The ringtail lemur is one of roughly 100 species of lemur - the endangered primitive primate whose native home is the island of Madagascar.
Ringtails are highly social, living in troupes of up to 30 individuals. To keep warm and to reaffirm social bonds, groups will huddle together to form a ‘lemur ball’. Females are dominant and they are the same size as the submissive males. The hormones regulating increased female aggression also lead to enlarged genitals. Girl power. Lemurs got it.
In order to stay connected lemurs, participate in social grooming. With all this grooming going on lemurs have evolved a kind of Swiss Army vanity kit.
They have a comb made out of their teeth. They also have an elongated nail referred to as a toilet claw.
One of the greatest benefits of being a wild animal is of course free pooping. Some lemurs though are not truly free poopers but instead choose a very unhappy tree as a communal latrine.
Lemurs are among the most vocal of the primates. The Indri lemur, for example, can't seem to shut up, and sounds a bit like when you squeak by pulling apart the butthole of a birthday balloon.
Most lemurs communicate through colognes that they make themselves in scent producing glands. When female ringtails are receptive to mating males compete in something called a stink fight. They rub their tails over a variety of scent glands on their genital regions their wrists and their chest. This arms the tail with an odour which they send in their competitors’ general direction.
Ringtails spend a lot of time on the ground and from a young age learn to walk and run fairly gracefully. The sifaka, on the other hand, spend most of their lives in trees and are very impressive jumpers. They are even comfortable on the octopus tree, a tree covered in spiky thorns. Which is evolutions' way of saying don't climb on me? However, on the ground, though the sifaka is not so elegant.
The Indri also spends most of its time in the trees. It is even figured out how to build nests like birds. They predominantly eat leaves. The ringtail will also eat the occasional insect like a cicada or locusts when they swarm. Some lemurs will eat poisonous millipedes biting them and then rubbing the anti-parasitic poison on their genitals. Many lemurs eat fruits and are primary seed dispersers
The bamboo lemur eats bamboo and the mouse lemur, which is amazingly gently, sips the nectar from the flowers.
Mouse lemurs may be tiny, but they are extremely dangerous to the dumbest and slowest of the insects.
Lemurs are hilarious and cute and there are many threats facing them in the wild! Still, they are the most endangered mammals in the world and on the brink of extinction.
Don't let these cute lemur babies wind up in an empty white room clutching a facsimile of another endangered animal.
Conservation in Southern Africa is rapidly becoming unsustainable without the active involvement of the community, especially the younger, more active generation. The Bushbabies Monkey Sanctuary and The Elephant Sanctuary group strongly believe that we have to get the younger members of communities involved to instill a passion for the environment and wildlife in them through education.
I'll introduce you to Joyce, for example. A young female capuchin, she was rather pampered with child-like paraphernalia; a dress and a small hat around her head. Cute, indeed. She had been with her "foster" family since only two months old, bought straight from a breeder. The couple who owned her did not have children, and so decided to substitute the missing link with a primate, albeit a bit smaller...and with sharper teeth.
