March 30, 2012 — Aracus started getting into trouble as a youth, with a string of arrests, rehab, and finally a stint in lock-up. He never knew who his father was. While he was confined, he began participating in research projects, and discovered he really had a talent for it. Upon release, he settled down with a couple of female roommates, and now supports his growing family with his research endeavours.
Aracus is a ringtailed lemur. He’s 20 now, and all his life, records have been kept – medical records, weights, dates, but also screeds of descriptive records, that reflect the richness and texture of his life. The question is – how to make all these records available in a way that they can be used to increase our understanding of these interesting and complex animals.
Duke Lemur Center was founded in 1966, and ever since the earliest days, researchers and technicians have kept meticulous records. For the first 30-odd years, records were hand-written or typed on paper, until the first computerised databases in the mid-1990s. These contain medical and husbandry records, but the databases are cumbersome and not particularly user-friendly. There are also excel files, and text files with descriptive records. All these records represent a huge and valuable resource, but they are largely inaccessible without a great deal of work.
Until now, that is! Dr Sarah Zehr, former research manager at the DLC, has taken on the enormous task of assessing and assembling the information from all these sources into an analysable format. Data for 4,000 animals and 30 lemur species will be included in the database, which the scientists among you will appreciate – large sample sizes give statistically reliable results. Basic information such as animal identification, birth and death dates, parents, weights at birth and through life, housing and diets will be included, along with variables that are anecdotal at present, such as litter size, length of gestation, and susceptibility to disease.
With such disparate sources, a lot of work is going into ensuring that the data is reliable and “good” and this could not be accomplished without valuable input from DLC staff and other experts. There is more than 45 years worth of data, so it is quite a task, but Sarah finds it very satisfying. “The need for this data is obvious, it has immediate and direct application for a lot of things”, says Sarah. “People need and want this data.”
The project began in January 2012, and is funded by the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent), the DLC, and Duke Natural Sciences for a year. After this, large amounts of the data will be made publically available through NESCent. Once the database is up and running, the treasure hunt can begin!
