Guest Post by Sheena Faherty, Biology Graduate Student
Madagascar’s much-adored and fuzzy lemurs might be “sweated out” of habitats by warming environments under global climate change. Or will they?
A team of researchers at the Duke Lemur Center is employing high-tech heat cameras used in fire fighting, sports medicine and cancer diagnostics to take “glowing” rainbow pictures of lemurs and their forest surroundings. The results look similar to a child’s coloring project gone rogue.
A mother and baby Coquerel’s Sifaka at the Lemur Center in thermograph and visible light. (Leslie Digby)
This technology, known as infrared thermography, is a camera that allows researchers to detect surface temperatures of lemurs and their hang-outs in the forest—at different depths and heights—and on varying surfaces such as the ground, leaves, and tree trunks.
Combining these data with records of where an animal prefers to spend time, the researchers can begin to determine what temperatures make lemurs most happy.
Leslie Digby, an associate professor in the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, and her students want to see how the lemurs are changing their behavior to warm-up on cool days, and cool-down on warm days without having to shiver or sweat.
This sounds rather like a lizard basking on a rock during a sunny day to warm his cold-blooded body up, but lemurs aren’t cold-blooded. They shouldn’t have to do this.
It turns out that even though lemurs are warm-blooded, they can conserve precious energy by channeling their inner Buddha — using sunning behaviors, just like lizards, to fine-tune core body temperatures.
Digby’s team is trying to understand why some species have seemingly restricted territories, even without obvious geographical barriers like mountain ranges or rivers. They suspect temperature plays a part.
“We know that primate species ranges have been very different in the past, so understanding how flexible these animals are, or [are] not, to temperatures can help us understand these larger scale impacts [of changing climate]”, says Digby.
Figuring out how animals respond to alterations in their environment, like rising temperatures, can help scientists anticipate species’ survival in the face of globally changing climates. And knowing which areas of the forest are preferred by lemurs, could help direct conservation efforts, like reforesting parts that have been cut down, or preserving those areas that have not.
Changing temperatures will undoubtedly have major impacts on lemur home ranges in the future, potentially altering them until the animals are forced into an area outside their thermal limits. By gearing her research toward understanding the thermal tolerances of lemurs, Digby is doing her part to protect the vulnerable lemurs.
A ringtailed lemur striking the classic belly-warming Buddha pose in one of the natural enclosures at Duke Lemur Center. (David Haring)