What is a Lemur Health Evaluation?
We can get very useful information from the lemurs when we have them in hand. For the larger lemurs, we need to capture them with a dart gun (more on that later), but for the smaller lemurs, such as mouse lemurs, we can use small traps that don’t hurt the little guys. Put a little piece of banana in there and the mouse lemurs love it.
During the evaluation, I’ll note a lot of information about the individual, such as age, sex, any abnormal behavior, and general coat, eye and teeth condition. I also take a small hair sample to later measure stress hormone levels in the lab, a fecal sample (mmmm….yes, my life is glamorous) to look at intestinal parasites and a small skin sample to get DNA from each individual.
All this data will come back to the US for analysis, and combined with geospatial and habitat data, we can tell a great deal about lemur health.
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