Madagascar, Lemurs, OneHealth.......a Masters? 🏝️🐒🔭🎓(U9)
Hey friends, its been a while and I’m glad you’re here!
This weeks’ prompt encourages us to share something about nature that gets us excited and ooooooooooooooooh am I excited! Like I’ve mentioned before, I’m a 4th year zoology student which 1) means I know a lot of cool animal stuff (ask me questions!), and 2) it’s almost time for me to graduate!
So today I’d like to talk about my current Masters application and the really cool OneHealth conservation research I have done (and hope to do again) in Madagascar!
Over the summer I got the opportunity to take the One Health Approach to Conservation Field school where we were taught zoological, ecological, and anthropological approaches to conservation issues in Madagascar’s rainforest and unique dry deciduous forest within Ankarafantsika National Park (Picture a rainforest but take away the rain, the biggest animal is the same kind of lemur as Zoboomafoo, and also the soil is like sand!!). While I won’t go into too much detail about most of the field work we practiced, like tree identification, phrenology, and size measurements, participant-observation sessions in tree-planting, rice harvesting, and a local village classroom, and of course-tent living and consistent rice and beans eating, I willllllllllll go into detail about the lemurs, cause oh so much do I love those little guys.
(1. Male with eye tumor/injury, 2. me with two mothers (if you look close you can see 2 baby heads!), 3. me taking leaf samples to make a dry-season Tree ID sketch, 4. my luxurious living quarters for the month.)
Our instructions were to do both focal and scan sampling, but my absolute favourite part of the trip was following the lemur groups and trying to identify the specific individuals while they were either chilling in our camp or being extremely chaotic in the forest.
During these observations, not once but twice did I witness 2 separate groups have lemurs literally try to kill an individual from the other group... and so when asking about this to my professor, the general conclusion we came to after he told me he’s never seen such violence despite coming to the park for years, was that the increased forest fragmentation (deforestation making the forest into sections rather than one continuous space) might be forcing groups that should be far apart into sharing the same spaces, causing fights for space, food, etc.
This species of lemur (Coquerel’s sifaka) is critically endangered and is a huge sense of pride for the indigenous people of Madagascar. Many of the parks residents follow taboos that forbid lemur hunting and consumption to protect these creatures. Unfortunately, its possible that either the past or current farming practices of some of them are negatively affecting lemurs, potentially without realizing. Not only does this become an anthropological issue, but if true, is a logistical problem best answered with knowledge of the lemurs behaviour, spatial and abundance knowledge on the plants used for food and shelter by both lemurs and people, and of course interviewing, participating in, and potentially educating and being educated by the residents to get a proper understanding of how to tackle this problem.
And so that’s the general gist of what I’ll be diving deeper into for my Masters, wish me luck!
[My friends video of one of the violent interactions (I know it looks like they are hugging but they have giant teeth with a strong bite force, are the size of toddlers, and it didn't give up until it thought the other was practically dead), the lemur that didn't run away was left with a bleeding head and injured arm but we think she survived!]
