Category: Lemur

New paper

8/30/2023

PhD students Veronarindra Ramananjato & Nancia Raoelinjanakolona, along with colleagues, have a new publication in the American Journal of Anthropology, about a toolkit to improve data quality of multi-researcher datasets for analyzing morphological variation in mouse lemurs:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ajpa.24836

Photograph by Veronarindra Ramananjato

Highlights (copied from the article)

Morphological variation is commonly used to infer environmental adaptations and phylogenetic relationships in animal taxa, but multi-researcher datasets can hamper analyses due to inter-observer biases.
Our filtering pipeline markedly improved data quality for downstream analyses and highlights key steps in data quality assessment for generating reliable results.
Across species, mouse lemurs are sexually dimorphic (with larger females), do not follow Rensch's rule for sexual size dimorphism or Bergmann's rule (as larger mouse lemur taxa live in warmer and wetter climates) but are concordant with Allen's rule with regard to having shorter tails in colder environments.

New paper: Individual-based frugivore-plant network

9/15/2021

We have a new paper in Oikos examining how space and variation between individual plants affect movement and visitation by frugivores foraging on individual fruiting plants.

Graphical abstract from Tonos et al. Oikos 2021

New paper: Seed dispersal limitation in forest edge habitats

9/15/2021

We have a new paper in the Frontiers of Ecology and Evolution investigating how differences between frugivore communities at the forest edge and interior habitats of a diverse tropical rainforest relate to patterns of animal-mediated seed dispersal and early seedling recruitment.

Main findings:

Lemur communities across the forest edge-interior gradient in this system showed the highest species richness and variability in body sizes at intermediate distances; the community of birds showed the opposite pattern for species richness.
Three large-bodied frugivores, known to be effective dispersers of large seeds, tended to avoid the forest edge.
The forest edges received a lower rate of animal-mediated seed dispersal compared to the interior habitats.
The seeds that were actively dispersed by animals in forest edge habitats were smaller in size than seeds dispersed in the forest interior. This pattern was found despite a similarity in seed size of seasonally fruiting adult trees and shrubs between the two habitats.
Despite these differences in dispersal patterns, we did not observe any differences in the rates of seedling recruitment or seed-size distribution of successful recruit species.

Forest edge in Ihofa Forest, Madagascar. Photo by O. Razafindratsima

New paper: Mouse lemur microhabitat use

8/4/2021

We have a new paper in the International Journal of Primatology investigating several aspects of the microhabitat structure that the rufous mouse lemur (Microcebus rufus) might prefer and examining how this structural preference varies across a heterogeneous landscape of forests with different disturbance levels.

A mouse lemur in the rainforest of Ranomafana National Park. Picture courtesy of Vero Ramananjato.

New paper

New paper: Individual-based frugivore-plant network

New paper: Seed dispersal limitation in forest edge habitats

New paper: Mouse lemur microhabitat use

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