Category: Lemurs

Meet Joel Bray, Lemur Enthusiast

On March 20, 2012

In Animals, Behavior/Psychology, Lemurs, Students

By Nonie Arora

Joel the Lemur and the rest of the Crazies meet Dick Vitale at the March 3 UNC game. (Duke Photo)

You may have been wondering who the student dressed as a lemur was for the Duke-Carolina game. Meet Joel Bray, lemur enthusiast and Trinity Junior.

Joel works in Brian Hare’s cognitive psychology lab where he does research on the psychology and evolution of nonhuman primates.

“Primates are an amazing way to understand human behavior, and specifically cognition,” Bray says. He studies lemurs at the Duke Lemur Center, which is home to the largest population of lemurs outside of Madagascar. Lemurs, most similar to the last common ancestor of all primates, are interesting because all 100 species are closely related at the genetic level, but they live in very different social and ecological environments.

In his first project, Joel studied inhibitory control in lemurs to understand how cognition evolves. This was part of a larger effort under NESCent, the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center. The project sought to compare dozens of species, including primates, birds, and rodents, on the same tasks using the same methods.

Joel tested the lemur’s inhibitory control by presenting them with an opaque cylinder with openings on both ends and food inside. The animals first learned how to retrieve the food. Then, the opaque tube was replaced with a transparent one. The impulse is to reach directly for the food item through the obstructed barrier, but to successfully retrieve the food the lemurs had to inhibit that response and reach from the side. Inhibitory control is considered to be important in both social and foraging contexts, and certain environments are expected to exert more selective pressure for the ability. In human children, it is predictive of future academic and social success.

Joel, out of costume, studies a troop of ringtailed lemurs because he's a method actor. (Courtesy of Joel Bray)

More recently, Joel has investigated social cognition, specifically asking what lemurs understand about the perception of other individuals. Humans display “theory of mind,” the notion that other individuals have perceptions, knowledge, and beliefs different from one’s own. While lemurs are unlikely to have a complex understanding of the minds of other individuals, they may display more basic abilities.

In his current project, Joel is asking whether lemurs will take advantage of information about a human competitor’s visual perspective to acquire food. One food item is visible to the experimenter and the other is not, and the lemur must decide which to approach. It is expected that that species in large or complex social groups will perform better because their evolutionary history has selected for being able to understand what other individuals can perceive (i.e. “social intelligence”).

Ultimately, this research may lead to a better understanding of human cognition and whether our “big brains” evolved because of complex social environments.

A Festival of Lemur Babies

By Karl Bates

On September 12, 2011

In Animals, Biology, Lemurs

Ichabod the baby Aye-Aye was the somewhat nervous 2008 result of a painstaking 2-year effort to teach his sire how to make babies.

A BBC Television production called “Miracle Babies” is airing this week on the Nat Geo Wild cable channel, with two segments about the captive breeding programs at the Duke Lemur Center. Their crew travelled all over learning about captive and not-so-captive breeding programs – all of which seem to result in adorable infants, strangely enough!

Tuesday, Sept. 13 at 10 p.m. Eastern on National Geographic Wild, learn about DLC’s efforts to breed nocturnal, bug-eating Aye-Ayes. (The male needed more than mood lighting to figure things out, let’s just put it that way. )

Then on Wednesday Sept. 14 at a more reasonable 8 p.m., they check in again with a segment about the stunning Coquerel’s sifakas and their spindly little infants. View the complete schedule.

Preview here: Miracle Babies Preview

Coincidentally, the Lemur Center posted a baby video of its own over the weekend, starring an impossibly small baby mouse lemur and its mum.

See it here: Mouse Lemur baby

Lemur film features future Duke post-doc

By Ashley Yeager

On September 8, 2011

In Animals, Biology, Environment/Sustainability, Field Research, Lemurs

Primatologist Erik Patel studies the endangered silky sifaka, seen here. Credit: Erik Patel.

Primatologist Erik Patel is trying to study and save a cute lemur called the silky sifaka (Propithecus candidus).

In a recent online documentary, he takes viewers through Marojejy National Park, a 148,387-acre area of jungle with rugged mountainous terrain, and gives them a rare, up-close look at the silky in its wild habitat.

These lemurs are most at risk of extinction, which is one of the reasons Patel studies them, and, as the documentary shows, the illegal logging and bushmeat trade are likely accelerating the loss of the lemurs’ habitat and their overall population.

Patel, who will join Duke’s Lemur Center in January, told the New York Times that “stopping illegal logging in Madagascar will be impossible until the government stabilizes and some measure of accountability is put in place.”

“It’s about money,” as the individuals in government are now “organizing and profiting from the problem,” he told the Times reporter.

One of Patel’s roles when he joins Duke will be to oversee the Lemur Center’s new conservation initiative to help individuals in cities near Marojejy understand and value the distinct environment and animals found only in their country.

Watch the full feature here.

Lemurs leap in back-to-school lessons

By Ashley Yeager

On August 30, 2011

In Animals, Biology, Environment/Sustainability, Lemurs, Science Communication & Education

Mr. Gimod, an education specialist, reads notes taken from the Malagasy Teacher's Guide, a teaching tool to help preserve the country's lemurs and biodiversity. Courtesy of Lanto Andrianandrasana.

By Ashley Yeager

Halfway around the world, in Madagascar’s northeastern city of Sambava, 30 students crowded into a classroom to start lessons in biology and conservation.

These students weren’t your average school children, however.

They were mostly Chefs ZAP, officials from the local school districts in Sambava and another nearby city, Andapa.

People in these cities “are not yet conscious” that it’s urgent to protect the biodiversity in this region, says Lanto Andrianandrasana, a Malagasy field assistant and who helped organize the lessons.

The lessons are to help individuals there to appreciate and understand the importance of the environment through a new Duke Lemur Center conservation initiative.

One reason the center chose to develop a new conservation education initiative in Sambava is because the nearby national parks are experiencing devastating effects from illegal logging and lemur trapping.

In 2009, armed gangs began harvesting rosewood trees worth hundreds of millions of dollars and trapping and killing critically endangered lemur species after a military coup overthrew democratically elected president, Marc Ravalomanana. The illegal activity continues, with the wood being shipped to China for use in high-end furniture and the lemurs eaten or sold as bushmeat.

Andrianandrasana, who is the on the ground coordinator for the DLC conservation initiative, says that to protect the lemurs and the rosewood trees in the region, the people must learn to love them. He says they need to understand the importance of the environment, and that’s why it is essential to give them basic biology knowledge, particularly in primary and secondary school.

Through the initiative, he and others will train the Chefs ZAP to use a Malagasy-prepared Teacher’s Guide, which discusses the biology of the rosewood and lemur populations and the environmental strategies to preserve them, along with other conservation topics.

The Chefs ZAP will then share the guide with the directors of the schools in the region. The directors are then to train their teachers to use the guide so they can share it with their students. This is a training cascade technique that has worked in schools in other eastern Madagascar cities to encourage enthusiasm for environmental issues not only among teachers and students, but also adults in the community, says Duke Lemur Center conservation coordinator Charlie Welch.

Welch worked with Andrianandrasana and other Malagasy conservationists to plan and implement the new initiative. The lessons and the Teacher’s Guide are borrowed from an already successful conservation initiative run by the MFG, or Madagascar Fauna Group. The Duke Lemur Center, or DLC, is a founding and managing participant of this 27-member group, which for the past ten years has sponsored Malagasy education specialists to train teachers in the Tamatave region in environmental education.

The Chefs Zap from Andapa and Sambava after their biology and conservation training. Courtesy of Lanto Andrianandrasana.

But Welch and others at DLC thought the center could “do more” to broaden the efforts of the MFG, he says. Using DLC grants and donations, Welch arranged for the most experienced MFG trainers, along with Andrianandrasana, to work with the local Chefs ZAP in Sambava and Andapa.

The first session was on Aug. 15, and the trainings will continue through the school year.

Welch, meanwhile, has been working with other Duke departments, including four masters students in the Nicholas School who will evaluate the trainings, to further develop the education initiative.