Lemurs | Duke Research Blog

Fossil Primate Director Becomes a Fossil Primate Himself

May 20th, 2013

Gregg Gunnell directs the fossil primate division of the Duke Lemur Center.

By Karl Leif Bates

A newly discovered 25 million-year-old monkey fossil has been named for Gregg Gunnell, director of the Duke Lemur Center’s Division of Fossil Primates.

The thing is, Nsungwepithecus gunnelli, might turn out to be a pig. “It might be a ‘porky-pithecus,’ ” Gunnell said with a laugh. ”Early monkeys and early pigs looked remarkably alike.”

The fossil, from southwestern Tanzania, consists of a single molar. But it displays nine characteristics that would distinguish it from other Old World monkeys, according to Nancy Stevens, a paleontologist at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio who was the lead author on a paper about the discovery in Nature.

Gunnell’s monkey was found at a site in the Rukwa Rift Basin along with another new monkey fossil, Rukwapithecus fleaglei, for which scientists have a jaw and three teeth. It too has nine distinguishing features.

An artist's conception of the two newly named 25.2 million year old fossil monkeys described in Nature. (credit: Mauricio Anton)

An artist’s conception of the two newly named 25.2 million year old fossil monkeys described in Nature. Gregg Gunnell is the guy on the right. (credit: Mauricio Anton)

Gunnell said Stevens named the monkey after him to honor his role in helping her become a paleontologist. When Stevens was an undergraduate at Michigan State University, and Gunnell worked in the museum at the University of Michigan, he took Stevens and her now-husband and co-author Patrick O’Connor along on archaeological digs in Wyoming. Apparently the lessons stuck.

N. gunnelli is actually Gunnell’s third species. He was earlier honored by the naming of a bat and an extinct tillodont, which was, he reluctantly explains, a rather pig-like little animal.

“I’m hoping that this pig really is a monkey — that’ll improve my self-image,” he said.

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Activist targets inner child not ‘target audience’

March 4th, 2013

By Ashley Yeager

A baby albatross carcass full of plastic “food.” Credit: Chris Jordan.

When artist Chris Jordan works on a photograph or film, he doesn’t think about his audience. He said he thinks the phrase “target audience” is a disrespectful, manipulative business concept.

“I want to be as authentic as possible with my work,” Jordan said, explaining that each of his pieces instead taps into that “universality in us that we all carry, a deep appreciation for the abiding beauty of our world and the miracle of our own lives.”

An environmental activist as well as an artist, Jordan is challenging others to target that universality too as they convey messages about the issues that affect the planet.

Jordan spoke March 1 as part of a working group to discuss questions about how environmentalists, neuroscientists and artists can work together to better communicate about issues affecting the planet. The Nicholas School of the Environment and the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences sponsored the discussion.

Duke ecologist Nicole Heller moderated the discussion, opening it with the idea that scientists are frustrated with their inability to communicate with politicians and the public about the environment.

“In the ’70s, yucky or scary images might have worked, but now they don’t. That’s no longer appealing. We need different kinds of imagery to reach across people’s biases,” Heller said. She invited Jordan to speak because of his reputation for being able to move audiences from diverse backgrounds and education levels.

“Second graders are some of the most passionate and responsive to these issues,” Jordan said, adding that perhaps the best thing we can do is to appeal to an individual’s inner child – that curious spirit we have to understand how the world works.

One example of this approach is the film Jordan is working on to explore the mating dance of albatrosses on Midway Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. He’s photographed dead baby albatrosses, whose stomachs are full of plastic trash their parents fed to them because they mistake the plastic for food. The work was to make people aware of the plastic vortex, or Great Pacific Garbage Patch, swirling beyond the horizon and therefore beyond our conscious concern.

Jordan decided to capture the wonder of the albatrosses as they mate, rather than just their rotting carcasses, hoping to feed his audiences — no matter their background — with life, rather than depress them with death.

“Like the albatross, we first-world humans find ourselves lacking the ability to discern anymore what is nourishing from what is toxic to our lives and our spirits. Choked to death on our waste, the mythical albatross calls upon us to recognize that our greatest challenge lies not out there, but in here,” Jordan writes on his Web site.

Lemurs Most Threatened Mammals on the Planet

July 24th, 2012

By Karl Leif Bates

Things seem to be going from bad to worse for the lemurs of Madagascar.

A report issued two weeks ago by a working group in Antananarivo, Madagascar’s capital, concludes that these prosimian primate cousins of ours are THE most endangered mammals on the planet with 91 percent of all lemurs on the Red List of threatened status.

The 5,000-acre Betampona Nature Reserve in the eastern rainforest region is the smallest and oldest of Madagascar's officially protected areas. It looks like a green island surrounded by damaged forests and subsistence farming. The reserve is jointly managed by the Madagascar Fauna Group, of which the Duke Lemur Center is a founding partner, and was the site of first reintroduction of lemurs which had been bred in captivity at DLC.

In a poor and poorly governed country, humans are steadily chewing away at lemur habitat and at the lemurs themselves.

One species, the northern sportive lemur, is down to just 18 individuals on a tiny speck of habitat at the extreme northern end of the island. There are none in captivity.

“When these species disappear from Madagascar, they are lost forever,” Lemur Center Director Anne Yoder said. Captive breeding programs, like the one at the Duke Lemur Center, are a poor substitute for the protection lemurs really need.

The warning is unfortunately all too familiar to the faculty, staff and volunteers of the DLC, and it casts their work in conservation, education and research as even more critical.

In addition to its crucial work in Durham, DLC has been working on the ground in Madagascar for more than 20 years to preserve habitat and build a corps of conservation-minded citizens. Post-doctoral researcher Erik Patel participated in the Antananarivo workshop and reported on the meeting last week.

Learn More:

Anne Yoder and Charlie Welch on Duke Lemur Center blog.

Russ Mittermeier, chairman of the Madagascar Primate Specialist Group and President of Conservation International in the Huffington Post.

The Duke Lemur Center's breeding population becomes ever more important as wild lemurs disappear.

Kratt’s Creatures come to life

April 3rd, 2012

By Ashley Mooney

Duke alumnus Martin Kratt detailed his journey from his time as an undergraduate throughout the creation of several wildlife shows targeted toward children.

Kratt spoke Monday to a crowd of students, wildlife enthusiasts and some of his younger fans about his roots in wildlife conservation. With his brother Chris, Kratt created several wildlife television shows—including Kratts’ Creatures, Be the Creature and Wild Kratts—as a way to aid education and preservation of endangered species. Several of his roots tie back to Duke, namely the star of his popular show Zoboomafoo, which featured Jovian, a captive Coquerel’s Sifaka from the Duke Lemur Center.

Kratt got his start as a student technician at the Lemur Center—then known as the Duke Primate Center—in his junior year.

Jovian, the Coquerel's sifaka who played Zoboomafoo. Photo courtesy of David Haring from the Duke Lemur Center.

Although he initially wanted to be a conservation veterinarian, he credited his beginning in wildlife television to a class at Duke called amphibian ecology. Kratt borrowed an underwater camera and filmed salamanders during class field trips, creating a video on the amphibians for another class he had been taking for fun. His film ended up winning the Hal Kammerer Memorial Prize for Film and Video Production.

“Every weekend our professor would take us on field trips to the coastal plains of Piedmont to the Smokey Mountains—looking for salamanders, that was the course,” he said.

He joined Ken Glander, professor of evolutionary anthropology, on a research trip to Costa Rica. There, Kratt helped Glander catch Howler monkeys amidst the dry northern rainforest. He remained in Costa Rica for an additional six months, filming the wildlife in the area.

“We started taking these videos . . . to elementary schools in New Jersey. We sat and ate pizza at lunch, asking them what they liked and what they didn’t like. And the great thing about kids: They are honest critics,” he said. “Overall, they liked it, from kindergarten to fifth grade.”

Despite positive reviews from their younger audience, several networks did not find the Kratt brothers’ idea feasible.

“One comment we got from National Geographic was, ‘it’s cute but it will never be a TV show.”

Despite many setbacks, Kratt created a known collection of children’s wildlife programs. His new endeavor, Wild Kratts, aims to teach kids about animal behaviors that are known or suspected to exist, but have never been caught on camera.

“There’s animal behaviors that nobody’s ever seen, for example sperm whales fighting colossal squids,” he said. “If we did a series using animation we can show all of these behaviors that eluded us.”

This idea evolved into the current series Wild Kratts. The show is now ranked number eight in ratings of animated shows, two spots ahead of SpongeBob, Kratt said.

“We’re all working together [to help endangered species]. Scientists are studying to gather new information; educators are educating [and] policy makers can make policy,” he said. “Everybody can find their own path and their own way to help save endangered species.”

Meet Joel Bray, Lemur Enthusiast

March 20th, 2012

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

September 12th, 2011

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

September 8th, 2011

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

August 30th, 2011

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.