Meet baby Sophie from the Saint Louis Zoo.
Just three months old, this fluffy little Coquerel’s sifaka lemur spends her day riding piggyback on mom Almirena. She is still nursing, but is beginning to reach out and show some curiosity about the food her parents and brother Titus (age 15 months) enjoy. Watch Sophie and Mom interact.
When full grown, Sophie will be about 20 inches tall, not including a two-foot tail, and weigh about 11 pounds. She will leap from tree branch to branch on powerful legs, up to 30 feet at a single bound. And when on the ground, she’ll ‘dance’ on those legs, using her much smaller arms for balance. When the sifaka’s are on display at the zoo’s Primate house from about 10 AM to 5 PM daily, the action is pretty much non-stop.
The name sifaka comes from the species cry of alarm, “Shee-fa’-ka.” Actually, these prosimian (non-monkey or ape) primates make many sounds as they stay in constant communication with their group. They live high in the trees of the dry forests of northwestern Madagascar, and are strict vegetarians. Since they prefer to eat leaves, they are called “folivorous.” (your vocabulary word of the day.) And, as with other lemurs, theirs is a matriarchal society.
Sophie’s endangered status
Coquerel’s sifakas are one of the 17 endangered lemur species on the island of Madagascar near Africa. Lemurs are found nowhere in the world except Madagascar. As the only primates they have evolved into 48 species that exploit the various island ecologies. This type of adaptation is similar to how marsupials such as kangaroos and koalas have filled many mammalian niches in Australia.
In Madagascar today, Coquerel’s sifaka lemurs now live only in two protected areas. They are endangered for many reasons. Mainly, their deciduous forest habitat is being destroyed. Madagascar is a very poor country with a high birth rate. Forests are burned to create pastures and for charcoal. An additional pressure on these animals is hunting for bushmeat. Traditionally, the tribes that lived near sifakas had a taboo against killing them. But in Madagascar as in the rest of the world, people are mobile today, and other tribes do not necessarily respect that taboo.
Modern zoos consider breeding endangered animals one of their most important missions. To keep them genetically robust, as well as to increase their numbers, the St. Louis Zoo participates in a planned breeding program through the Association of Zoos and Aquariums. This program maintains a stud book that keeps track of the origins of reproducing pairs in order to balance the genetic input among them. Pairs that reproduce more than average may be put on birth control to let other pairs catch up in genetic representation. So far, however, only the Saint Louis zoo and Duke University’s lemur center have succeeded in breeding Coquerel sifakas like Sophie. In fact, Sophie’s father Caligula comes from the Duke Lemur Center.
The Zoo’s Wildcare Institute in the eastern rainforest
Sophie’s relatives live on the east side of the island. The Saint Louis Zoo, through its Wildcare Institute, has worked since 1988 with the Madagascar Fauna Group to preserve biological diversity in the rain forest preserves on the northwest side of the island. Species-rich Madagascar rain forests are particularly important because many of its animals and plants occur nowhere else in the world.
Ingrid Porton, curator of primates at the Zoo, manages the Center for Conservation in Madagascar. Her work is very focused on several critically endangered lemurs like the diademed or silky sifaka and the ruffed lemur. (The ruffed lemurs at the Saint Louis zoo are a breeding group. )
She explains that existence for these animals is threatened by the destruction of their habitat. Vast rainforests get nibbled away by “slash and burn” agriculture that fails to produce the fertile farmland needed to feed a growing population—and leads to more slashing and burning. Poachers harvest valuable hardwoods and kill wild animals for meat. And natural preserves like Betampona and Parc Ivoloina where the Zoo’s programs are centered no longer can count on government protection since the military coup d’etat in 2009.
The Zoo and its many partners are taking a multi-pronged approach to studying and preserving the rainforests. Some are more academic, such as taking comprehensive inventories of species.
Other projects are aimed at changing conditions for the human population. For example, the Madagascar Fauna Group partnered with Appalachian State University in a program to enrich the extremely poor Malagasy soil. They experimented with different composts from readily available materials, using pretreatments to boost seed germination, and planting trees to control erosion. The Saint Louis Zoo is investigating which native trees could be used for nitrogen-fixing to improve the soil. More fertile soil produces more abundant crops; more abundant crops reduce the temptation to destroy the native forest.
One of the more interesting projects is Parc Ivoloina, a 700 acre former forestry station converted to a conservation, education, and research facility. The education center has dorms and dining halls so that the Malagasy people who come to study conservation can live on the grounds.
Parc Ivoloina has a zoo, where they are breeding some endangered animals. In addition, the zoo has a tree nursery. In partnership with the Missouri Botanical Garden, they have a grant to learn how to propagate endangered native tree species with the goal of reintroducing them into the wild.
The holistic approach of the “Lemurs in Madagascar” project includes a high-tech program to integrate all the field data collected in the 5500+ acre Betampona rain forest preserve. Established in 1927, original nature reserve is host to a huge diversity of species, including over 80 kinds of frogs.
Researchers have been gathering ecological data there since 1990, but putting it all together into a comprehensive picture has been daunting. Now the Madagascar Fauna Group (including the Zoo and the Garden) is collaborating with Saint Louis University’s Wasit Wulamu to establish a GIS (Geographic Information System.) With GIS, a detailed map can be overlaid with layers and layers of data. As Ingrid Porton puts it, “You can see how ruffed lemur densities are related to tree densities and/or frog populations and/or poaching events.”
At times it seems as if the collected data will be the history of a disappearing habitat. For the Sophie’s of the world to have a future outside of zoos, Porton emphasizes the importance of world pressure for Madagascar to once again have a recognized stable government. In the absence of the current unrest, the government could once again protect its unique nature preserves, and the Malagasy population could again receive the foreign aid to relieve its poverty.
In the meantime, the zoos will continue their efforts to save and increase endangered species. And we will have a chance to enjoy the antics of these amazing primates as they play in their safe havens.
This article was originally published in the St. Louis Beacon.