beautiful lemurs

CASE STUDY – WORKING TO SAVE ONE OF MADAGASCAR’S MOST BEAUTIFUL LEMURS

Some of the most striking lemurs of Madagascar are undoubtedly the sifakas. In a group of nine closely related lemur species with generally very limited distributions and all heavily threatened with extinction, eight of them are critically endangered while the ninth is endangered. They are amongst the most beautifully marked of all the lemurs and also iconic for their sideto-side hopping gait when moving along the ground – sometimes giving them the colloquial name of dancing lemurs!

They have traditionally been a very difficult group of lemurs to care for out of their natural habitat – mainly due to their highly selective feeding strategy on leaves – eating a wide variety of foliage from different species of trees, which is sometimes hard to replicate out of their natural Madagascan forests. Despite this, many of the species are in urgent need of conservation breeding and would benefit from species preservation programmes as both an ‘insurance’ against further decline and also as a source for direct population restoration of already low and fragile populations.

At Chester Zoo, we already work with a number of very threatened lemurs and had considered using our expertise to keep sifakas as long ago as 2007. But a number of circumstances needed to align in order to make this feasible – facilities to house them, a sufficient and reliable source of fresh food, staff training and, not least, the availability of the sifakas themselves as part of a coordinated conservation programme. With the planning of the new Madagascar Forest Zone, these started to become reality, and a sifaka habitat was built as an integral part of the new Madagascar Forest lemur walk-through and Fossa area, which opened in 2019. A huge effort to plant the appropriate food trees has been carried out over the last few years in preparation for the long-awaited arrival of sifakas at Chester Zoo. Now hundreds of specially selected trees have been planted in the zoo’s browse plantations to provide continuous, fresh palatable leaves, including such common garden trees as Buddleja, Photinia, Robinia and Rhus. Arrangements were finally made to bring the very first Coquerel’s sifaka (Propithecus coquereli) from Duke Lemur Centre in North Carolina in the United States.

In order to build a foundation from which a professionally managed species preservation programme could grow, it was decided to move four pairs into Europe (a first for this species in Europe!), with the first pair coming to us here at Chester Zoo in May 2021, and following that success, a further three pairs to zoos in Germany in June, with all four being managed as a European Association of Zoos and Aquaria conservation breeding programme. Coquerel’s sifaka are critically endangered and restricted to a highly fragmented habitat in the north of Madagascar, where their population has dropped by 80% over the last 30 years – so these four pairs represent an important start to a species preservation programme for a species that could be heading rapidly to extinction in the wild.