What a wonderfully sensational headline from New Scientist!
Basically, lemurs eat fruit in trees and disseminate the seeds via their droppings. As lemurs die off, they leave species of "doomed orphan trees" with no animal to propagate the seeds. Lots of the lemur species that have gone extinct (e.g. the koala lemur) were much larger than the remaining lemurs, so they were able to eat larger fruits. Now, the smaller lemurs may not be able to eat the large fruits of certain tree species, so those trees are "doomed" or depending precariously on the two largest surviving lemur species (the black and white ruffed lemur and the red ruffed lemur), both of which are critically endangered and crucial to the long-term survival of many tree species. Sarah Federman from Yale predicts a "cascade of extinction" if the lemurs go extinct.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2083800-lemur-extinctions-in-madagascar-leave-behind-doomed-orphan-trees/
This is big news right now, y'all. Here are a couple of other articles covering the same thing.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/lemur-extinctions-are-harmful-madagascars-plant-life-too-180958717/?no-ist
http://news.yale.edu/2016/04/11/lemur-extinctions-orphaned-some-madagascar-plant-species
I like that we have learned a new term "orphaned trees." I wonder what other terms we can learn about conservation, maybe some in Malagasy so we can talk to people who live their!
ReplyDelete- Joanna Langner