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“There’s a Malagasy proverb that says that every time something bad happens, something good has to happen as well to mirror the effects. And I think that that’s really true today.”
Welcome to Pulse of the Planet’s Science Diaries, a glimpse of the world of science from the inside. Summer Arrigo-Nelson is a research scientist with the Institute for the Conservation of Tropical Environments. She studies the tree-dwelling primates called lemurs on the island of Madagascar. In a previous broadcast, we learned that Summer and her team of volunteers were having trouble find a young lemur, nicknamed Brown.
“We reached Group One and found that Brown was missing, and a lot of us spread out to go look for her. We left two research technicians back with the group so that we’d know where the adult male and female were if we ever did find Brown. Now while those research technicians were there, waiting and watching and collecting data on the two adults, they realized that there was really a third member in that group that we hadn’t seen. Apparently yesterday, while we were in town for the Environmental Day festivities, Green/Orange, the adult female, has had her baby. Whereas the first thing this morning we were very disappointed to find that we were missing Brown, we can also be very happy this afternoon knowing that there’s a new baby in the group and that there’s still life going on in the forest. The new baby is two hundred and fifty grams, about the size of two of my fists put together. And right now she’s cuddled in the curve between her mother’s stomach and her thigh, just nestled in there to keep warm. Over the next couple of weeks she’s going to start moving up and soon she’ll be riding, clinging to her mother’s stomach as her mother jumps through the trees.
Check out our daily podcasts on pulseplanet.com. Pulse of the Planet’s Science Diaries are made possible by the National Science Foundation. I’m Jim Metzner.