Ologies with Alie Ward - Lemurology (LEMURS) with Lydia Greene

Episode Date: December 20, 2023

How did these tree-hopping furry angels evolve to be the cutest thing in the world, objectively speaking? They have saucer eyes, wet noses, chunky tails, toe claws, matriarchies, a feature film starring role, and all the mystery of 100 species spending millions of years on a remote island.  Wildlife ecologist and official Lemurologist Dr. Lydia Greene finally joins me to bust flim-flam straight out of the gate and talk about Madagascar, aye-ayes, ring tailed lemurs, Zoboomafoo, evolutionary biology, hibernation, jumping, hopping, these endangered primates’ conservation, and so much more. If you thought you liked lemurs, just wait until you’re obsessed with them. Visit Dr. Lydia Greene’s website and follow her and Dr. Marina B. Blanco on Instagram @lemurscientistA donation went to the Mahaliana LabsMore episode sources and linksSmologies (short, classroom-safe) episodesOther episodes you may enjoy: Gorillaology (Gorillas), Geology ROCKS), Scuridiology (SQUIRRELS), Dasydurology (TASMANIAN DEVILS), Primatology (MONKEYS & APES), Wildlife Ecology (FIELDWORK), Mammalogy (MAMMALS), Island Ecology (ISLANDS), Philematology (KISSING), Procyonology (RACCOONS), Raccoonology (PROCYONIDS), Oppossumology (O/POSSUMS), Ursinology (BEARS), Scatology (POOP), Urban Rodentology (SEWER RATS), Phenology (SEASONS), Conservation Technology (EARTH SAVING)Sponsors of OlogiesTranscripts and bleeped episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, hoodies, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramEditing by Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio ProductionsManaging Director: Susan HaleScheduling Producer: Noel Dilworth Transcripts by Emily White of The WordaryWebsite by Kelly R. DwyerTheme song by Nick Thorburn

Oh, hey, it's the bird hanging out near your park bench, hoping that your sandwich crumbles into pieces, alleyward. And listen, no matter what place in your life, lemurs have, make some room, because it's about to get bigger. What are these animals? Well, the most endangered mammals on Earth, but also, I'm going to be a little shallow, they're the cutest. And in that Venn diagram of adorable and vulnerable, there exists pure relevance. So this guest is someone whose work I've loved for years. She's based at Duke University in North Carolina where there is a world-renowned lemur center. They got free-range lemurs, runnin' all over the forests

as lemur ecologists assist with conservation breeding programs. They take notes, they watch them, they collect their poop, doing non-invasive research, it's a dream. You can also visit the Duke Lemur Center and you can look at Lemurs if so inclined, which who wouldn't be. So thisologist did their undergrad at Duke in evolutionary anthropology and they did a PhD in ecology,

studying Lemurs in Madagascar, and she's worked at the Duke Lemur Center, did a postdoc, at a lemur lab, studying adaptation and hibernation, and she's an excellent science communicator, and a champion of lemurs. We're going to get into it, including questions that you submitted via patreon.com slash allergies, which you can join for a hot dollar a month. Thank you to patrons, and to everyone out there wearing allergies merch from allergiesmursho. month. Thank you to patrons. And to everyone out there wearing Oligis merch from OligisMersh.com. Thanks also to everyone who's ever written a review,

which really helps keep us up in the charts where more people can find us. And I read everyone, including one this week from Haley, a cancer biologist, another from MM Marshall, 20 who wrote, if you need to reignite your sense of wonder and awe in the universe, because hyper focusing on all your problems has made you forget that we are statistically

anomalous flesh sacks on a spinning rock in space. This podcast may help. And, Marshall 20, I'm right there with you. I'm on this rock. I'm ready to hear about lemurs. So, due to time zones, I got up a little early and this was recorded in pajamas. early and this was recorded in pajamas. Good morning. Good morning. 7.30 a.m. Pacific time. We're talking lemurs. It's a good thing to talk about first thing. And yes, it was. So first off, the word lemur comes from the Latin for ghosts or spirits of the dead because of their nighttime prowlings. And yes, people who study lemurs are lemurologists. Just straight up, that's the word.

It's on their LinkedIn bios. It's a term used in journals. Lemurologist is a thing that you can be, and you might want to be after this. So tuck in or hop around to hear about dangerous, fateful journeys, but noses, saucer eyes, striped tails, movie flim flam, tiny demons, giant anatomy, weird toe claws, matriarchies,

madagascar landscapes, folklore, travel tails, and why intelligence is really all about how you use it with wildlife ecologist and lemurologist Dr. Lydia Green. My name is Lydia Green and I go by she her pronouns. Lemurs, lemurs, lemurs. I've known of you. We've been friends, mutuals, as they say online for quite some time. I've wanted to come down to the lemurs center and have not been able to. And you've so graciously let me interview you remotely.

Can I still come to the lemur center at some point? Yes, but what I would suggest would be even better if you came with me to Madagascar. OK. Great. Put it in a, give me a g-cal invite. I'll just click Yes without looking at detail. Sounds good.

We've got to make sure the time zone works out, but you know. How often do you go to Madagascar? As often as I can, but in a good year, I would say I try to go maybe once or twice a year for like a two to three month trip. It really just depends on the project and what we're trying to accomplish while we're there. What is Madagascar like?

I have clearly never been, but I can't even picture it. It is extraordinary. It's a really large diverse island. In fact, there's one argument to be made that it is so big and so diverse that we should really think about it more like a continent. Then we should like a country just in terms of its geographic features, mountains, you know, oceans, beaches, forests, rainforests, dry forests, sirens, it's just, it's got everything you could possibly want. And so the biodiversity and also the cultural diversity is, is equally as diverse to match that geographic diversity.

So there's no one way to describe Madagascar. It's just extraordinary. And are lemurs just malagassy, or do they live in other parts? So lemurs are endemic only to or do they live in other parts? So lemurs are endemic only to the island of Madagascar, and in fact many of us define a feature of lemurs as they're living only endemicly on Madagascar. There is a population of some lemurs on the Comoros islands, but there is pretty strong

evidence that they were introduced by people and do not naturally live there. How many species of lemur do you think? So we currently recognize 108 species of lemur. There are also subspecies that push that number up. What's so many? But it really kind of changes across years, and that's in part due to advancement in genetic sequencing, because there's quite a lot of diversity in lemurs that we can't necessarily see with our own eyes, because that diversity isn't present and how the animals look, but that diversity is present in their genomes.

And so we need to do the genetic sequencing to see the diversity that we can't visually see. And so as the community is sequencing more and more animals, they're gaining more clarity about how much diversity there really is. And so that's been causing a big increase in the number of species, which is why we keep seeing new lemur species discovered. We of course knew that animal lived there, but it's through understanding changes or differences in the genomes that we're understanding how many species there actually are.

So yes, genetic testing helps lemurologists take a head count of how many species are roving about in this over 200,000 square mile island nation, which is about two and a half times the size of the UK. And if you're trying to get a visual picture, whoo, think rocky deserts, brilliant blue lagoon, rainforests, mountains, and savannas, silhouetted with Madagascar's iconic towering, thick, trunked, bow-bapt trees. I have never Google image search Madagascar, but my heavens, it's a gorgeous place.

Also, it's filled with a primate that for some reason just burrows into my very heart. Every photo of a lemur hits you like it's your favorite child. And there are again 108 species, plus more subspecies, which Lydia helps keep track of. How does that work? Do you like meat a lemur? You make friends with it,

you're like a little bit of sleepy time and then do you do a cheek swab? Like they do for like 23 and me. We, so it really would depend on the species and the size of the lemur from the bigger animals where we can do really close behavioral observations because we can see them and they're active during the day. A lot of the genetics is done through fecal samples that are just collected off the forest floor.

For the small nocturnal lemurs, particularly the mouse lemurs that are, as their name implies, the size of a mouse, being able to collect fecal samples from that are as their name implies the size of a mouse. Being able to collect fecal samples from that animal as it's leaping through the tree tops at night is near impossible. So for those species we tend to use live traps like Sherman traps or Tomahawk traps spated with banana or peanut butter. And then we'll give the animals a brief physical exam under anesthesia so they're super comfortable and don't know what's going on.

And then we'll usually take a small skin punch, like a little ear clip or something, that they don't even really notice and grows back pretty well. And then after they recover from anesthesia, we'll give them another snack, and then we'll release them that evening to their home territory. So they're removed from the forest for less than 24 hours, and we make sure that they have a safe place to sleep at camp during the day. Oh, mouse lemurs. Yeah. What did they look like? They look like primate mice, I guess, would be the...

So there are about 25 species of mouse lemurs. So there's actually quite a lot of diversity within that genus. But they're about 40 to 80 grams at adult weight, so they're super small. So they have a round body, like a little pear. And even with their furry tail, a mouse lemur is shorter than a human foot, most human feet. And many species of mouse lemur have these cute little pointy elf ears.

Sometimes they got a tiny tongue sticking out of their mouth. And of course, a set of these gorgeous hazel eyes. They look like marbles shoved into a slipper. And they have very large eyes, and they have quite the Napoleon complex because they're so tiny, they can be quite feisty, but they're pretty remarkable in how they just navigate treetops being so small I mean If you had asked me like a pub quiz how many species of lemurs I would have said max four Three to four I'm shocked by this that is incorrect on your pub quiz you would not gain that point There are in fact five families of lemurs that diversify into 15

genera and then over 100 species. And I think what happens in sort of the American public knowledge is that we see images of a select few species that tend to be overrepresented in captive institutions or that are really easy for people to see in the wild and then get photographs of. But there are also all these other species like the sport of lemurs, the woolly lemurs, all these different species of mouse lemurs, the fork marked lemurs, that people don't really see or have as much connection to because some of them don't live in captivity or that wouldn't be the thing you would go see on a tour and that a gas car. And so we're just less familiar with those species in pop culture compared to save their ring-tailed lemur.

Mm-hmm. I gotta say, I'm shocked that there aren't more influencers that have mouse lemurs, just as an exotic pet. Oh my god, I'm so glad they don't. I imagine if they have an Napoleon complex and jump around, it might be a little more difficult than having a squirrel. Yeah, I think, you know, lemurs are primates. They're smart. They're social. They live their best lives in the environments in which they evolve to live.

And so it's just not a great life for a lemur to be living by itself in somebody's house, eating food. It didn't evolve to eat. You want a high dog? So we tend to think about lemurs as living their best lives out in nature, in a nice quality habitat where there's plenty of fresh figs on the trees. Do you say figs?

Yeah, the ficus trees are a big part of the diet of a lot of the fruit eating lemurs. But let's backtrack a little and get into basics. What even is a lemur in an email setting this up? I wrote to Lydia. I was like, hey, the oligee's feed is just screaming for a good monkey episode. Are lemurs monkeys just one of my many questions to which she was forced to reply,

well, no, lemurs are decidedly not monkeys. I was kidding when I asked that because they have long curly tails and they bounce around and force canopies, they're fuzzy. They live off the coast of Africa, of course they're monkeys monkeys. What else is they going to be? Harry Alligators? Tree elephants? Not monkeys? And here we are. Limers are not monkeys and they live in one island in the world. What is going on? What are they describe them? Thank you. Yeah. So, lemurs are not monkeys, but they're relatives of monkeys. So like monkeys, lemurs are primates.

So they are one lineage within the order primates. That's the mammalian order that we belong to as well. And so the primates really split into two major groups. That's the strepsurines and the haplurines. Now we humans are haplurines, apes are haplorines, monkeys are haplorines, and the lemurs, along with the loruses and the bush babies, clump over in these strepsurine category. And those words strepsurine and haplorine actually have to do with the shape of the nose, and so you can classify primates first and foremost by what type of nose they have.

So strepsis for turning in and rine for nose and greek. So they have sort of these sort of curlicue noses on their ends. The strepsis for turning in and rind for nose and greek. So they have sort of these sort of curlicue noses on their ends. The streps are ens due. They're also known as the wet nose primates because lemurs have a wet, fleshy tip at the end of their nose called a wet rhinarium. Just like your dog or your cat would have. Whereas the haplorines like us are the dry nose primates. And so as that name implies, they have a pretty good sense of smell and are much more sensitive to odors than than we humans are. So if I hid a canelope and you loved canelope,

could you find the canelope? You could if you were a ringtailed lemur, according to the 2021 paper, ringtailed lemurs use old faction to locate distant fruit and researchers launched essentially like an Easter icon with melons, but also hit some melon-like objects that the paper called sham cantalopes. And the results? Our ring-tailed friends could sniff out the real cantalope from nearly 50 feet away when the breeze drifted their direction. The sham to lope remained unfound.

But also reading the study, I learned that cleanotaxis is a term that means to snoot around, sniff in the breeze until you find treasure. Just twitching your little snooty snout sniffer, total of snacky. Cleanotaxis. But it's not all sweetness or juicy melons. So a 2018 press publication out of Lydia's own Duke University was titled, In All Caps, Lemurs can smell weakness in each other, and it referenced the study, Costs of Injury for sent signaling in a strepsurine primate, and researchers found the first off, Lemurs

can get into little tussles, little fights, especially whenever someone's hort-up wants to bang. But sometimes when Lemurs get into fights, if one male is injured, others can tell just by his smell. And the paper detailed, quote, lemur genitals secretions were significantly diminished and altered during injury. So smelling the wounded male's secretions mean he'd be picked on more because the other male's knew he felt like shit. But wait, back, I'm sorry, back up. What's secretions? Oh yes, cool. So male and female lemurs have glands in their crutches that ooze out sexy juices, made up of up to 300 different chemical compounds, and then they rub that stuff on branches,

like graffiti, that's a hinge profile. And one researcher at Duke said that this love butter is quite pungent and musky, and quote, not something you'd want to get a big whiff of. But luckily, as simple-nosed haplorines, we wouldn't be able to smell as well as our lemory wet-nosed strepsurine friends, would we? Um, especially me. Um, and so then within the strepsurines, the lemurs are the sort of most diverse group within the strepsurines and they live only on Madagascar, but they're also bush babies or Gallagos and lorises that live in continental Africa and then over in Asia and they belong to the same group with the strepsurines. But monkeys are all the way over in the haplarines, so they're

quite divergent from the lemurs. I had no idea. Does that come up a lot? Is that the biggest question that you're having to correct? Do people just say, look at that monkey with the big eyes? I would think that was the case maybe about 10 years ago. The other big one for people who study anthropology or primatology is that chimpanzees are not monkeys. That's a big one in pop culture that people get cranky about as well. But I would say right now the biggest

question I get is, quote, do they like to move it, move it? I like to move it, move it. I like to move it, move it. That is the Madagascar movie. That is the dance that they do. And I have to clarify that lemurs in fact do not like to move it, move it. This is good to know. And how did they all wind up on Madagascar? Okay, so now we're getting into one of my favorite things on Earth to talk about, and you're gonna have to cut me off when I ramble too much. No, never. Because actually, people usually ask me what's my favorite thing about lemurs, and I say it's the diversity of species and how that diversity came to be, because it's actually a rather extraordinary

story. And so we have to go back to Pangia when all of Earth's land masses were smushed together in one land mass sandwich. And Madagascar was sandwiched between continental Africa and India, and was actually attached to Antarctica as well. And this was, of course, the age of the dinosaurs, primates had not yet started evolving, but Madagascar had this connectivity to both continental Africa and India. And as Pangaea separates Madagascar separates first from mainland Africa about 130 million

years ago and then separates from India about 80 to 90 million years ago, which means that it's been in Ireland for 80 to 90 million years Which makes it one of the oldest standing islands that's left around today And for those of us who learned about the dinosaur extinction and the rise of the mammals and like middle school science You might have the number of 65 million years ago in your brain That is the asteroid that killed everything and like fire and you know brimstone and dinosaurs going extinct. And from there that mass extinction event is what allowed the mammals to sort of take dominance over the planet including the rise of the primates. And so we see primate evolution in the fossil record as really taking off around 55 to 65 million

years ago, but Madagascar had already been in Ireland for 15 million years, and primate evolution is taking off in mainland Africa. So this big question and lemur biology had always been how did they get to Madagascar? Because there's this huge time gap in between when primates are evolving in Africa, and when Madagascar became an island. So Madagascar kind of chunked off of Africa like a bite out of a cookie. And then India sailed off to its current place as well, but very, very slowly. And again, roughly 90 million years ago. And one of the unfortunate things about Madagascar is we don't really have a great fossil record

around 55 to 65 million years. This exact window when lemurs would have first been getting to Madagascar, we don't have a fossil record around 55 to 65 million years. This exact window when lemurs would have first been getting to Madagascar, we don't have a fossil record. So we were all as a community pretty stumped by this question for a while and I like how I'm calling myself a wee as if I was part of this community. This all got done way before I got to college but I'm going to give myself a little credit here. And so the first thing that happened is people like Dr. Ann Yoder who use genetics as sort of a puzzle solving technique started to ask the question, well, can we place a molecular clock on the time at which lemurs got to Madagascar

by comparing the genes of today's lemurs to their relatives in Africa, say the Bushbabies, or called the Gallagos. And can we figure out the date when these guys split from each other? And also if all lemurs stem from one ancestor, or if we think there were multiple colonizing events? So by looking at their sweet-faced Bushbaby cousins on the African continent from a molecular genetic standpoint, they can figure out how many times groups of lemurs, I guess,

their called a conspiracy of lemurs, came to this island to then branch off into over a hundred different species. So, okay, listen up, this is so cool. I love lemur origin story gossip. And those data demonstrated a date of around 58 million years ago, plus or minus, and also that all lemur stem from one colonizing event. We know from genetics that lemurs got to Madagascar once, and it happened about 58 million years ago, which is a pretty good window on when we think things were happening. How far off the coast of mainland is Madagascar?

It's a couple hundred miles. Do you have to look to the Galapagos to try to figure out similar islands with a lot of diversity? Any correlations there, do you think? I think there could be in that island systems often operate under similar dynamics, but where we really need to give credit is to a guy named George Gaylord Simpson, who in the 1940s, before genetic dating, before all of these sort of modern techniques, said, well, what if they rafted? And he came up with this idea of rafting as a way that animals would move between landmasses

and across oceans. And so this is where the genetic data get combined with the ocean current data, with Simpsons hypothesis about rafting and actually help us tell the story that we think what happened is some 58 million years ago, some small family group of early primates got washed out into the Mozambique channel on a giant mat of floating vegetation in the middle of a cyclone. And the way the ocean currents worked back then, it would have blown this vegetative mat from Mozambique over to Madagascar. And this happened probably once for lemurs, and it's just by luck that they got there.

And what's extraordinary as well is that the same thing seems to have happened in more recent history with the rodents, the tenrecks, and the carnivores. Some of those other mammals include a narrow striped mongoose, some flying fox bats, and tenrex, which, P.S., when she said that, I didn't know what a tenrex was. I thought it sounded like a mid-size SUV, like the Hyundai tenrex, but no, it's a little pointy-snouted mammal, and their closest relative is an African true. So imagine all these critters and sisters, each on their own journey just swept to see on a plant boat just hoping for the best. That's some real main character stuff right there.

So there were in fact four rafting events that gave rise to the mammalian biodiversity of Madagascar that we see today because of course mammals were starting to evolve after Madagascar was already in Ireland. I wonder how long it would take in a cyclone to make it from the coast to an island on a mat of vegetation. So I have heard of estimates as short as three days. I think I've heard ones as long as a month. There is one camp that suggests that those early primates that made that journey must have been hibernators in order to survive that. There's another camp that says hibernation

and lemurs evolved to Denouvo or newly evolved once they arrived in Madagascar. So there's a sort of a lot of playtime and trying to understand how this could have happened, but of course without a fossil record it's all just sort of like everyone making their best educated guess. And does it not have a fossil record just because it doesn't have certain sedimentary rock climates? So my sister's a geologist, and she's going to roll her eyes really hard when she hears me try to explain this.

So I apologize, Sarah. But for my understanding is that for the past 65 million years, Madagascar has sort of been favoring erosion rather than deposition of soils. And so there's just not really good rock preservation for what was happening at the time when the first lemur would have arrived to Madagascar. And if you had to describe a lemur,

what are some features that are common? Let's say that you're looking at a lineup of fictitious and real lemurs. What makes a real lemur? So they have a lot of primate traits, forward-facing eyes, 3D vision, five, you know, fingers and opposable thumbs, also opposable toes, big toes that is fingernails instead of claws. So all of these sort of characteristic primate traits, they also have a couple of things that make them distinct

from the other type of primates, the monkeys and the apes, including us, the haplorines. They have this thing called a grooming claw, which is that the second toe has a claw on the end of it, instead of a nail, and that's for scratching in your ear. And some of the older literature, they call it a toilet claw, which I just don't think doesn't sound that nice to say anymore, so we've upgraded it to a grooming claw.

And then they also have some weird things. Most lemurs, not all of them, have some weird things with their bottom front teeth. So they're incisors and their canines are sort of fused together and they lay flat and it looks like a comb. And this is how they groom their fur because lemurs do have opposable thumbs but they do not have the manual dexterity that a monkey has and so they're not very good at pinching and so they end up using their teeth to groom this sort of grooming tooth comb in their in their jaws and de pathoclean their fur and their their group mates fur so not so much with the

hands. Hey if I like you and we're buds I'll break my teeth through your hair and maybe I'll eat what I find. What does lemur for feel like? They look so fuzzy. So don't touch wild lemurs just as a preface this. Gotcha. But there's a lot of variation in their fur. So some fur is super thin and super soft. So for animals that live in a warmer climate, for animals that are living in a colder climate, say the central highlands, where it's really cold in winter. They have really big thick, fluffy fur to keep them warm. The roughed lemurs that live on the very canopy

of the rainforests, where it's quite wet, because it rains a lot. It's also cold. They have a very, very thick coat that helps protect them from water. IIs have very wiry, sort of, bushy fur. So it really, you know, different fur for different animals and different habitats for different functions. That's the story of lemurs is a story of diversity. Why do eyes look like you put a demon in

the wash and it shrunk? That's what we did. That was the evolution, that was the evolutionary process by which we got eye eyes. Yeah, I can say that for sure, washing machine. Okay, side note, if you need a visual on these, picture something, the size of a small cat, but resembling a wingless bat with possum ears and a shock of black and silver hair that looks like a middle aged hangover. And the name Ii, which is spelled A-Y-E, A-Y-E, is thought to come from a malagassy term for, I don't what the fuck that is.

It literally means, I don't know. Imagine a creature so weird, so unsettlingly horrifying and cute that its name translates to IDK, IDK. On top of that, they have long beef jerky fingers that look like twigs, but alive. And they use one skinnier finger to drum on branches, and then they lean their ear on the wood to listen for some chubby maggots' neck inside.

And then they use a different thicker finger to dig them out, like a toddler would plum a nostril. So yeah, saying that IEI's fulfill a particular niche in Madagascar, it's one way to put it. No, so I, some things about IIs are just undescribable in terms of why, but basically IIs evolved to fill a very particular niche in Madagascar, which is that they specialize on resources that are hard to extract. So think grubs inside trees or really fleffy nuts inside very, very hard cases or, for example, coconut fruit.

And so they are anatomically set up to be able to extract these resources. So they have very, very strong ever-growing teeth that can just nod into anything, including a padlock in captivity, I've seen, or cementing captivity, they're extraordinarily strong in their jaws, but then they have this delicate, flexible, sensitive, long, middle finger that can scoop out resources, so they can scoop out, for example,

a soft boiled egg out of its shell. And they can also scoop out the flesh of an orange, or the flesh of a coconut after they've made a hole, or a grub from inside a hole that they've not in a tree. So they just have this morphological toolkit to extract the resources that they need. And you see commonalities with other primates, so chimpanzees using a stick to fish for termites. IIs have their stick just in their body, it's their finger. But if you'd like to be extra horrified, there was actually an extinct giant eye, a dobbentonia robusta that I'm actually kind of glad as extinct, because I think it would be absolutely traumatizing to see that thing in the wild at night. But there's this very, very large cousin to today's eye that that is now since gone extinct, like the rest of the giant lemurs.

Lydia says that the vast majority of lemurs are nocturnal, but not all of them. So what's up with their big-ohed lights? Orange eyes, huge eyes. What do we know about that? So not all lemurs have orange eyes. So I would say lemurs do have huge eyes, particularly the nocturnal species

because seeing at night is difficult, and so the bigger the eyes eyes the more light they can capture And so probably because early lemurs were likely nocturnal and I can already hear people yelling at me that we don't know that for sure Which is the case, but it's it's possible that early lemurs were nocturnal and so the sort of big eyes was sort of built into them as a thing to help them survive and You see even bigger eyes in primates like tarziers big eyes was sort of built into them as a thing to help them survive. And you see even bigger eyes in primates like Tarziers, which is just go spend an hour on YouTube looking up Tarzier eye videos and

you'll be astonished. So, okay. All right. Think of a Furby that got photoshopped to have eyes twice as big, but a nose half the size. So a Tarzi, it's not a lemur, but rather it's a small, kind of camel-colored angel that hugs tree branches, and whose eye-to-face proportion is much closer to a Roswell, New Mexico alien head

than any mammal on the planet. And so, I think part of it just has to do is capturing a light. Even the species that we think of as diurnal, like ring-tailed lemurs, and particularly the brown lemurs are actually chathemeral, which means they can be active at night or during the day, depending on what's better for them. So we see a lot of brown lemurs foraging at night during the warmest parts of the year,

when it's just really, really energetically expensive to forage in the heat. So the forage at night instead. And so for them, there is a really good reason to maintain big eyes that capture a lot of light. So it probably just has to do with functionality, but you do see a range and eye color across species from very, very dark. Like if you look at the all black schifak, they have very, very dark eyes. And then if you look at the cockroach, sch fox, their eyes can be deep orange to light orange to yellow to even light green. And then you have the blue eyed lemurs who of course have blue eyes and they're like sapphire blue. So

you just get with everything in lemurs, it really depends on the species. And there's this huge range. But the fact that even within a population, you can have variation from light green to dark orange suggests to me that it's just variability. We do see more variability in coat coloring in some species that has to do with camouflage. So there was a paper that came out, particularly for the chafac showing that they tend to be

darker where the habitat is cooler and wetter, which makes sense. Why do we see so many ring-tailed lemurs in captivity? Because they are a flexible generalist that adapts well to different habitat conditions and they survive well in captivity and breed well in captivity and they're very easy to care for in captivity. They're sort of like the rabbits of the Lima world, I guess. Whereas a lot of the other species are quite ecologically specialized, so they maybe only live in one geographic area, or they evolve to eat one particular type of food. And they're very locally

adapted. So finding ways to maintain them outside of the place where they're really evolved in that place. Finding ways to maintain them outside of that can be very difficult. They're just down to hang. Yeah. Okay. What about you? How did you get yourself to Madagascar, a life journey? I understand that you were about lay dancer before.

Can you tell me a little bit about how the world conspired to make you a lemur scientist? Yeah, I think this is, I mean, like the arrival of lemurs in Madagascar, I think my story is one of accident rather than intent. So I grew up in New York City in a household of classical musicians and so I was a very energetic child that was not going to be playing an instrument. So I got put in dance instead. ballet was the way by which I could connect to my family's love of classical music, but do it in my own way, I think. And so yeah, I trained to become a professional, which didn't work out very well. And luckily my college advisor in high school had suggested that I apply to Duke as a reach

school. And nobody thought I would get in, but I did very grateful for that still to this day. And so after a two-year deferral when I tried to make my ballet career happen that didn't happen, I came to Duke looking for something else to do with my life. And I had been at a school for a while. I couldn't remember how to do basic algebra. I was very nervous about getting back into academics,

but I signed up for classes that sounded interesting, which included an introduction to evolutionary anthropology. I feel like that sounded like a science class that I could handle. And also, I really knew that I liked animals, and they talked a lot in the synopsis for that course about primates, and I knew that those were animals. So I kind of left on to that. And then at the same time, I needed a work study job and the then Duke University Primate Center, which has now become the Duke Lemur Center, was hiring undergraduate tour guides. And so I was simultaneously taking a class about lemurs

and primates and the place of humans in nature, while I was starting to lead tours of this facility to talk to the general public about lemurs. So I sort of talk about how my career as a science communicator sort of co-evolved at the same time as my career as a scientist. And then when I came time for graduate school, I knew I wanted to spend time in Madagascar. I like working with the lemurs in captivity, but I'm an ecologist. I study, I mean, I'm a lemurologist for the purpose of this episode, but I really think of myself as an ecologist.

I fundamentally study lemurs in the context of where they live, and so that environment becomes really important. And so I wanted to base quite a lot of my dissertation work in Madagascar. And then I ended up meeting my wife in Madagascar. She's Argentinian, but was also working at Duke. And so together, we've done quite a lot of field work. And she's really the field expert in our family. And so I sort of like follow her around,

kind of like puppy a lot in Madagascar. I wish she sorts things out. There was no master plan here. It was just like fumbling around and finding things that I thought were interesting. Well, I was going to ask you mentioned that you're, before we started recording that you're there for a few months at a time.

And I was like, what a power of your wife though. But she comes with you as well. Yeah, actually more often than not, she leaves me behind. So she just got back this week from a three month trip where I stayed here and took care of our cat and our house. And she went off gallivanting through the countryside, working with our colleagues and our students there and collecting some data that we needed to fill in some gaps. So she, some Marina's been working in Madagascar since 2004, so coming up on her 20-year work-aversary there and she's got quite deep ties to the island, a really solid network

of collaborators and students and I think she really feels comfortable, really, really comfortable in Madagascar and in a tent. I just follow her around. How long is the flight? It depends on which way you go, but usually it will take us about 24 hours door to door. You can fly through Paris, you can fly through Ethiopia, you can fly through Kenya, you don't fly through Johannesburg, just depends on which flights are cheapest. Do you just knock yourself out?

Do you just bend a drill at the whole time? No, I wish I could. I don't sleep on flights. I usually end up watching it, like the entire extended edition of the Lord of the Rings. I think there was one year I got through, like, five of the seven Harry Potter movie's in a row. At some point, you're so bored.

You sleep for a couple hours, and then they wake you up with food. And you just arrive usually pretty knackered and you sleep for a day when you get there. Oh my god. Can I ask you questions from patrons? Yeah. They're excited about it. But first let's show some love for lemurs by donating to a cause of Lydia's choosing and she would love a donation to go to the Mahaliana Labs, which is an NGO running a veterinary science and training lab in Madagascar's capital city. And Lydia says that Mahaliana Labs are training the next generation of wildlife scientists and vets in Madagascar,

and they're doing wonderful work. So to find out more about them, visit mahaliana.org, which will be linked in the show notes, and that donation was made possible by sponsors of the show. Okay, if you're a Patreon member at patreon.com suchologies for a dollar a month, you may have submitted questions before this recording, so let's make some heads and tails of these. Starting with a great one, asked by patrons, lovely bites, Earl of Grammolkin, curly-free, saty-by-pond, Ali Brown, Kegan Newman, Colleen Selwood, and first-time question askers, Heidi and Qtip. Want to know what's going on with the ringed tail? Why the rings?

Why is it so fashionable? I mean, who doesn't love a bold fashion statement? I love stripes, long time stripe wear. But how did they get them? So there's sort of two schools of thought, and probably they're both right in terms of function, because for something that, exceptional to evolve, it's probably going to be functional in some way.

And so one school talks about it being actually functioning for camouflage, much like we don't think zebras would be very camouflage with their stripes, but they are. And so there's an idea that the tail actually helps with camouflage. Another is that it helps with social communication. So ring-tailed lemurs are quite terrestrial.

They're the most terrestrial of all the lemurs. They spend the most time on the ground. Up to 80% of their time can really be on the ground. And so when the troop is coordinating movements, you'll often see the dominant female lift her tail in the air and that sort of a symbol for everybody else to follow her. The males also use their tails in this sort of competition stink fighting thing that they do. And so as a prequel, or maybe to stave off being physically

aggressive with one another, they actually fight with each other by getting their tails full of their different smells from their different senklans, and then wafting it at each other, or wafting it at the females, as like a cum-hid-there-a-kind of a thing. And so the tail serves definite communicative functions in ring-tailed lemur societies,

but also probably helps with camouflage. Ah-ha, like a feather boa soaked in buckle-own, which also lets you go low profile in a tree. A must- have accessory. Um, Ali Brown wants to know what noises do lemurs make. So many noises. Um, so all the species have a different vocal repertoire and there are noises for all sorts of things like, ah, predator and like, oh, friend. So, and also also like come here and find this food with me.

So there's a lot of group coordination that happens. There's also a lot of like, hey, let's tell that group to back off that happens. So territorial vocalizations. And it really just depends on the species. So probably the most iconic vocalizations come from the roughed lemurs. And these animals live upway in the tippy-top canopy of the rainforest.

There used to be some aerial predators that were much larger than today's predators that could pick them off when they were at the top of the trees. And so they have a quite elaborate alarm call repertoire to warn each other of, say, an incoming aerial predator. And that eagle that used to pick them off no longer exists, but airplanes still look kind of scary when flying overhead. And so they still maintain this elaborate vocal repertoire to warn about predators.

And then the other really iconic vocalization would be the injury, which is the largest living lemur today. And these animals live in pair bonded, so male-female pairs with their offspring. So quite a small social group, but they maintain very large territories, and they do that through vocal communication. So the male and the female pair will do it with each other in this sort of series of cascading and decascading roots that they make, especially early in the morning, and it's a way for the parent to maintain their bonds and also to tell other pairs nearby,

like, hey, this is our territory, leave us alone. It's like the good morning text. That's so sweet. Yes. You know, I keep like, swooning audibly because it's too much just a door ability for me to handle. A bunch of people wanted to know like in Abby Greib's words, lemur seems so cute and lovable. Are they actually as sweet and nice as they seem? And Mary and Thomas said, my wife heard that they will kick

seven shades of shit out of an unfamiliar lemur. Is this true? What's going on with their behavior? This was also on the minds of Macy Abbott, Marie E. A. K. Joshua Tazin, Matt Hershel's wife Jenna, who wanted to know about their talents. But yes, in first-time quest jasker, Marie E. K's words, OMG literally fave animals ever, but I've heard that some of them are violent. So I don't think that they're like nasty animals by nature, right? I think when there's no reason for anger or violence tends to be actually very calm, lemurs societies tend to be very pro-social, so there's a lot of beautiful, affiliative interactions, like grooming and play and huddling and snuggling, and so you do see all of those

beautiful interactions as well. However, they are wild animals. And so when there's competition over food, over breeding, over territory, like, yeah, they'll cut a bitch when they need to. Because that's just life in the wild, right? You can't, life in the wild is not always this peaceful thing that we imagine.

And so if there's a fight over dominance in a ring-telled lemur society, the females can get mean towards each other. If there's a fight over dominance in a ring-tilted lemur society, the females can get mean towards each other. If there's a fight over who gets the best sleeping spot or who gets the best food resources, yeah, they can be mean, but I don't think they are nasty by nature. It's just sometimes the situation calls for a little bit of aggression, and they are certainly capable of throwing punches and shade, but they need to. They just have boundaries, people.

You should try it sometime. Oh, shit. Do they use their grooming claw as kind of like pack in a blade? Nah, they got teeth for that. OK. Gemma wants to know, behaviorally, are lemurs silly guys? The juveniles can be.

So one of the most wonderful things about primates, all primates, and including lemurs, is that we have this extended period of juvenileity between when we're infants and when we're adults, and that extended period of juvenileity often serves as a place where animals can gain the social and the life skills that they need to survive in adulthood, because lemurs societies are socially complex, and there's a lot of rules you got to learn, and a lot of bonds you got to form, and a lot of things you gotta learn, and a lot of bonds you gotta form, and a lot of things you gotta try and figure out.

And so in that period of juvenileity, we see a lot of things like play. We see gangly animals who haven't reached their adult size yet, but their limbs seem to have grown faster than their brains. We see big ears, and we see lots of falls, and we see a lot of silliness, and that sort of period of juvenileity is a really wonderful time to watch animals grow and develop and you know get their own little personalities and figure

out their own place in their group. Olivia, Elias, and what's known is it true that they do drugs? No, yes. No, yes. There is this sort of famous situation of a pair or a group of common black lemurs. I should really say a population of common black lemurs, I should really say a population of common black lemurs in the Northwest Madagascar that have a habit of like using the toxin from centipedes or millipedes as a way to like coat their body in this toxin so that they are like maybe less attractive to predators or maybe more attractive to friends, but also maybe there is a little bit of a drug-induced stupor that they seem to enjoy. What is in these mygic millipedes? I know you want to know.

So according to the 2018 study Potential Self-Medication, using millipede secretions in red-fronted lemurs, combining anointment and ingestion for a joint action against gastrointestinal parasites. So it's Benzacquino, which helps ward off mosquitoes, which carry malaria, and bonus, it also helps with the worms that live around their anus. So they chew these millipedes, then they rub them all over their body like a deodorant stick. And then, many times, they end up chewing them like a ropalicorish, eating the whole thing up, which induces a narcotic type intoxication

that involves the naps and so much drooling. They're drooling all over the place, like a bloodhound, but drunk. But humans do that with beer, and it offers no protection from malaria or anal worms. Oh, speaking of liquids. Kristen, John's wants to know why do lemurs hate water so much? It seems like all it takes to contain them is a small moat.

They don't swim. They do like to drink water, but they're not great swimmers. So they definitely didn't get to Madagascar by swimming. And so they, yeah, they're just, they swimming is not their jam. But of course, there are a lot of lemurs that live in a rain forest. So they can't hate water that much,

because it rains a lot in the rain forest. But certainly, they're not doing high dives off the diving board. Listen, some of us don't like getting our hair wet. Maybe lemurs are the dry shampoo type. They do a little styling with some millipede poison. They're good to go. But what about lady lemurs?

Are these insular primates more evolved than the United States government? You want to know about social structures, patrons curly fry, hannagore, Libya, Lias and Holly Spencer and... Emily Herbert wants to know, how did they evolve hannigori, libya, liason, holly Spencer, and Emily Herbert wants to know how did they evolve to become a species, quote, run by women. I understand you mentioned they might be matriarchal, is that true? Yeah, so with the exception of one group of brown lemurs, lemurs are female dominant. And so they are matriarchal or the females are in charge. The females can be mean actually more often than the males.

The females run things. And it's funny when you give tours, there are a lot of like women who are like, that's the way it should be and their husbands are like, that's the way things are. I love my wife. And so what we see in lemurs is this clear female dominance. And I think this question is a good one,

which is not just, is that the case, but if so, why? Why do we see female dominance in lemurs when you don't necessarily see this in other primate societies? And it goes back to Madagascar, because one feature of Madagascar is that it is extraordinarily heterogeneous and stochastic, meaning that the environments are super, super variable. There is variation across seasons. We have a yearly rainy season and a yearly dry season. And so that means there's a time of plenty and a time of scarcity. We have variation across years into how strong those rains are or how dry the year might be.

So some years you might have really bad fruit even in the season of plenty. And then Madagascar frequently gets hit with these stochastic sort of random climate events, like cyclones, droughts, floods that are, of course, now getting more frequent and more intense. And so what that means is for lemurs is they have to expect at some point in their lifespan

for there to be really bad times. And how are females supposed to support pregnancy and lactation if there's this expectation of not great food around. And so one idea for the evolution of female dominance and lemurs is that the females basically took control so they could be guaranteed access to food to be able to support pregnancy and lactation. Ah, access to childcare, reproductive, rises, interesting, it's interesting stuff.

Maybe in another 55 million years, who knows? Piper Jones, Earl of Grammillkin, Amanda, Mary the grapefruit, Ron, Dicken Crane, and Reha, are, want to know, what's their intelligence like, Mary, just how smart are they? Yeah, I also get this question a lot, and I think it's a good question to unpack,

because I think we have to think about how we're defining intelligence. I think we as humans tend to really place emphasis on things like cognitive intelligence, on counting, on reasoning, on math, on puzzle solving. And so in some cases, lemurs do very well on those tasks. Ring-tailed lemurs can count up to say for about seven. They can do some level of transitive inference,

if A is bigger than B and B is bigger than C, they can infer the relationship between A and C. But if you're comparing their cognitive reasoning skills to that of an ape, they're always gonna look dumb by comparison. However, if we think about intelligence instead, as an animal's ability to survive in its environment, and we get rid of this focus on cognitive capacity as being the thing that defines intelligence,

and we think about it as an ability to survive where they are. Lemurs are really, really smart. They're doing pretty well in their habitats. They know how to find food, they know how to find mates, they know how to live and thrive, so I think they're pretty smart. But each species has its own different intelligence because they each have different problems to solve. Are you figuring out your shit?

Because that's the smartest a person can be. Put different people in front of a subway map, wish them luck. Ask me to drive a weed combine, watch me cry at the dashboard. Intelligent at what? If it's doing life, you're doing fine. And lemurs, they have streetsmarts to help them survive. But for how long now? Lovely bites asking for their son, Elliott and A.O.F.E. homes want to know how long do they live? What's their life expectancy?

Also, super depends on the species. So generally, the larger animals live longer. And so the smallest animals, the mouse lemurs, I would think in the wild, you know, a seven year old mouse lemur would be pretty old. In captivity, we can extend that up to 15. There are slightly larger cousins, the dwarf lemurs can live up to 29 under human care. We have IIs under human care that are in their mid 30s.

So they can live pretty long lives. There are cases of animals in their 30s in the wild just kicking it, chilling, doing their thing. So they are not as long lived as the apes, but they are very long lived compared to other mammals of their size. And probably my wife would be angry, I mean, if I didn't mention that there's this correlation in the lineages that do hibernate between hibernation and longevity. So there's one genus of lemurs called the dwarf lemurs, the chirogealius, and they are obligate hibernators, meaning every individual of every population and every species hibernates

every year, no matter what. So according to a 2021 paper titled, on the modulation and maintenance of hibernates every year, no matter what. So according to a 2021 paper titled, on the modulation and maintenance of hibernation in captive dwarf lemurs, published in the journal Nature, fat-tailed dwarf lemurs can hibernate for up to seven months out of the year, bless them. How do they sleep so long?

What about a snack or a bevy? Well, they don't calm fat-tailed for nothing. In the feeding season, they can start to 40% of their body weight in their chubby tail, along with water. So it's like just being hooked up to a nutrient hose. And if you've ever needed an inspiration to slow down, the fat tailed dwarf lemurs heart rate drops from 180 beats a minute to about eight, and fun aside, aside, one of the authors on this paper was Dr. Lydia Green herself, and so was Dr. Marina P. Blanco, who is Lydia's wife? Life, love, lemurs. Now this next question came from Joshua Tossin,

and they say it rhymes with cause and problems. Are they hibernating in nests, in trees? Are they in burrows like Austin Power suggested? Where are they sleeping? Yes and yes. Okay. So it depends on the habitat. So in the east, in the rainforests where you have really spongy thick, you know, really nice soil, they bury themselves underground. In the west where we're on dry deciduous forests where the soil is much sandier and they probably can't dig into that. They use tree holes. God, everything's fascinating.

I can't handle it. Destiny Lam wants to know how faster lemurs could they personally outrun one? Olivia wants to know, why do some of them run skip sideways? Make you a little marshal ask why it jump like that though? That's my favorite one. Jarmus wants to know has there been any measurement of lemur leaps? These jerks can jump. How do they do it?

How far do they leap? Also depends on the size of the species and this gets into sort of some of the variation in morphology because we have lemurs that are quadrupeds. So they run on all floors,

just like your dog or your catwood. So think of your ring-tailed lemurs always on quadrupeds, so they run on all fours, just like your dog or your cat would. So think of your ring-tailed lemurs always on all fours. They run pretty fast, they can outrun me. I'm not a runner, but they're pretty speedy animals to outrun predators, they gotta be. The ones that, why do they move it like that, though, are probably referencing the chafak

or the group of lemurs called the Andria Day. You'd know these lemurs, so they're this ivory white everywhere except they're kind of deep, purplish red-colored bellies, and they're the ones skipping and leaping and bouncing around like a fourth grader with a belly full of monster energy drink. And so these species, along with the sport of lemurs, practice a different style of locomotion called vertical clinging and leaping, or BCL, if you're in the know. And so here the animals are vertically oriented and they have very, very long,

very powerful muscular back legs. And they move from tree trunk to tree trunk in an upright posture, sort of leaping off, pushing with their back feet, rotating in mid-air, and then coming into the next tree trunk, facing forward. Our leaf eaters tend to live mid canopy, and so being able to leap vertically when you're going from tree trunk to tree trunk is really helpful.

The problem for those vertical clingers and leopards is when they get on the ground, because they are not quadrupeds, so they can't run like a dog or a cat, and they have to do this awkward hop, and that's because their legs don't run like a dog or a cat, and they have to do this awkward hop. And that's because their legs don't really swing in their hip sockets the same way that a quadruped would because they're adapted for this vertical clinging and leaping. And so they have to do this awkward sideways, Sache, you stay hop on the ground.

And they're much faster in the trees, but they can still at run a predator if they need to. Now, Sashay, away. Spencer J and Nick there wants to know, in Spencer's words, what role do lemurs play in Malagasy folklore? That's also a great question. So lots of different roles because there are lots

of different lemurs and also Madagascar has more than one ethnic group. So it's a really diverse culture as well. There's no one thing is malagassy culture necessarily. So it really depends on the region. I want to be wary about speaking for Malagassy Society because of course I'm not malagassy but this is what I've learned from my Malagassy friends and colleagues. It's basically a lot of Malagasy society is governed by what are called Fadi or taboos. And there are some Fadi's that protect wildlife. So in many places, there's Fadi against hunting lemurs,

particularly Shafak and Indri, in part because they feature heavily in the origin story of humans. And there's a lot of recognition of human-like features in some of these vertical species. So I've heard stories about how Shafak moms carry their babies on their back the same way that many malagassy women carry their babies on their back. So there's a recognition in some of those species that contributes to these faddies that protect them from being hunted.

There are other faddies that say eye eyes are evil and they should be killed on sight because they're a bad omen. So it's really varied in terms of how the folklore relates to the lemurs and the region as well. But probably the most famous story, at least in Western culture, has to do with the injury, Babakutu, or the son of Kutu.

And there's a couple different stories of Babakutu, or the son of Kutu, and there's a couple different stories of Babakutu and how the injury came to be. Some tell of man and injury being brothers, some tell of a father and his son, and the kid gets lost, and his father becomes the injury or becomes Babakutu. But all of them sort of share this sort of intertwining history between humans and lemurs as a recognition of each other. So injuries, side note, are lemurs that are stark, black and white. They're like a dog-sized panda that's mixed with a koala, with these two fuzzy pom-pom ears,

and these light green eyes that just interrogate your being. And their vocalizations sound kind of like a surprised cowboy. Like, whooo, wait? And yes, there are folkloric tales about the injury lemur saving someone and then becoming revered and so many species of lemur are prey to poachers Looking for bush meat which feeds both malnourished folks below the poverty line all the way up to the wealthier classes who prefer Exotic game, but it's considered taboo to hunt the injury because they can be looked at like our ancestors, speaking of family lines.

Well, you mentioned babies, Madison Wilfer, first-time question asker, wanna know how many babies do they typically have? Alexandra Katoel wants to know, lemurs 101, sex ed, let's get the dirty. Sarah King wants to know do they mate for life? Storm has a question from their mom. Why do lemur moms just leave their young if they're not strong enough? She's still mad over that one David Attenborough episode where the lemur mom

abandoned her baby because it couldn't hold on. So how are they making other tiny cute lemurs? Yeah, so again this is going to go back to Madagascar, which is that when you evolve in a very, very seasonal environment, your reproduction can become seasonal. And so basically all breeding in lemurs with kind of the exception of the eye eye, but excluding the eye eye, the rest of the species, their breeding is timed such that the kids are weaning in the season of plenty. And different lemurs have different gestation periods or different periods of dependence on mom for nursing. And so they all breed at different times,

but basically then all the kids wean and start eating solid food at around the same time regardless of species in the rainy season because you want your kid to have the best chance of going up healthy and strong, and so that best chance would be when there's food around. And so it really depends when they're

breeding on when they're actually going to give birth and how long the kids are going to nurse. So it's super variable as well. The mouse and dwarf lemurs have only about a 60 day pregnancy. That was quick. The chafac, it's more like five months, five and a half months. So it's, again, super, super variable. The smaller lemaq, it's more like five months, five and a half months. So it's again super, super variable. The smaller lemurs, like the mouse and dwarf lemurs,

will have anywhere from a singleton to triplets. I've also heard cases of quads, but that's pretty atypical. You're lemurids. So you're ring-tailed lemurs, you're brown lemurs, you're bamboo lemurs. Usually have singletons or twins. Your roughs lemurs can have the biggest litters of four up to five I've heard cases of. And they do this fascinating thing

where they have like these boom or bust years. So in really good years, basically all the females will reproduce. And then they co-raise their kids and kindergarten together, where there's a lot of allomaternal care. So caring for other other moms kids. And then she cares for your kids as well. So that's sort of this fascinating system. If you're going to be a really heavy fruit eater and you want to time everything for years of really, really good fruiting. So there's a lot of variation in it, but basically it's very, very, very seasonal. And how are they doing the NASDAQ? Do they mate for life or do they have orgies and treetops?

It depends. It depends on the species. So we have some species that are they mate for life or do they have orgies and tree tops? It depends on the species. So we have some species that are pair bonded for life, the most classic and beautiful example I think would be the red bellied lemur. They live in just these beautiful pairs that mate for life. A lot of dwarf lemurs also will be in very, very strongly bonded pairs that mate for life, injury are the same. Ah, some are so romantic. Others less so. And then we have the other end of the spectrum, which is the ring- Awesome. So we're manic. Others less so.

And then we have the other end of the spectrum, which is the ring-tailed lemur, which is a very promiscuous, multi-mail, multi-female kind of like a frat party that happens around mating season where there's a lot of competition and there's a lot of female choice. There's even things like paternity confusion, so mating with multiple males, so nobody knows who's get his who's and it's just kind of a mess. I mean, I'm feeling like because they're so cute, they have tiny, tiny dicks. Is that true? It depends on the species as well.

So what we tend to see in primates, and probably in other mammals as well, is that when there's intense competition for paternity, you tend to have much bigger testes and much bigger sperm competition. So for example, male mouse lemurs have just enormous testes in the breeding season. Mouse lemurs, of course, smaller than a microwave burrito, about the size of a small squirrel. They're furry and they're golden brown, huge eyes.

They could just sit right in your palm, but its nartsack is a size of a walnut, the largest among all primates. The lead researcher on the job offered the visual. If humans had testicles of an equivalent size, they would be as large as two great fruits. Oh, lemurs, we've gotten to know you so well. And again, the season is a really short window, so outside of the breeding season, they've regressed their testes and you can't really see them at all because it's a waste of energy to maintain those enormous testes. But we tend to see smaller testes in

parabonded species where the males are pretty confident that they're gonna be the dad and they don't need to sort of fight for it at all. So once again, sociality and evolution go hand in hand. I love that having big balls is actually the sign that you're a cuck. Yeah, exactly. One thing that a lot of people talk about, the obvious question that we have not yet answered was asked by patrons mouse, mish the fish, Amanda Kamlett, Susan Singley, and Phi Cameron. Now, when it talks about that, so many people, which is why I've saved it to the end, want

to know Nova, first time question, Oscar, what do you think about King Julian from Madagascar? How do you feel about the portrayal of Lemurs in Madagascar movie? I wish you could see the eye roll in my case right now. So I want to give the movie credit, where credit I think is due, which is that over the course of my career, the questions went from what is a lemur to, oh, I know what lemurs are because of this movie and now I want to know more. So I do think that the movie gave the general public an understanding of lemurs and where they come from

in a way that wasn't present before the movie franchise. However, I do think that could have gotten things a bit more accurate. My favorite being, of course, that King Julian should be Queen Julian. Leemander, female dominant, and that was such a good opportunity to teach everybody that there is more than one way to structure a society, and that women can play, and females can play a really important role in governance and being in charge, based on a real life situation, and they

missed that vote. Or that raft of vegetation. So that's the part that makes, I think, a lot of us pretty annoyed. And also, like, there are no giraffes in Madagascar. None of the African megafauna is in Madagascar. They all missed the raft. None of them got from continent Africa over to Madagascar. So there's just also some misinformation that has resulted from the sort of poster of the movie being the title Madagascar

with them like a giraffe and a hippo and like a penguin and a lemur. So it gets some credit but it also could have made things a bit more accurate. I had no idea. Thank you for clearing that up. A bunch of people. Anne Kylesy, Red Seater, Lily, Jen McGillivray, Sarah Piett, Ali Amiris, Katie Harris, Emily Hebert, also wanted to know about zoo and boop, zoo and boota. Zubamafil. Thank you. Yeah.

This was a TV show for kids. Zubamafil. With the crack credits. I'm walking in the woods one day. Prison Martins are something strange. I need to live in Lena who likes to bounce and play. I was a little bit too old to ride the Zabumafu bandwagon, but this was a show that was filmed for wild crats.

And there's a lot of ties between the crap brothers and Duke because they went to Duke and they were involved at the lemurs center. And so they chose a cockroach chafac, which by the way is the best lemurs species. They chose a cockroach chafac because they're mascot and it was this puppet named Zabu. And they did some filming for their entrance sequence using a real lemur whose name was Jovian.

And so Jovian is actually Zabu and he lived his whole life at the Duke lemurs center and has a bunch of kids and grandkids, and I think even out great-grandkids that are out there. And so Jovian actually was part of my senior thesis. He contributed to data for my dissertation. So I had a long history with that family outside of the TV franchise.

Did he pass away? He did. He was, I think, 20. So he got to be a decent age. A lot of people want to know, a museum, rena, Adam Weaver, Connor Chapman wants to know, are lemurs at risk or endangered,

Becky, this Assi, Seagress, scientists, how can we help the precious baby, lemur loves? Do you need volunteers at the lemur center? Please, I'm begging you, says Taylor Wade. And also, of course, Papka 34 wants to know what impact will climate change have on lemur populations. How are they doing? How can we help them? So lemurs are super endangered. For a number of reasons, and part of it is just that like a lot of

lemurs are naturally, geographically or ecologically specialized, meaning they only live in one place, and they really only survive by eating, for example, one thing. And so for some of these species, there's not a whole lot of natural resilience or flexibility encoded in how they operate. And so those species tend to be quite at risk from habitat loss or habitat fragmentation or also climate change. So there is this real pressure for many species in the wild that is just present and real. And where I would spend a little bit more time talking is not about

the fact that they are endangered because like most wildlife they are endangered, but we tend to spin why they're endangered as being the fault of malagassy people for destroying their habitat. And I think that's the part where we need to have a change in conversation, which will also feed back into how do we help. Because the reality is that malagassy people also need land. It's also their country.

And so there is this competition over space for farming. Malagassy people, many of them also have a deep respect for the forest and for the environment and they rely on the forest and they don't want the forest gone. There's a growing ecotourism industry in Madagascar that also is dependent on intact habitats and healthy habitats and healthy ecosystems and lemurs being there. And so we have to change how we talk about the conservation crisis in Madagascar and where we place blame, because a lot of the problems actually developed as a consequence of colonialism on the island,

and not necessarily because of what the indigenous population is doing. So, to the answer of how can we help, I think we have to make sure that we are lifting up malagassy leaders, conservation leaders, and scientific leaders who are being agents of change in their own country, and recognize that the voice of Westerners cannot be louder than the voice of Malagasy, because it's not our country. And so making sure that we are donating to

and supporting causes that are run by Malagasy leaders and Malagasy experts that are providing training opportunities for Malagasy students. So if you can find organizations that are run by malagasy leaders that are doing good work, even if it's small scale, I think that's a really, really good way to help. Yeah, wonderful. And thank you for the suggestion for where to donate. Yeah, so I can I give a particular shout out to Mahalena run by Dr. Fidi-Ross and Bineri and Elizabeth Tumey who are doing really good work and malagascar to support veterinary

and conservation students, basically teaching them all the things that a scientist needs as they're growing into their own. And again, we'll be linking those in the show notes and this answer is shocking to me. I mean, the underlying question, I feel like we all have. It's like, why are they so cute? Hmm. What's happening in our brains when we see them?

Is it the gigantic eyes? I think it probably is the gigantic eyes. So this is where me and other primatologists might differ because the closer I get to human looking, the more scared I am and the less like cute I find them. Like I am, I am very intimidated by baboons and macaques and by like chimpanzees and gorillas. I'm really like don't ever want to come in contact with any of those animals. I'm so great, like so happy that people are studying them, but that is just not my jam.

So for me, lemurs like are basically on the other end of the primate spectrum where they could almost not be primates and they fall into sort of the bucket of cute mammals, but they still have fur and they're still like, you know, they're small, they're not terrifying. Maybe some of the extinct lemurs that were like the size of like female gorillas

I would have felt more intimidated by, but there's something very not intimidating about a lemur, maybe unless you're another lemur. So for sure it's the eyes, it's the fluffiness, it's the beautiful coat colorings, often the pictures that we're seeing, and the videos we're seeing are of animals that are eating really nutritious food,

and so look wonderful and healthy and super fluffy. The kids are adorable, it's just, you know, I'm here being a scientist and talking about how cute they are, which just sounds very like not, you know, objective, but it is, they are just adorable. What about the hardest thing about studying lemurs? What sucks about your job other than maybe the flights? The flights are not great. For sure, it is working on an endangered system. Like sometimes

you just have to put out of the back of your brain like how endangered these animals are to focus on the task at hand. It can just be mentally exhausting. It is exhausting when a population you've been studying gets hit by a hunting wave or by cyclone seeing animals that you've spent a long time studying, go missing or get lost. It is just really, really difficult. It's also just part of nature sometimes. I think recognizing that nature is just harsh is part of it.

It can just take an emotional toll. So sometimes you need like a nice hot shower and a cup of tea to remind yourself of why you got into this. And then there's the other like physical aspect of it. If like field work is really difficult, it is physically difficult, it is emotionally difficult, sleeping in a tent, not having access to running water or a bathroom, getting up early in the morning,

not getting the data that you expected to get, worrying that you're not fulfilling your obligations to the community or to your grants that you promised because you can't find the animals that you thought was there. All of that takes a toll over time, but I mean, what I do anything else, probably not. What do you love the most about it or what is your favorite lemur? I feel like you maybe mentioned the shifak, but I'm not sure. Yeah, there are nine species of shifak and the best ones the cockrole shafak and I can hear people yelling at me

Through Instagram right now For me, it's the cockrole shafak just because it's a species I've been working on for working with I should say for close to 17 years now So there's just a familiarity with that species that I have I also think their coloring is beautiful the sort of warm maroon of their arms and legs with the like luscious cream of their body, this variation eye color that we talked about. They're just, they're beautiful to look at. They're dopey in behavior, they're smart.

They just have it all. I think the best part is seeing them in the wild. And it's also recognizing that as many data as I generate and as many papers as I publish for students as I mentor, like ultimately those animals are there just living their lives, having nothing to do with me. And just getting to see them do their thing without them caring at all that I exist

is actually really rewarding. Like they're up foraging, they don't care that I'm there, they're unforaging, they don't care that I'm there, they're uproaming, they don't care that I'm there. Like I just get to observe without disturbing. And that's sort of an extraordinary place to stand there and be in just to see. Thank you for taking us to Madagascar from an oral standpoint.

I mean, this has been an absolute thrill to talk to you about this. It's been a long time coming and you're just a gem in this field. Oh, that's so kind. Yeah, I think next stop is actually a collaborative trip to Madagascar. Send me details. Honestly, I will go. Can I come too? What month? I should tell you what month. Do not go in the rainy season. Okay. So, sometime like between April to October is the best time of year. Let me know when you're headed there next. Yeah. Seriously, we have it on record deal. Well, thank you so much, Doc. This has just been the best. It's my pleasure. Thank you very much for having me. I love this. Oh, I got this. So ask smart people not smart questions because you're going

to remember the answer long after they had forgotten that you ever asked it. And huge, huge thanks to Dr. Lydia Greene for hopping on this episode with me. You can follow her in her wife, fellow Limerologist, Dr. Marina Blanco, on Instagram at lemur scientist. And we'll put more links including one to the NGO charity. And we'll of course have more links to research on our website at alleyword.com slashology slash lemurology. We are at allogies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm at alleyward with one L on both. We also have small Gs which are shorter classroom

friendly episodes that are all available to download for free at alliword.com slash small Gs. That's linked in the show notes. Aaron Talbert is our Allergy's podcast Facebook group, Admin, Emily White of the Rotary, makes our professional transcripts. Noelle Dilworth is our scheduling producer. Susan Hale is our managing director, Kelly Arduire,

makes our website and can make yours too. And the rare specimen who pieces the show together each week is lead editor, Mercedes-Mateland, a Fmateland audio, Nick Thorburn wrote the theme music, and if you stick around until the end of the episode, I tell you a secret. And this week is that one of the ornaments on our Christmas tree this year is this rock hard bowed caesho. I don't know how if I think I'm pronouncing that right. It's this Brazilian cheese roll. When we were decorating the tree like a year ago with our friend Jason, he strung right, it's this Brazilian cheese roll. When we were decorating the tree like a year ago with a friend chase and he

strung this trader Joe's appetizer cheese biscuit on a popcorn garland for us to find later. And I was so touched, I kept it and I froze it for a whole year. And then now it's a holiday fixture. We've made it into an ornament. So far, nothing else is trying to eat it. It really is like a geological specimen at this point. Also, another secret.

This is the quickest turnaround I've ever managed on an episode. It's now midnight, and I recorded this with Lydia at 7.30 this morning. But I shuffled some episodes around, because I really wanted this one to go up. I think we all needed it. Okay. Also, my dog looks like an eye eye. I look it up. Bye-bye. like an eye-eye look it up. Bye bye.

Move it. Move it.