lemurs
grrlscientist | April 25, 2010tags: Parrots the Universe and Everything, biogeography, lemurs, twig technology, conservation, endangered species, evolution, komodo dragons, kakapo, baiji, comedy, Douglas Adams, streaming video
Douglas Adams was the best-selling British author and satirist who created The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy [DVD]. In this talk at UCSB recorded shortly before his tragic and untimely death, Adams shares hilarious accounts of some of the apparently absurd lifestyles of the world's creatures, and gleans from them extraordinary perceptions about the future of humanity.
laelaps | January 20, 2010
A ring-tailed lemur (Lemur catta), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
Who doesn't love lemurs? The strepsirrhine primates, or wet-nosed cousins of ours, are favorite documentary subjects and extremely popular zoo attractions. And, in one of those bits of zoological trivia that everyone knows, lemurs only live on the island of Madagascar off Africa's southeastern coast. The question is how they got there.
Documenting the paths of animals during geological history is not an easy task. In the days before scientists understood plate tectonics, land bridges, now sunk beneath the ocean, were often…
kthompson | December 10, 2009Research on the subject suggests that somewhere, somehow our squirmy reaction to incest can be expressed genetically. Because of natural selection and all that blah blah, it's thought that there exists a biomechanism that triggers incest avoidance in humans. Well, it looks like some very bold scientists have found a solid starting point for furthur research: lemur hoo-ha's.
Christine Drea, Marylene Boulet, and Marie Charpentier from Duke University carefully obtained genital gland secretions from 17 sexually mature female ring-tailed lemurs.
Side note: most species of lemurs live in…
grrlscientist | January 30, 2008tags: drug use, lemurs, streaming video
This streaming video from Animal Planet reveals that Madagascar's lemurs also use drugs to get high -- but instead of peyote buttons or magic mushrooms, they use a poison produced by the millipede [1:55]