Music
Ambience: Sifaka seed feeding, Brown Lemurs and Blue Coua
“I’m afraid that it never fails that the interesting stuff happens in the forest on the day that you’re not there.”
Welcome to Pulse of the Planet’s Science Diaries, a glimpse of the world of science from the inside. Summer Arrigo-Nelson, is an Earthwatch scientist who studies lemurs, tree dwelling primates, in the Ranomafana National Park in southeastern Madagascar.
“Yesterday was the International Day for the Environment. And in Ranomafana this included speeches from local officials, and a big soccer tournament, and also traditional dances. However, when we came back to the forest today, we found that one of our study animals is missing. Brown Female who’s a two-year old in our first study group, was with us on Friday when we followed the animals, but this morning she’s not there. We call the individual we’re looking for Brown, because we’ve given her a brown nylon collar, which helps us tell her apart from the other members in our study groups. What we’ve done now is we’ve spread out into a couple of groups, and we’re walking through the forest, trying to see if we can find her. Hopefully, she just got separated from them momentarily, maybe she went off to feed in a different tree and she’ll reunite with them quickly. But we never know, because there are predators that lurk in the forest. And we also know that a two-year old female isn’t probably able to survive on her own for too long, so we want to t find out what she’s doing. Has she joined another group? Has she gotten ill? Or maybe we’ll find a collar and we’ll know something bad happened to her.”
Unfortunately, no sign of Brown was ever found. Summer Arrigo-Nelson assumes that Brown was caught by a carnivore the lemur was too young to go off on her own to join another group. You can check out Summer’s blog at pulseplanet.com. Pulse of the Planet’s Science Diaries are made possible by the National Science Foundation.