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In 2003, a team of primatologists led by CU Boulder trapped, tagged and released a male ring-tailed lemur in the Bezà Mahafaly Special Reserve in Madagascar. The researchers captured him one more time in 2004, but after that, the lemur disappeared, never to be seen again.

That is, until 2008 when his internally placed electronic tag, similar to a dog’s microchip, showed up in a pile of scat from a forest cat. This predator is related to domestic cats and was likely introduced to the island off the coast of Africa hundreds of years ago.

Now, that case of cat predation is part of a new study exploring how such attacks could endanger the conservation of lemurs. Over the course of 14 months, researchers from the United States and Madagascar became lemur crime scene investigators. They gathered a wide range of data, including camera trap photos, scat samples and eye-witness reports to unravel the mystery of who is eating these primates at Bezà Mahafaly.

Their findings suggest that predators not native to Madagascar, such as forest cats and dogs, may kill more lemurs than scientists once believed. Lemurs live only in Madagascar, and several species are already in danger of going extinct.

“It’s not that people didn’t know that predation was happening,” said Michelle Sauther, lead author of the new study and a professor of anthropology at CU Boulder. “But they’ve mostly been looking at other conservation priorities like the effects of deforestation.”

She and her colleagues in the journal Folia Primatologica.

Read the article:��CU Boulder Today