Category: Madagascar

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.

Fall 2022 highlights

12/19/2022

As we're toward the end of the fall semester, looking back to how this semester turned out, we're happy to share some highlights ... There were some challenges, ups and downs, but overall it was productive..

Awards

Vero was awarded a Black and Indigenous Scholars Award from the American Society of Mammalogists and a renewal of the Train Faculty Fellowship from WWF
Nancia and Vero were awarded the grant “Lemur Fund” from Re:wild to support their research on lemur ecology in Madagascar’s rainforests

Publications

Anaid & colleagues documented the birth of an infant black-howler monkey in this paper published in Primates (Don't forget to check out the video in the supplementary information!
One of Nancia’s PhD chapter, investigating the robustness of plant-frugivore interaction network in a fragmented rainforest landscape, is published in the journal Conservation Biology.

A newborn howler monkey with its mama. Photo by Anaid Cardenas Navarrete

Graphical abstract of our recent paper in Ecology and Evolution.

A team led by Vero recently reported an unprecedented discovery of arboreal mouse lemurs sleeping in a burrow on the ground in the rainforest of Ranomafana, published in the journal Ecology and Evolution
We reviewed current knowledge about frugivory and seed dispersal in Madagascar in the book The New Natural History of Madagascar.

Others

Anaid passed her Qualifying Exam in December and is now a doctoral candidate
Hasina defended her Master's at the University of Antananarivo in November and then participated in a training on designing a research project in Kenya offered by the Tropical Biology Association
Hasina & Onja are wrapping up this month their participation in the program Global STEM Field Assistant by National Geographic Society but will continue collaborating.
Rindra was selected to participate in the iDiv Summer School in Leipzig, Germany in August to develop skills in molecular evolutionary biology in Biodiversity
We were happy to have Dr. Seheno Andriantsaralaza (University of Antananarivo) and Dr Denise Spaan (University of Veracruz) join us as Visiting Scholars this semester. We enjoyed the intellectual exchanges and looking forward for future collaborations.

Representative sample of the Razafindratsima lab, Fall 2023 at the lab's holiday party, celebrating our diversity with a diversity of food from different countries/regions. From left to right: Jade Tonos, Jessica Stubbs, Anaid Cardenas Navarrete, Kat Culbertson, Vero Ramananjato & Onja Razafindratsima.

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.