to change how we talk about the conservation crisis in
Speaker 2: Madagascar and where we place blame because a lot of
Speaker 2: the problems actually developed as a consequence of colonialism on
Speaker 2: the island and not necessarily because of what the indigenous
Speaker 2: population is doing. So to the answer of how can
Speaker 2: we help, I think we have to make sure that
Speaker 2: we are lifting up Malagasy leaders, conservation leaders and scientific
Speaker 2: leaders who are being agents of change in their own
Speaker 2: country and recognize that the voice of Westerners cannot be
Speaker 2: louder than the voice of Malagasy because it's not our country.
Speaker 2: And so making sure that we are donating to and
Speaker 2: supporting causes that are run by Malaeas leaders and Malagasy
Speaker 2: experts that are providing training opportunities for Malagasy students. So
Speaker 2: if you can find organizations that are run by Malagasy
Speaker 2: leaders that are doing good work, even if it's small scale,
Speaker 2: I think that's a really really good way to help.
Speaker 1: Yeah, wonderful, and thank you for the suggestion for where
Speaker 1: to donate.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so can I give a particular shout out to
Speaker 2: Mahalina run by doctor Feede Russ and Bahnardiev and Elizabeth
Speaker 2: Toomey who are doing really good work in Madagascar to
Speaker 2: support veterinary and conservation students, basically teaching them all the
Speaker 2: things that a scientist needs as they're growing into their own.
Speaker 1: And again we'll be linking those in the show notes.
Speaker 1: And this answer is shocking to me. I mean the
Speaker 1: underlying question I feel like we all have. It's like,
Speaker 1: why are they so cute? What's happening in our brains
Speaker 1: when we see them. Is it the gigantic eyes?
Speaker 2: I think it probably is the gigantic eyes. So this
Speaker 2: is where me and other primatologists might differ, because the
Speaker 2: closer I get to human looking, the more scared I am,
Speaker 2: and the less like cute I find them. Like I am,
Speaker 2: I am very intimidated by baboons and macaques, and by
Speaker 2: like chimpanzees and gorillas. I'm really like, don't ever want
Speaker 2: to come in contact with any of those animals. I'm
Speaker 2: so great, like so happy that people are studying them,
Speaker 2: but that is just not my jam. So for me,
Speaker 2: lemurs like are basically on the other end of the
Speaker 2: primate spectrum where they could almost not be primates, and
Speaker 2: they fall into sort of the bucket of cute mammals.
Speaker 2: But they still have fur and they're still like, you know,
Speaker 2: they're small, They're not terrifying. Maybe some of the extinct
Speaker 2: lemurs that were like the size of like female gorillas,
Speaker 2: I would have felt more intimidated by. But there's something
Speaker 2: very not intimidating about a lemur, maybe unless you're another lemur.
Speaker 2: So for sure, it's the eyes, it's the fluffiness, it's
Speaker 2: the beautiful coat colorings. Often the pictures that we're seeing
Speaker 2: in the videos we're seeing are of animals, you know,
Speaker 2: that are eating really nutritious food and so look wonderful
Speaker 2: and healthy and super fluffy. The are adorable. It's just,
Speaker 2: you know, I'm here being a scientist and talking about
Speaker 2: how cute they are, which just sounds very like not
Speaker 2: you know, objective, but it is. They are just adorable.
Speaker 1: What about the hardest thing about studying lemurs? What sucks
Speaker 1: about your job? Other than maybe the flights.
Speaker 2: The flights are not great for sure. It is working
Speaker 2: on an endangered system. Like sometimes you just have to
Speaker 2: put out of the back of your brain, like how
Speaker 2: endangered these animals are to focus on the task at hand.
Speaker 2: It can just be mentally exhausting. It is exhausting when
Speaker 2: a population you've been studying gets hit by a hunting
Speaker 2: wave or by cyclone. Seeing animals that you've spent a
Speaker 2: long time studying go missing or get lost is just
Speaker 2: really really difficult. It's also just part of nature sometimes,
Speaker 2: I think recognizing that nature is just harsh is part
Speaker 2: of it. It can just take an emotional toll. So
Speaker 2: sometimes you need like a nice hot shower and a
Speaker 2: cup of tea to remind yourself of why you got
Speaker 2: into this. And then there's the other like physical aspect
Speaker 2: of it, like field work is really difficult. It is
Speaker 2: physically difficult. It is emotionally difficult. Sleeping in a tent,
Speaker 2: not having access to running water or a bathroom, getting
Speaker 2: up early in the morning, not getting the data that
Speaker 2: you expected to get, worrying that you're not fulfilling your
Speaker 2: obligations to the community or to your grant that you
Speaker 2: promised because you can't find the animals that you thought
Speaker 2: was there. All of that takes a toll over time.
Speaker 2: But I mean what I do anything else, probably not.
Speaker 1: What do you love the most about it or what
Speaker 1: is your favorite lemur? I feel like you maybe mentioned
Speaker 1: the chaffak, but I'm not sure.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there are nine species of chaffak, and the best
Speaker 2: ones the cockroll chaffock, and I can hear people yelling
Speaker 2: at me through Instagram right now. For me, it's the
Speaker 2: cockroll chaffock just because it's a species I've been working
Speaker 2: on for working with I should say for close to
Speaker 2: seventeen years now, so there's just a familiarity with that
Speaker 2: species that I have. I also think they're coloring is beautiful,
Speaker 2: the sort of warm maroon of their arms and legs,
Speaker 2: with the like luscious cream of their body, this variation
Speaker 2: and eye color that we talked about. They're just they're
Speaker 2: beautiful to look at. They're dopey and behavior, they're smart,
Speaker 2: they just have it all. I think the best part
Speaker 2: is seeing them in the wild, and it's also recognizing
Speaker 2: that as many data as I generate and as many
Speaker 2: papers as I publish for students, as I mentor like,
Speaker 2: ultimately those animals are there just living their lives, having
Speaker 2: nothing to do with me, and just getting to see
Speaker 2: them do their thing without them caring at all that
Speaker 2: I exist is actually really rewarding. Like they're unforaging, they
Speaker 2: don't care that I'm there, they're up brooming, they don't
Speaker 2: care that I'm there. Like, I just get to observe
Speaker 2: without disturbing, And that's sort of an extraordinary place to
Speaker 2: stand there and be in just to see thank.
Speaker 1: You for taking us to Madagascar. From I'm an oral standpoint,
Speaker 1: I mean, this has been an absolute thrill to talk
Speaker 1: to you about this. It's been a long time coming,
Speaker 1: and you're just a gem in this field.
Speaker 2: Oh that's so kind. Yeah, I think next stop is
Speaker 2: actually a collaborative trip to Madiascar.
Speaker 1: Send me details. Honestly, I will go. Can I come too?
Speaker 2: What month? I should tell you what month? Do not
Speaker 2: go in the rainy season? Okay, so sometime like between
Speaker 2: April to October is the best time of year.
Speaker 1: Let me know when you're headed there next Yeah, seriously,
Speaker 1: we have it on record. Deal. Well, thank you so much, doc,
Speaker 1: This has just been the best.
Speaker 2: It's my pleasure. Thank you very much for having me.
Speaker 3: I love that.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, it is that mad. So ask smart people,
Speaker 1: not smart questions, because you're going to remember the answer
Speaker 1: long after they had forgotten that you ever asked it.
Speaker 1: And huge, huge thanks to doctor Lendia Green for hopping
Speaker 1: on episode with me. You can follow her and her wife,
Speaker 1: fellow limerologist, doctor Marina Blanco on Instagram at Leemur Scientist
Speaker 1: and we'll put more links, including one to the NGO charity,
Speaker 1: and we'll of course have more links to research on
Speaker 1: our website at aliward dot com slash ologies slash limerology.
Speaker 1: We are at ologies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm at
Speaker 1: ali Ward with one L on both. We also have
Speaker 1: smologies which are shorter, classroom friendly episodes that are all
Speaker 1: available to download for free at aliward dot com slash
Speaker 1: Ssmologies that's linked in the show notes. Aaron Talbert is
Speaker 1: our Ologies podcast Facebook group admin. Emily White of the
Speaker 1: Ordery makes our professional transcripts. Noel Dilworth is our scheduling producer.
Speaker 1: Susan Hale is our managing director. Kelly R. Dwyer makes
Speaker 1: our website and can make yours too. And the rare
Speaker 1: specimen who pieces the show together each week is lead
Speaker 1: editor Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio. Nick Thorburn wrote the
Speaker 1: theme music and if you stick around until the end
Speaker 1: of the episode, I tell you a secret. And this
Speaker 1: week it's that one of the ornaments on our Christmas
Speaker 1: tree this year is this rockhard bow decay show. I
Speaker 1: don't know how if I'm I think I'm pronouncing that right.
Speaker 1: It's this Brazilian cheese roll. When we were decorating the
Speaker 1: tree like a year ago with our friend Chason, he
Speaker 1: strung this Trader Joe's appetizer cheese biscuit on a popcorn
Speaker 1: garland for us to find later and I was so touched.
Speaker 1: I kept it and I froze it for a whole year,
Speaker 1: and then now it's a holiday fixture. We've made it
Speaker 1: into an ornament. So far nothing else is trying to
Speaker 1: eat it. It really is like a geological specimen at
Speaker 1: this point. Also another secret, This is the quickest turnaround
Speaker 1: I've ever managed on an episode. It's now midnight, and
Speaker 1: I recorded this with Lydia at seven point thirty this morning.
Speaker 1: But I shuffled some episodes around because I really wanted
Speaker 1: this one to go up. I think we all needed it. Okay. Also,
Speaker 1: my dog looks like an I I look it up forerebye.
Speaker 3: Pacadermatology, homeology, ydo zoology, lithology, in zeroonology, meteorology, pactology, ethology, seiology, elinology.
Speaker 1: Move it, move it