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201310Aug08:41

New lemur species iden­ti­fied and already endan­gered, in Madagascar

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pub­lished 10 August 2013 | mod­i­fied 28 June 2014
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A dwarf lemur species already dis­cov­ered in Mada­gas­car in 2001 have now been iden­ti­fied as a dis­tinct new dwarf lemur species using molecular-​genetic analyses.

Lavasoa dwarf lemurThe island of Mada­gas­car har­bours a unique bio­di­ver­sity that evolved due to its long-​lasting iso­la­tion from other land masses. Numer­ous plant and ani­mal species are found solely on Mada­gas­car. Lemurs, a sub­group of pri­mates, are among the most promi­nent rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the island’s unique fauna. They are found almost exclu­sively on Mada­gas­car. The only excep­tions are two species of the genus Eule­mur that also live on the Comoros Islands, where they prob­a­bly have been intro­duced by humans. Thanks to exten­sive field research over the past decades, numer­ous pre­vi­ously unknown lemur species have been dis­cov­ered. Dwarf lemurs in turn received rel­a­tively lit­tle atten­tion to date and the diver­sity within this genus is still not well known. Researchers of the uni­ver­si­ties of Mainz and Antana­narivo have inves­ti­gated lemur pop­u­la­tions in south­ern Mada­gas­car. Based on field­work and lab­o­ra­tory analy­ses, they now iden­ti­fied a pre­vi­ously unknown species of dwarf lemur. The find­ings of the research project have been pub­lished online on 27 July in the jour­nal Mol­e­c­u­lar Phy­lo­ge­net­ics and Evo­lu­tion.

It is only now that we were able to deter­mine that some of the ani­mals exam­ined rep­re­sent a pre­vi­ously unknown species
Dr. Andreas Hapke, Insti­tute of Anthro­pol­ogy, Johannes Guten­berg Uni­ver­sity Mainz (JGU) »

“Together with Mala­gasy sci­en­tists, we have been study­ing the diver­sity of lemurs for sev­eral years now.”

The newly described Lava­soa dwarf lemur (Cheirogaleus lava­soen­sis) inhab­its three iso­lated for­est frag­ments in the extreme south of Mada­gas­car. Accord­ing to cur­rent knowl­edge, it does not occur out­side this area. The exact pop­u­la­tion size is unknown. Pre­lim­i­nary esti­mates indi­cate that there are less than 50 indi­vid­u­als remain­ing. The Lava­soa dwarf lemur is thus rare and extremely endangered.

The lifestyle of dwarf lemurs makes them extremely dif­fi­cult to study as these noc­tur­nal for­est dwellers often remain in the upper parts of the for­est canopy. More­over, they hiber­nate for sev­eral months dur­ing the aus­tral win­ter. Their main period of activ­ity is the rainy sea­son, when many of the forests they inhabit are vir­tu­ally inac­ces­si­ble to sci­en­tists. Nev­er­the­less, the researchers were able to care­fully cap­ture a total of 51 dwarf lemurs in live traps at nine loca­tions for this study and to take minute tis­sue sam­ples before releas­ing the ani­mals back into their nat­ural habitat.

The tis­sue sam­ples were sub­jected to molecular-​genetic analy­ses at the Insti­tute of Anthro­pol­ogy at Mainz Uni­ver­sity. The data gen­er­ated through the process were then com­pared with data already pub­lished by other research groups. “The new data from south­ern Mada­gas­car enabled us to sig­nif­i­cantly enlarge exist­ing datasets,” explained Dana Thiele of the JGU Insti­tute of Anthro­pol­ogy. “We then used exten­sive data analy­ses to exam­ine the genetic diver­sity in two closely related lemur gen­era, the mouse lemurs (Micro­ce­bus) and the dwarf lemurs (Cheirogaleus). The com­par­i­son showed that the species diver­sity of dwarf lemurs is greater than pre­vi­ously thought.”

Andreas Hapke and Refaly Ernest, work­ing as a local field assis­tant for the project, had dis­cov­ered the first indi­vid­u­als of the Lava­soa dwarf lemur dur­ing a field study in Mada­gas­car in 2001. Few genetic data from other parts of the island were avail­able for com­par­i­son at that time. The ani­mals were thus ini­tially assigned to an already known species, Cheirogaleus cross­leyi. Only now it was pos­si­ble to ascer­tain that the Lava­soa dwarf lemur is a dis­tinct species.

(Source: JGU press release, 29.07.2013)

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