By Margaret Lillard, The Associated Press
DURHAM, N.C. Romeo peers winsomely with his large, round eyes from behind the bars of a cage, his glossy, golden-brown fur seemingly far too formal and exotic for the humble surroundings.
He is the only diademed sifaka — a type of lemur — in captivity. And his keepers at Duke University's Lemur Center hope to soon replace the cage with something more appropriate for his lifestyle.
The 40-year-old center — which houses the largest collection of lemurs outside their native Madagascar — has a new name, a new director, $8 million in newly pledged funding from Duke and a new research focus on lemurs as evolutionary models.
"We can take the lessons we learn here, and what the animals need and what they do and what kind of social structures they have and how they behave, and we can apply that in the field to populations that are under stress and human pressures, and we know what they need," said Anne D. Yoder, who became the center's director in January.
The center was established in 1966 and has become the world's largest sanctuary for rare and endangered prosimians, primates that evolved before monkeys, apes and humans.
Until April, the facility was known as the Duke University Primate Center. University officials formally announced the new funding, name and genome project at an April 29 gala at the center on the edge of Duke Forest, with Madagascar's ambassador among those in attendance.
Much of the money pledged will be used to create better habitat for the 250 or so prosimians — 15 species of lemurs, lorises from Asia and bushbabies from Africa — that live at the center. Many of the larger animals are happily accommodated now in fenced outdoor areas, but must be brought into smaller enclosures during extreme weather, including most of the winter.
"It's burdensome on the staff. It cuts completely dead in its tracks any kind of behavioral research that's going on because they go from this kind of environment — where you can really see them behaving like lemurs — to cages," Yoder said as a nearby keeper fed leaves to several western sifakas.
The leggy animals, famous for a sidelong, skipping gait in which they move upright along the ground, gracefully dropped from their eye-level perch in a small cluster of trees and followed their handler to a small enclosure where they sometimes spend the night.
"I liken it to a family of four that's been living in a four-bedroom home, and suddenly you're in a studio apartment," Yoder said. "It can make people testy."
It can also make them confused. Only last fall, the center celebrated the first birth of an aye-aye — a nocturnal lemur that is becoming increasingly rare in Madagascar — in captivity to captive-born parents.
The hurdle was a high one because the father, Merlin, never learned the social skills of wooing and mating. It took a two-year visit with other aye-ayes at the San Francisco Zoo and another two years of coaching by handlers at Duke before Merlin figured out what to do.
Center managers are still trying to pick a site on their 80-acre campus for the new habitat. The 26-acre facility will have indoor housing within an outdoor fenced enclosure, allowing the animals to stay outside on warm winter days and, hopefully, behave as they would in their native Madagascar, an island off the southeast African coast.
They also plan to build two other facilities. One will house animals involved in more "manipulative" research, such as an ongoing project to measure the lemurs' cognitive abilities by having them interact with computer touch screens. The other will be a visitors' center where guests — last year, there were 13,000 — can view displays explaining the center's work and its vast collection of prosimian fossils.
The Duke Lemur Genome Initiative is already underway, said Huntington F. Willard, director of the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy. The project will eventually take DNA samples from all the Lemur Center's living animals, as well as from tissue samples saved from each of the hundreds of animals that have lived at the center in its history.
The samples will be used to create a genome map that can provide data ranging from the genetic diversity of the lemur population in Madagascar to how the animals compare to humans in an evolutionary sense.
"The great thing about genome mapping projects is that, even from the first day, you're getting some input. The data get richer and richer and deeper and deeper as you go," Willard said. "We've already started gaining some information and it will play out probably over five years."
The data will help conservation efforts by determining family relationships between living lemurs so that keepers can avoid inbreeding or breeding of animals with hereditary health problems.
It will also aid research into human evolution.
"We understand at best two percent of our (human) genome. So you've got 98% where you just get a big collective shrug out of scientists when you say, 'Why do we have such a big genome, where did it come from, why is it organized that way, why do we have 46 chromosomes?'" Willard said.
"Mice are (genetically) too far away to tell us that, chimpanzees are too close. Lemurs are perfectly situated on the tree of life to tell us where our genome came from and where it's going."
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