Ghosts of Madagascar
by Alex Hawes
In the woods neere about the River, is a great store of beasts, as big as Munkies, ash-coloured, with a small head, long taile like a Fox, garled with white and blacke, the furre very fine.
So wrote William Finch, senior merchant aboard the English East India Company vessel Red Dragon in 1608. Bound for the Spice Islands, the Red Dragon had set anchor along the coast of southwestern Madagascar, just south of the modern-day city of Tular. Ashore the crew would find species wholly unknown to the Western world amid the thorny scrub of didierea plants and tamarind trees. Finch’s dutiful account is almost certainly the first written description of the ring-tailed lemur (Lemur catta)—just one of many peculiar creatures in this peculiar land.
It was from the lazy port city of Tular that I would journey eastward in a creaking jeep nicknamed Manga-kelly (“little blue”) 385 years later on a far more modest expedition. I was accompanying a scientist studying Verreaux’s sifakas (Propithecus verreauxi verreauxi)—white-furred lemurs that share the island’s southern gallery forests with their smaller ring-tailed cousins. For hours on end, I would gaze up into the treetops to decipher sifakas’ identities and movements, jotting down all bluffs and cuffs. It was but a sneak peak into their unique survival tactics.
While pitching a tent in front of the dusty research station the day of our arrival, I soon heard the grunts and car-alarm-like warning calls of Finch’s curious creatures. Within minutes it seemed, a band of ring-tailed lemurs had descended upon our little clearing, the animals chomping at greens intended for the village’s zebu cattle, drinking from a water bucket, and eying my tent—which I made sure was zipped tight thereafter.
As I crashed through the thorny forests of Beza-Mahafaly Special Reserve during the weeks to follow—waterproof notebook in hand, binoculars bouncing from my neck, my belly full from a dense breakfast of brown beans and rice—lemurs would appear from nowhere a few arm-lengths away. Ring-tails scurried across the trail, their banded tails pointed at the sky. Sifakas lunged through the air overhead or scared me senseless with their honking seeee-fak alerts and head-bobbing cautions. Quickly it was clear that I, the budding primatologist, was not the only one conducting observations. The ghosts of Madagascar were watching me.
The 33 known living species of lemur—from the Latin word for spirits of the dead—haunt only one place: the island nation of Madagascar (although populations of mongoose lemur, Eulemur mongoz, and brown lemur, E. fulvus, were introduced by people onto the nearby Comoro Islands several hundred years ago). The island’s incredible diversity of life has evolved in creative isolation since Madagascar and the Indian subcontinent broke off from mainland Africa more than 120 million years ago. Palms, euphorbias, aloes, and more than 1,000 orchid species enrich the dwindling forests of this Texas-sized island. Six of the world’s seven species of baobab tree spread their roots only here. All but two of the island’s 150 known frog species and 90 percent of its reptiles—including two-thirds of the planet’s 90 chameleon species—inhabit Madagascar, and Madagascar alone. In sum, an estimated 75 percent of all the flora and fauna here is endemic—unique to the island.
The remarkable array of lemur species further reveals the evolutionary cauldron that is Madagascar. Lemurs, together with lorises, galagos (“bushbabies”), and tarsiers, form the prosimian suborder—a branch of primates distinct from monkeys, apes, and humans (although the tarsier’s exact position within the primate tree remains unclear). Fossil evidence indicates that lemurs first appeared about 50 million years ago, well after Madagascar’s separation from continental Africa. A founder population must have traversed the Mozambique Channel from Africa on floating vegetation or other debris—these bold colonists crossing a body of water that is 220 miles wide at its closest point now, but was perhaps narrower and more riddled with intermediary islands then.
Ancestral lemurs flourished in the absence of large predators and primate competitors on Madagascar. The modern lemur species represent only a fraction of the diversity that existed here as recently as two millennia ago. Those that have since vanished—the so-called megalemurs—all greatly outweighed their surviving cousins. One such group, the palaeopropithecids, hung upside down from branches like orang utans or sloths with the help of long, arching finger bones. Megaladapis members likely clung upright to tree trunks while browsing on leaves—picture a 160-pound koala. The largest known megalemur (Archaeoindris fontoynomtii) tipped the scales at about 400 pounds, the size of a silverback gorilla, and stuck mainly to the ground.
The human occupants of Madagascar also descend from daring colonists. Sometime between 1,500 and 2,000 years ago, the ancestors of the Malagasy people first reached Madagascar, having traveled an astounding 4,000 miles from the Indonesian archipelago in simple outrigger canoes. Unfortunately for lemurs, these new arrivals introduced cattle and goats to Madagascar and hunted native animals for food. By the time European explorers and merchants like William Finch made records of the island’s wildlife in the 17th century, all of the megalemur species had already vanished, as had two species of giant tortoise and several species of enormous elephant bird (Aepyornis spp.). Madagascar had suddenly become much smaller.
The island’s diverse climate zones and microhabitats have allowed dozens of lemur species to co-exist through the eons. The southern end of the island features an arid climate with low tree canopies and entangling scrub vegetation. Dry forests and limestone plateaus reach northwards along the western coast of Madagascar, while the eastern coast bears a narrow band of lowland rainforest containing a rich assemblage of plant and animal species. Mountains up to 9,000 feet in elevation dot the interior of the island, where lush highland rainforests have all but disappeared since the advent of agriculture. In their place sit terraced rice paddies and cattle pastures. Amid the deforestation and development, Madagascar’s wild creatures must apply adaptations evolved over millions of years to an altered landscape presenting novel obstacles to survival.
The lemur species today range in size from the pygmy mouse lemur (Microcebus myoxinus)—which, at less than two ounces, is the smallest of any primate—to the indri (Indri indri) and the diademed sifaka (Propithecus diadema diadema), which each weigh upwards of 16 pounds. I use the term “lemur” loosely to refer to all primate species on Madagascar—including those within the Lemuridae family (the “true lemurs,” such as ring-tailed lemurs and brown lemurs), as well as the Indriidae (the woolly lemurs, sifakas, and indri), Lepilemuridae (the gentle and sportive lemurs), Cheirogaleidae (the dwarf and mouse lemurs), and Daubentoniidae (whose lone member is the bizarre aye-aye).
Most lemurs feed primarily on leaves and fruit, as well as sap, gum, and nectar. The mainstay of the ring-tailed lemur diet is the pod of the kily (Tamarindus indica), a common tree in their arid home. Not surprisingly, bamboo lemurs (Hapalemur spp.) prefer bamboo shoots and leaves, while the aforementioned aye-ayes (Daubentonia madagascariensis)—which resemble some strange Steven Spielberg/George Lucas creation—use long middle fingers and protruding incisors to dig up insect larvae that they’ve detected in tree bark, thanks to the auditory powers of their giant ears.
While all prosimians evolved from nocturnal ancestors and still retain certain nocturnal adaptations—including a strong sense of smell and keen vision at night—several lemur species lead either diurnal (active during the day) or crepuscular (active mainly at dawn and dusk) lives. The hours a species keeps can affect, or be affected by, the social system its members maintain. Primates that live in large groups are, without exception, active mainly during the day—maintaining a cohesive social structure in the dark is inherently difficult (if not impossible) for animals that rely on visual communication. The lemur species that live in groups of up to ten or more—ring-tailed lemurs, brown lemurs, and sifakas, for example—thus are all diurnal. Conversely, the mouse lemurs and dwarf lemurs, which can fall victim to a host of mammal and bird predators by virtue of their hamster-like size, prefer the safety of nighttime travel and live either alone or in small family groups.
What most clearly distinguishes nearly all lemur species from their typical primate brethren is their social chain of command: Females dominate. In these species, female lemurs have preferred access to the choicest fruits and appear to dictate group movements (see “Mandrills are from Mars, Lemurs are from Venus,” in the January/February 2000 ZooGoer). After weeks observing the drama unfolding in the treetops of Beza-Mahafaly, it was clear to me that female lemurs there were running the show. Moreover, sifaka matrons seemed benign rulers—the obedience of their male comrades is generally attained without incident—while their ring-tailed sisters tyrannically enforced their preeminence. Lemur biologist Alison Jolly of Princeton University writes about ring-tails: “at any time...a female may casually supplant any male or irritably cuff him over the nose and take a tamarind pod from his hand.” A not-so-gentle reminder of who’s in charge.
Known to the local Malagasy as maki, the ring-tailed lemur serves as a widely recognizable symbol of Madagascar’s diverse wildlife. The abundance of ring-tailed lemurs at reserves like Beza-Mahafaly—and in zoos the world over—masks a growing threat, however. Satellite data have shown that their spiny forest habitat is being slowly consumed by overgrazing livestock, fires, and the cutting of trees for charcoal. There remain anywhere from 10,000 to 100,000 ring-tailed lemurs on Madagascar according to a survey published in 1992 by the World Conservation Union (IUCN), which now considers this species vulnerable to extinction.
More than 90 percent of all of Madagascar’s native forests have already been destroyed by slash-and-burn cultivation and large-scale farming. The country’s human population, a vibrant blend of African and Asian influences, faces persisting poverty and an ever-shrinking natural resource base. Many of the ethnic groups here, however, have long considered killing lemurs to be fady—taboo.
“I was in Tattersall sifaka [Propithecus tattersalli] country four to five years ago,” recalls Russell Mittermeier, president of Conservation International and chairman of the IUCN/Species Survival Commission Primate Specialist Group. “This forest area was just overrun with gold miners living in wretched conditions, on the verge of starvation. But every afternoon, these little sifakas would come bouncing into camp and would be fed bananas by the miners, and then they’d bounce away. So some fadys are still holding.” Yet, in other areas of the island, taboos against killing lemurs appear to be eroding within a slowly modernizing, but still destitute, Malagasy society.
The troubled status of lemur populations on the island carries grave implications for other segments of their respective ecosystems. Jrg Ganzhorn of Hamburg University has found that the dry forests of western Madagascar contain few seed-dispersing animals. About ten percent of the tree species there rely largely or completely on lemurs—especially brown lemurs—to ingest, excrete, and thereby disperse tree seeds. Certain lemur species, such as the black lemur (Eulemur macaco), also help pollinate flowers. The healthy regeneration of already degraded forests may not be possible without lemurs present.
Like giant pandas, lemurs further serve as “flagship” species highlighting the threats to their habitat and to the reptiles, amphibians, plants, and other equally imperiled but less recognizable species that live there. Ecotourism largely based around primate-watching represents a growing share of Madagascar’s economy and a stimulus for land conservation. Russell Mittermeier predicts tourism will become the country’s number one source of income within the next decade. “You can see more primate species in a week in Madagascar than in six months in the Amazon,” says Mittermeier.
Not everyone can manage a trip to the Indian Ocean. Inquisitive lemur watchers, however, will soon find a mixed troop of eight ring-tailed lemurs and two red-fronted lemurs (Eulemur fulvus rufus) on the Smithsonian National Zoo’s Lemur Island (formerly Monkey Island). The Zoo’s new prosimians hail from the Duke University Primate Center, an institution that is leading experimental efforts to reintroduce black and white ruffed lemurs (Varecia variegata variegata) into the wild.
These newcomers are sure to delight zoogoers with their complex social conduct and acrobatic antics. So come gaze through binoculars, telephoto lenses, or your naked eyes at an evolutionary treasure in our midst.
But you’ll have to bring your own rice and beans.
—Alex Hawes is Associate Editor of ZooGoer.
Zoogoer 30(4) 2001. Copyright 2001 friends of the National Zoo. All rights reserved.
Those interested in voyaging to the land of lemurs can find listings of responsible tour operators from the nonprofit International Ecotourism Society.
