For Peace, Let's Try the Lemur Way~

 

  Golden Bamboo Lemur and Baby

A Lemur Rescue Mission in Madagascar

New York Times/Science

AUG. 18, 2014

By CLAUDIA DREIFUS

 

Lemurs, which live only on the island nation of Madagascar, are long-tailed, long-legged primates with an astonishingly graceful leap. They are also in serious peril: Of the 103 species of lemur, 90 percent are endangered, critically endangered or threatened, and several are on the brink of extinction, according to the primatologist Patricia C. Wright of Stony Brook University.

Dr. Wright, 69, has long been a leader in the effort to prevent what she calls a “lemur holocaust”; in September, she will receive the $250,000 Indianapolis Prize for conservation; and she is featured in a new 3-D Imax documentary, “Island of Lemurs: Madagascar,” (Click the title to view the film trailer) narrated by Morgan Freeman.

We spoke for two hours recently. Here is an edited and condensed version of the conversation.

Q. Did you always want to be a primatologist?

A. No. That happened in a roundabout way. In the early 1970s, I was a social worker with New York’s welfare department. My former husband and I lived in a small Brooklyn apartment, with a pair of South American owl monkeys we kept as pets. Then, in 1973, our daughter was born. Two weeks later, the monkeys, to our great surprise, also had a baby!

 

 Dr. Patricia C. Wright in Madagascar

Within our human family, I was the one who did the child care. But among the monkeys, it was the father who tended the baby. The mother just sat on the couch and nibbled grapes now and then. As I watched them, I thought: “Wow, they have a great system. Does male care happen often in nature?”

The question changed my life. After the marriage ended in 1977, I went to graduate school and wrote a doctoral dissertation that discussed, among other things, sex-role divisions among owl monkeys.

How did lemurs become your focus?

After graduate school, I got a job at Duke University’s Primate Center. They have a huge colony of lemurs, and I just loved watching them. It turned out that lemurs were matriarchal — females led the group. They intrigued me.

Do lemurs and humans have a common ancestor?

We do. If you go back about 65-70 million years, that’s when the common ancestor lived in Africa. What makes lemurs so special is that they evolved in Madagascar in isolation from monkeys and other primates. Thus, with present-day lemurs, we can see something of what our ancestors must have been like.

So in 1986, when an opportunity came to go to Madagascar, I jumped at the chance. I was tasked with finding out if one species, the greater bamboo lemur, had gone extinct.

At the time, did you understand how endangered all of Madagascar’s lemurs were?

To tell the truth, no one knew. The country had been closed off to Westerners for more than a decade. The economic infrastructure had fallen apart. There were no paved roads. People resorted to slash-and-burn subsistence farming, which meant slashing and burning the rain forest.

My journey was just one disappointment after another, until I came to Ranomafana in the Southeast. I stopped in a village there because it had hot mineral springs and I needed a bath. Later, the villagers guided me into this gorgeous forest, where we camped. And there I spotted something I thought was the animal I’d been searching for. It wasn’t. It was actually a species new to science, the golden bamboo lemur. Not long after that, I did see a greater bamboo lemur. It wasn’t extinct after all.

You were able to get Ranomafana designated as a national park. How does an outsider get to do that?

Well, around 1986, timber exploiters came and offered the villagers money to cut down the forest. I got very upset. I went to the capital, Antananarivo, and spoke to the head of the Department of Water and Forests. He said: “I agree that these animals are very important to Madagascar. We are poor. If you can find the money, I’ll help you make a national park there.”

It seemed to me that the park could only succeed if the villagers benefited from it. I asked them what they needed. They said jobs, health and education. So I began looking for grants and had some success. I received a U.S.A.I.D. grant for nearly $4 million. A couple of years later, I received a MacArthur “genius” grant, so I put that money into local health and education.

How endangered is the lemur today?

The ones at Ranomafana are mostly safe. But 90 percent of the lemur habitat elsewhere on the island has become wasteland. In 2009, there was a coup. Afterward, the central government was very weak and there was a lot of lawlessness. Timber exploiters came in from Asia and started cutting down the northern forests. Then they started demanding meat for dinner. The meat was lemurs.

 

We have one lemur species in the North where there are only 30 individuals left. The greater bamboo lemur, the one that I was sent to search for, we’ve found some more patches of them. Still, there are only about 500 left. That’s not a lot for a primate. The good news is that very recently, the politics have changed. They now have an elected government and there’s a lot of hope that things can be turned around.

Have the investments you’ve made helped the people and animals of Ranomafana?

Oh, definitely. Because there’s a park, 30,000 visitors a year come to Ranomafana. There are now 26 small hotels around the park, locally owned — which means jobs and income.

We made a social contract with the villagers. If they’d stop going into the forest to hunt, we’d make sure they had schools and clinics. And that’s worked well. Right now, we have a problem with people coming from elsewhere to do illegal gold mining in the forest. It’s the villagers who go to the government: “Get these people out of our park.”

How do you stay hopeful?

Oh, I can get angry, sometimes. I certainly get angry when an animal is killed. If something like that happens, I go to the villagers and talk with them. Sometimes, I cry in front of them to show how I feel. There’s a lot of empathy to their culture and they are more than likely to respond to that than if I preached at them. Who am I? It’s their country.

Actually, there’s a lot that can get done in Madagascar. For one thing, reforestation. We could also protect what remains of the rain forest and build corridors between the various national parks so that the wilderness areas aren’t so fragmented.

The matter that originally brought you to Madagascar — sex role divisions among primates: what has observing lemurs taught you?

That this old saw about that male dominance being the natural order of things ought to be more rigorously examined. Among lemurs, females lead. They go into the fruit tree first, and the males must stay out until the females decide they can come in. Interestingly, the female leaders don’t strut around a lot. They work out the relationships in the group peaceably.

That’s made me think it might be time for our species to do things more the lemur way.