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Ruffed lemurs go mad for muscadine 🤩
It's muscadine grape season in North Carolina, and that means it's time for the Duke Lemur Center's ruffed lemurs to feast! Whether a seasoned free-ranger like black-and-white ruffed lemur Halley or a first-timer like red ruffed lemur Spock, muscadine grape season is a delightful delicacy. As frugivores, ruffed lemurs' wild diet consists primarily of fruit. They have an incredibly short digestive tract—food passes through them in under two hours!—so they serve as seed dispersers throughout Madagascar's tropical rainforests, snacking on fruits and pooping out the undigested seeds 🍇
📸: Abby Flyer (1); Meg Dye (2)
Help the lemurs do their back-to-school shopping by sending tasty treats from our online wishlist! 😋
www.amazon.com/gp/registry/wishlist/373AW0NFW38GY/ref=nav_wishlist_lists_1
It takes a lot of food to feed just under 250 hungry lemurs! While we try to grow as many fruits and veggies as we can in our garden, there are many other diet items that we order online. Dried fruit is a fantastic motivator for positive reinforcement training and also helps our colony of fat-tailed dwarf lemurs bulk up for hibernation. Worms are an essential part of an aye-aye's daily diet, as they use their strong teeth to chew through wooden blocks to reach their wiggly snacks. Beans and nuts serve as an important source of protein for Coquerel's sifakas, especially to moms with growing infants! 🫘🥜
You can send snacks directly to your favorite primates by ordering on our Amazon wishlist! You can also help out our incredible animal care team by sending scrubs, tools, and other items that allow our staff to provide the highest quality of care to the lemurs that call the DLC home 🥰
📸: David Haring
9 CommentsComment on Facebook
I absoutly love what this place does.
Will do!
Treats on their way! FYI, the worm supplier doesn't ship to gift addresses 🙁 so beans it is. Please say hello to a lemur or two for me!
Live long and prosper! Ruby's infant finally has a name: Spock 💫
➡️ lemur.duke.edu/spock
Meet the newest group of donors to come forward to claim an Ultimate Adoption! Cindy, Donna, Freda, Marsha, and Leslie have volunteered for over two thousand combined hours at the Duke Lemur Center. As volunteers, these women work closely with us by choice, without pay—and now they are stepping forward to help during a most challenging budget year. With some help from family members Tom and Susan, these five volunteers donated $20,000 to the DLC's Animal Care Fund to symbolically adopt and name red ruffed lemur Ruby's male infant. Inspired by the infant's unique white face markings at birth, the volunteers decided to name this curious little lemur after the beloved character from the original Star Trek series, portrayed by the late Leonard Nimoy. The volunteers’ donation will provide the critical support needed to maintain the excellent care of the DLC’s irreplaceable colony, allowing lemurs like little Spock to “live long and prosper" 🖖
Read more about their adoption journey and the lifelong friendships that were forged along the way at lemur.duke.edu/spock 🥰
📸: David Haring (1,3,4), Cindy (2)
14 CommentsComment on Facebook
Looking for an activity that's fun for the whole family? Book tickets on a General Tour at the Duke Lemur Center! 🤩
➡️ lemur.duke.edu/visit
Our tour season runs until the last weekend of September, so make sure to snag a spot on one of our summer tours before the temperatures drop! The General Tour is a great introduction to the world's most endangered group of mammals. Guests walk the scenic tour path at their own pace, and the DLC's dedicated volunteer docents and education staff will be stationed at each lemur enclosure to tell you about the species and answer any questions 🌤
The last Thursday evening tour is THIS WEEK from 5-7pm, and our Friday evening (5-7pm) and Saturday/Sunday morning (10am-12pm) tours will run for the rest of the season. We've also added an extra General Tour on Labor Day morning, which is a week from today! Tickets MUST be purchased in advance through our website at lemur.duke.edu/visit ✨
📸: Abby Flyer
0 CommentsComment on Facebook
Positive reinforcement training with Bonita’s family 💖
Utilizing positive reinforcement training (aka reward-based training), the DLC’s animal care staff can teach the lemurs how to voluntarily participate in their own health care and in non-invasive research. Teaching the lemurs to associate behaviors (such as voluntarily sitting on a scale or allowing a pregnancy check by a DLC veterinarian) with getting tasty snacks allows our team to minimize stress on both the animals and humans. Bonita’s almost-five-month-old infant is starting off with the basics: going where a keeper points in exchange for yummy apple baby food. Just like her mom and dad, she’s a star student! 🤩
📸: Keeper Sarah M.
5 CommentsComment on Facebook
There's still a month left in tour season to book your visit to the Duke Lemur Center! 🤩
➡️ lemur.duke.edu/visit
Want to watch lemurs run, jump, play, snooze, and snack in our natural habitat enclosures? Book tickets on a Walking with Lemurs tour to enjoy unimpeded views of the lemurs, with no fencing or barriers in front of your eyes or your camera's lens. Walking with Lemurs tickets are available on our website through the end of the tour season (last weekend in September), so be sure to book your visit soon! 😱
Visiting Durham from October to April? Check out the tours page of our website to learn about our off-season offerings, like Wild Workshops and morning Behind the Scenes tours! October tickets are already on sale, and November tickets will be available at the beginning of September 🎟
📸: Sara Nicholson (1,2); Sara Sorraia (3,4)
7 CommentsComment on Facebook
Been here twice with FANTASTIC experiences both times. Learned a ton and was such a thrill to see these guys doing their own thing without a care about us watching from a respectful distance.
Great tours! We have taken 2. Very informative and entertaining.
love lemurs 😊♥️
Welcome to the Duke Lemur Center, Athena! 🤗
Meet the DLC's newest resident: Coquerel's sifaka Athena, born at the Houston Zoo. This eight-year-old female traveled from Texas to North Carolina as a new breeding partner for twelve-year-old Ferdinand (3rd photo), who is one of the offspring of the famous Jovian aka Zoboomafoo. The pair had about as perfect of an introduction as possible—the two sifakas immediately came together and started mutually grooming, and Ferdinand sang quietly to his new mate. Some lemur introductions can take days of careful observations, but Ferdinand and Athena took to each other quickly and were able to move in together after their very first meeting. They spent their first night together cuddled up in a basket and shared breakfast peacefully the next morning 🥰
Coquerel's sifakas, like one third of lemur species, are critically endangered, and the Duke Lemur Center's colony of Coquerel's sifakas is the most successful breeding colony of sifakas in the world. The DLC owns and manages every member of this critically endangered species in human care outside of Madagascar. We work with other AZA-accredited institutions to create a genetic safety net for these incredible primates, and we hope that Ferdinand and Athena will be able to successfully breed to add a new genetic combination to the colony to help protect their species from extinction 💙
📸: Sara Sorraia
23 CommentsComment on Facebook
I’m so happy for Athena and Ferdinand!🩷🩷
Good luck to the happy new couple! ❤️❤️
Welcome Sweetheart!💗
Say hello to some new merch designs—and welcome back to some sold-out favorites! 🤩
We've got all these and MORE in person at our Lemur Landing Gift Shop! Stop by before or after your scheduled tour or during our open gift shop hours (10am to 4pm, every day but Tuesdays) to pick up your new DLC swag. All of the profits from gift shop sales go back into the care and conservation of the world's most endangered primates—it's a win-win! ✨
While these new (and newly restocked) items are currently only available in person, let us know which ones you want to see added to our online store! You can check out our current online offerings at shop.duke.edu/specialties/duke-shoppes/lemur 💕
7 CommentsComment on Facebook
Oh we love these!!
Kyleigh Maynes when you visit, I may have to have you purchase something for me. I’ll Venmo you of course.
Nice new designs! When will you have the DLC canvas baseball caps back in ?
There's nothing quite as striking as a pair of blue-eyed black lemurs in a lush green forest 💙
Five-year-old Brady and four-year-old Malala are a mating pair of critically endangered blue-eyed black lemurs. Blue-eyed black lemurs demonstrate perhaps the starkest sexual dichromatism in the lemur world, with males sporting jet-black fur and females ranging in color from orange to russet, but they're not born that way! Males and females are both born in orange tones so that they blend in with mom's fur while clinging to her belly for the first few months of their lives. This helps them camouflage and avoid being spotted by predators as easy prey. Males will start to transition from orange to black fur around two months old 🥰
Like one third of lemur species, blue-eyed black lemurs are critically endangered, meaning they are at a high risk of extinction. Through both collaborations with Malagasy organizations and our conservation breeding program here in North America, the Duke Lemur Center is working to save incredible species like this. Visit lemur.duke.edu/donate to learn all the ways that you can contribute to the care and conservation of these beautiful animals ✨
📸: Sara Nicholson
5 CommentsComment on Facebook
Thanks so much for all you do, DLC.
My favorite such beautiful eyes.
Interesting fact about their fur. Learned something new about these beauties!
No one gets more excited about fresh leaves than Coquerel's sifakas! 🤩
Whether it's mimosa, sweetgum, tulip poplar, winged sumac, muscadine grapevine, or anything else that's green and grows in the woods, Coquerel's sifakas are fiends for leaves! As folivores, they need to eat fresh leaves every day of the year to stay healthy. Sifakas who live at the Duke Lemur Center, like free-ranging family Gratian, Pax, and Magdalena, still need to eat leaves during the winter, so the DLC's husbandry team harvests and freezes plenty of winged sumac to sustain our sifaka population through North Carolina's colder months 🍃
📸: Sara Nicholson
11 CommentsComment on Facebook
6 CommentsComment on Facebook
Duke Lemur Center do they have vines growing in their enclosures or do you harvest some for them?
I will have to try that with my lemurs. They love regular grapes n cherries, all fruit actually. I didn’t think they would like muscadine which grow wild here.
same
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