After an arduous four-hour trek, a mud-splattered expedition team in Madagascar saw something extremely rare: white-fronted lemurs mating.
This was an incredibly special moment. Wildlife Madagascar’s Chief Conservation Officer Tim Eppley has been studying the species for nearly nine years but had never seen this before. “This is incredibly rare,” he says in the video.
That's because there's only a sliver of time each year when it happens: these lemurs are only sexually receptive for between 48 and 72 hours per year. “Females are only in estrus for a matter of days each year, so the window is small,” he explains. “Miss it, and well... you miss it.”
Despite waiting for so many years to see this intimate moment, the act was over in a flash. “The mating itself was quick, but the interaction wasn’t,” says Andi Cross, leader of Edges of Earth, adding that the team spent more than an hour with the primates watching it all unfold.
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“They’re gonna be doing it throughout the day,” Eppley explains. “You only get this opportunity once a year for a very very short time period so it’s gonna be persistent.”
Eppley and his team are focused on studying Madagascar’s wildlife so they can find ways of protecting it. “For a species already listed as Vulnerable, and still under pressure from habitat loss and illegal hunting, moments like this carry weight,” says Eppley. “Their populations are declining as forests are degraded and broken into smaller patches, making it harder for them to move, feed and survive.”
Top image credit: Adam Moore
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