AnkomPalooza and Madagascar-California drawing exchange By Lydia Greene, DLC researcher and Duke PhD candidate Getting excited about the upcoming Lemurpalooza? We on the DLC’s SAVA team in Madagascar are sad to miss it, and so we held our own AnkomPalooza (Ankomba means lemur in Malagasy)! We threw the event at the local primary school in Manantenina, […]
Celebrate Earth Day at the Duke Lemur Center! Join us for our Earth Day Open House from 11:00 AM ’til 3:00 PM on Saturday, April 22. Guests are invited to walk the tour path at their own pace, stopping to talk about the amazing lemurs and science of the DLC with docents, staff, and researchers […]
Duke Lemur Center accepting and directing gifts to community rebuilding By Charlie Welch, Conservation Coordinator Massive crop loss, damage in SAVA region On 7 March 2017, a very powerful category 4 tropical cyclone Enawo made landfall in northeastern Madagascar and swept down the entire length of the island country. There was flooding and some wind damage in […]
Lemurs aren’t just cute, they’re crucial Why are lemurs so special? Here’s just ONE reason: Because non-invasive research on grey mouse lemurs has helped shed light on devastating human diseases like Alzheimer’s: https://today.duke.edu/2017/03/jumping-genes-suspected-alzheimers. Like humans, mouse lemurs develop amyloid brain plaques and other Alzheimer’s-like symptoms as they age. Studying these tiny primates has helped lead to a […]
Marina, our SAVA Conservation Project Coordinator and DLC researcher, just came back from the forest and sent us these images to post! Here’s what she writes: “The other night, while doing fieldwork at Tsihomanaomby, a subhumid forest in northern Madagascar, we came across a fat-tailed dwarf lemur, a few meters away from us, carrying a ‘bouquet’ […]
This is the 2nd of a series of posts exploring how the DLC determines which lemurs are bred, what ‘baby watch’ is like for techs and vet staff, and why it’s so important to increase captive populations of these rare and amazing animals. Question 1: How does the DLC decide which lemurs to breed? At the Duke Lemur Center, breeding is […]
It’s birth season here at the Duke Lemur Center! Birth season began this January with the arrivals of sifakas Gothicus (1/6) and Furia (1/10), our first babies of the year! Different species breed and give birth at different times, so infants should continue arriving through July and even August, concluding with the last mouse and dwarf lemur births. As […]
January-February, 2017 — During the fall session of the Lemur Learning Homeschool Academy, students wrote about two of their favorite lemur species. They compared and contrasted their physical characteristics, behavior (social systems, breeding, communication), and habitat in the wild. They paid special attention to their status as endangered primates. Here is Katlyn’s essay. Red Ruffed lemurs […]