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Photography by Kevin A. Roberts / courtesy of Fidisoa Rasambainarivo
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WEB EXCLUSIVE: CLICK HERE FOR A GALLERY OF ADDITIONAL LEMUR IMAGES
WEB EXCLUSIVE: CLICK HERE TO READ THE SAGA OF THE LEMUR RELEASES
Ingrid Porton steps into the narrow pirogue and sits down fast, before the boat’s wobble can knock her off balance. She swipes the back of her arm across her forehead, thinking how much she hates humidity. Traveling in Madagascar is like moving through hot steam.
Porton’s whole team fits in the pirogue; another one ferries their computers, cameras, solar-powered lights, meters, and darts. A man on the riverbank shoves them into deeper water, and their guide, standing in the bow of the boat, steadies it with a long bamboo pole. Once across the Ivoloina River, the group starts its trek to the foothills of the mountain. They ford seven streams before they reach the real challenge: an almost vertical two-hour climb, straight up on a narrow trail with sharp drops on either side.
Porton’s day job as curator of primates at the Saint Louis Zoo does not require such exertion. Sweat pools at her temples, coats her slender neck, slides down her cheeks. It’s a good thing she doesn’t wear makeup. The sun has traced lines in her fair, Dutch skin, but with her skinny body and blond bangs, she still manages to suggest the age of 10—which is exactly how old she was when she went around her California neighborhood asking for money for lion cubs in Africa. That was the year she vowed to spend her life saving animals.
Porton glances behind her at lean, well-muscled Dr. Sharon Deem, the wildlife veterinarian who directs the zoo’s new Institute for Conservation Medicine. “She’s friggin’ tough,” thinks 61-year-old Porton. “But I’m older.”
They go through villages—thatched-roof timber huts on stilts above the mud, palm trees, fences made of bundled sticks—and up long slopes of slashed-and-burned land where the sun blazes down without relief. Shiny with sweat, Deem announces, “Y’know, I’ve worked in a lot of places in Africa, but this is one kick-ass mountain.” Porton, who’s made this trip nine times, grins.
Finally, they reach Rendrirendry, a village at the edge of the Betampona Natural Reserve. When Porton first came here, in 1991, the village served as headquarters for the forest and water department. “There was a bureaucrat who lived there,” she says. “He was drunk all the time, and he never even went into the forest.”
She’s not fond of humans; she cringes daily at their shortsightedness and stupidity. But she loves lemurs.
And this is the only country in the world where lemurs live.
Madagascar could have been a mad scientist’s experiment. The world’s fourth-largest island, it drifted away from Africa tens of millions of years ago, and its animals and plants evolved in ways wildly different from those on the mainland. About 80 percent of Madagascar’s species occur nowhere else.
Porton hasn’t yet encountered the island’s giant hissing cockroach, but she’s grown downright fond of the exquisitely patterned radiated tortoises; the impertinent, bright red tomato frogs; and the leaf-tailed gecko that hangs out at her hut, mellow as an old hippie.
Her heart, though, belongs to the lemurs. Specifically, three critically endangered lemur species—black-and-white ruffed, indri, and diademed sifaka lemurs—that live at Betampona.
A protected bit of lowland rainforest half the size of Manhattan, Betampona is a fine place for a lemur to live. But because it’s an isolated fragment, surrounded by terraces planted with rice and barren areas stripped for firewood, its lemurs can’t leave. And that means they can’t widen their gene pool. By Porton’s best guess, fewer than 140 indri lemurs live there, and there are fewer than 60 black-and-white ruffed lemurs and fewer than 25 diademed sifaka ones. In the worst-case scenario, those numbers will continue to drop, and the lemurs will become so inbred, their species will die out.
At least 16 lemur species have already vanished from the island—including one the size of an orangutan that Porton would have dearly loved to meet. She is determined not to let her lemurs meet the same end. On this trip, her team will capture as many lemurs as they can, take blood and fecal samples, microchip them, and release them wearing pretty, brightly colored radio collars.
And if Porton gets her fondest wish, they’ll find at least one young lemur, born free, carrying the DNA of one of the captive-bred lemurs she helped release here in 1997 and 2001.
It would be all too easy to emphasize the traits Porton shares with her research subject: her lithe agility; her alert, vigilant gaze; her uncommon blend of playfulness, wariness, and intensity.
But that would feel contrived.
So when she pops up from her desk without warning, or suddenly shrills back the words of the question, or does an uncanny imitation of comic actor John Cleese doing an uncanny imitation of a sifaka’s zany, balletic sideways leap…we won’t even hint at the similarities between this gentle, elusive, determined conservationist and her lemurs.
Besides, she’s a whole lot smarter than they are. And she chose them because they weren’t like humans.
“I never liked primates,” she admits, remembering how uneasy she used to feel when they stared back at her with such familiar, complicated, maddening expressions. In grad school, she focused on hawks, foxes, and Maine wolves; she didn’t take a single course on primates.
Lemurs, though—lemurs are “cute as hell.” (She says this like she’s daring you to disagree.) They’re also far more primitive than primates—a compliment, in Porton’s book. They have big round eyes, foxlike faces, and a doglike crease in their noses.
She discovered their charms in 1983, when she left the National Zoo’s Conservation and Research Center and came to work at the Saint Louis Zoo. (“I don’t like zoos, either,” she says—her master’s degree is in wildlife ecology—“but I liked the work they were doing with endangered species.”)
Thirty years later, she’s still here, still besotted with lemurs. “They’re not the brightest. Woo woo”—she passes a hand over her face—“woo woo. Every day is a new day. Not a long memory. So they are forgiving.”
Their predators are the hawk, the boa, and the fossa—a panther-like carnivore that also lives only on Madagascar and is itself endangered. But the most powerful predator is the human. The Malagasy hunt lemurs for supper, which enraged Porton, until she learned that for many Malagasy children, bush meat provides lifesaving protein. Now she’s bent on finding them alternatives—like chicken. Dr. Graham Crawford, a veterinarian at the San Francisco Zoo, is studying the epidemics that often wipe out a village’s entire flock. “He’s going to create a blueprint for village chicken preventative health programs,” Porton says happily.
All told, between 30 and 100 lemur species still exist in Madagascar, depending on whether a “splitter” or a “lumper” is doing the categorizing, Porton says. Betampona also shelters the gray gentle lemur, the white-fronted brown lemur, and six nocturnal species, including the mouse lemur, the fat-tailed dwarf lemur, and the less-than-attractive aye-aye lemur, which has sharp teeth that keep growing the way a rat’s do. The aye-aye gnaws holes in trees and digs out the grubs with an extra-long, thin middle finger. Porton puts her hands up in front of her face, waving her fingers, and makes the aye-aye’s squeaky sound as demo. She’s pulled many an all-nighter just to glimpse these guys.
Porton can tell you anything about the natural history of the lemur, but she makes quick work of her own life story. She was conceived in Paris (“Too much red wine, and here I am”) and born in Indonesia. Her Dutch mother’s parents ran a sugar plantation. “I tell you, we were colonialists,” she mock-whispers. “I had a nanny and all that.” Her Dutch father had worked with the underground during World War II and spent almost four years in a German prison. He took Ingrid and her mother back to Holland when Ingrid was a toddler, then to California in time for kindergarten. By 13, she was writing to stables with Arabian horses, asking whether she could come live there for the summer.
And now she’s a curator at a zoo, and at home, she lives with six cats and two dogs.
Any humans? A spouse, perhaps? “No,” she says. “I have no such thing. Do you really think someone would put up with all this?”
The first morning out, the group hikes to a likely area, and the agents break into two scouting teams. The men move easily through the rainforest, eyes narrowed, scanning the tree canopy for the reddish-gold, silky fluff of the diademed sifaka’s arms and legs. They stop often, listening for the unmistakable, booming call of the black-and-white ruffed lemur or the duet of the indri, so haunting it reminds Deem of whale song. When the agents spot a lemur, they either whistle or pull out a radio and say calmly in Malagasy, “We’ve got one.” Then Deem quickly joins them with the darting rifle.
“We want to dart in the thigh area,” she tells Dr. Karine Lalaina, a young Malagasy woman who just finished veterinary school. “These are small-bodied creatures far away in the forest canopy, so the thigh’s the safest area. We want it intramuscular, not in the gut, chest, neck, or face.” She shows Lalaina the dart’s half-inch needle, so short and fine that even if it does go astray, it won’t do serious harm.
Deem takes aim. As soon as the drug takes effect, the first lemur topples from the tree. The agents scramble into position, holding tight to the edge of an outstretched net to break the lemur’s fall.
A few hours later, the group spots an indri family. “Holy hell,” Deem says. “Talk about pressure under fire!” She aims for the father first, then immediately for the mother, holding as steady as she can so she doesn’t risk hitting the baby clinging to his mother’s back. When the mother falls, he hangs on and plummets down with her, wide awake, his round eyes huge. Porton soothes him, laughing as she imagines a future family conversation: “Mom! They had ahold of you! I saw the whole thing!”
Once blood and fecal samples are taken and the lemurs have been microchipped and collared, they’re allowed to slowly wake up. Once they’re active again, the agents return them to the exact place where they were darted.
The big, gentle indri, their fuzzy ears rounded like a teddy bear’s, are the easiest to dart. Monogamous, they usually hang out in pairs, lower in the canopy. “They’re leaf eaters, not very active,” explains Porton. “If you find them, they’ll just sit in the tree and look back at you.” Once darted, they usually just get dozy and topple out of their tree into the waiting net.
She grins when one of the indris conks out in the crook of a tree and, like a candy bar stuck in a vending machine, just won’t fall. One of the agents sighs and climbs the narrow tree, scooting himself upward with his feet.
The diademed sifakas are more likely to leap away after the dart hits. Agents and vets tear after them so they can be there, holding the net, when the sedative finally takes hold.
The most elusive lemurs of all are the black-and-white ruffed ones, and they’re Porton’s special quarry.
In 1988, the Saint Louis Zoo was a founding member of the Malagasy Fauna Group, a consortium of international zoos and universities. Nine years later, Porton, who happened to be the keeper of the international studbook for the black-and-white ruffed lemur and the black lemur, became coordinator of an MFG program to release captive-bred black-and-white ruffed lemurs into the wild. Their fate’s a miniseries (read the story at stlmag.com) that has included a bit of West Side Story romance and feuding and more than four deaths by predation, most likely by fossas. But two of the lemurs integrated themselves nicely into wild groups—with one indomitable male, Sarph, being seen with three different wild females over 11 years—and four of the lemurs did manage to mate. It is their offspring she most wants to find.
And it won’t be easy.
Dress a 9-pound black fox in an Elizabethan lace collar and give her a long tail and Bette Davis eyes. Add legs as powerful as a little kangaroo’s. Now bounce her from tree to tree, 80 feet above your head. You’ve just gotten as close as you’re likely to get to a black-and-white ruffed lemur in the wild.
They stay impossibly high in the canopy, chattering in groups, and they make nests for their young up there, softening the crisscross of branches with bits of fur. They travel by leaping from one tree to the next (clinging first to the one, looking over their shoulder, then twisting in midair so they face the new tree as they land). And they can make this leap a whole lot faster than a human can load a dart, adjust the pressure, aim, and fire.
Nobly, Porton offers to wait at the field camp with Lalaina and help her hold and examine the captured lemurs. Lalaina had an accident that dislocated her hip when she was 16, and she’s been through several surgeries, but she fashioned herself a walking stick and managed the climb without a word of complaint. “Talk about dedicated,” Porton whispers to Deem. “An American wouldn’t do that.”
One extra-rainy day, they run out of towels, so Porton wraps her father’s shirt, which she brought with her for sentimental reasons, around a wet, sleepy indri and holds her close. It’s the first time she’s ever held an indri.
Back at the Saint Louis Zoo, she shuns the oversize butterfly net and deftly plucks lemurs from their perches with her bare hands. The zoo even has a few orphaned lemurs that were bottle-raised, and they lift their arms and wait for her to scratch and tickle underneath.
But now she’s on the lemurs’ turf, and every contact is extraordinary.
When Porton took her first trip to Madagascar, the island had a population of a little more than 11 million. Today, it’s almost double that. “There are people everywhere, kids everywhere,” she says. “Slash-and-burn works fine with a low density of people. Not with 20 million.”
Roughly nine-tenths of Madagascar’s rain-forest ecosystems are already gone. The remaining tenth are under siege by slash-and-burn farmers, poachers, wildlife smugglers, and illegal loggers who’ve been selling ebony, rosewood (Madagascar has a rosewood mafia), and other exotic hardwoods to Chinese importers and American guitar companies.
Porton’s hopes soared when Marc Ravalomanana became president of Madagascar in 2002 and pledged to triple the country’s protected areas. He made steady if uneven progress and won reelection in 2008—but in January 2009, Andry Rajoelina, a former disc jockey and mayor, staged a coup and seized power. Under his self-proclaimed presidency, the economy skidded off the road and corruption intensified.
“We’re still suffering,” says Porton, speaking of both the lemur project and the country as a whole. She’s a lumper, not a splitter; to her, “it’s all connected. And it’s a friggin’ mess. He keeps making empty promises to negotiate with the African Union, and he’s managed to stall a democratic election. Environmental laws are a joke. Before, there was money coming in; now the U.S. and the European Union, all the big countries, have pulled out.”
After the coup, soldiers swarmed the roads, and her dealings with civic officials grew tense. “Suddenly people couldn’t make our agriculture trainings, because it wasn’t politically correct,” she says.
“Rice prices went up, which hit our Malagasy workers hard,” she continues. “In Betampona, there was more poaching, so we had to increase staff there to protect the park. And it became incredibly difficult to get government permits for researchers to do nocturnal work.”
She kept her focus on endangered diurnal lemurs, involved as many other organizations as she could, and started methodically collecting data. She needs to anesthetize, sample, and collar enough lemurs to do a significant health and genetic survey of the population—but the government’s standard permit only allows a researcher to anesthetize five individuals per species.
Before leaving for this fall’s trip, she begged a Madagascar National Parks official to write a letter supporting her research—and Deem’s research, and the research of a Washington University graduate student who’d be in Madagascar a month or so later. Deem and Porton had promised to collar lemurs for her, too, so she could study family behavior.
The official wrote the letter. Weeks later, word came back: The Ministry of the Environment would require individual letters of support for each of the three projects. Porton started over. She left for Madagascar without knowing the results.
When she and Deem reached the island’s capital, Dr. Fidisoa Rasambainarivo, the Malagasy veterinarian who works with them, produced the paperwork with a flourish.
The Washington University researcher they’re collaring for would be allowed five individuals per species. Deem would be allowed 10 individuals per species.
And Porton’s permit was unlimited.
She did an elated little jig. “After all that agonizing! And we didn’t even have to bribe them!” She tilted her head, struck by a thought: “We’ve been working here 20 years. Maybe they’re starting to trust me.”
After a week in Rendrirendry, the team packs up and goes deeper into the rainforest, to camp in a spot where the agents have often seen black-and-white ruffed lemurs. This is where Porton has the best chance of finding Fara, the son of Zuben’ubi and Praesepe, and other offspring from the captive release program.
They scout. They listen. They wait. Rain starts to pour. Porton shakes it from her ponytail and keeps her eyes on the forest’s upper canopy.
Finally, in the distance, she hears it: the boom of the ruffed lemur. It’s especially loud this time of year, even when the animals are 80 feet up and half a mile away.
She cranes her neck. A minute later, she sees movement in the trees. She grabs binoculars and begins an odd dance, jockeying to get into position so she can catch a real glimpse.
There they are. And yes: solid black necks! She points, gestures wildly to the agents.
Her hand’s still flapping at raindrops when the lemurs leap out of sight.
Porton curses. But she’s nowhere near as upset as Jean Noel, the passionately dedicated head conservation agent at Betampona. He shakes his head and stares at the ground.
Porton’s frustrated, too; realistically, they just blew their only chance this trip. But she’s still aglow, her blood zinging, just from the thrill of seeing them.
Finally, Rasambainarivo darts his first black-and-white ruffed lemur, and his smile nearly splits his face. Porton takes an eager look, but the lemur doesn’t have the markings of the third release group. They had a wider band of black on the neck, without white in the middle.
Porton spots another the next day. It’s raining again, and the air’s so steamy, it’s hard to make out details. But when she gets closer, she can see that this one doesn’t have that distinctive, thick band of black, nor is he wearing a radio collar. He’s lying back on a branch like it’s a hammock and it’s siesta time. Leisurely, he begins to groom himself. Dotted in the trees all around him are white-fronted brown lemurs, at least eight or nine of them. “They’re just merrily foraging,” Porton grumbles.
Her working hypothesis is that the white-fronted brown lemurs are outcompeting just about every other lemur in Betampona. These lemurs swing through the forest night and day, and they’re not picky eaters, either: Leaves can be old and tough; bark and sap are fine, too; centipedes and millipedes are swell. White-fronted brown lemurs don’t even spook at the presence of human beings. “They’re a utilitarian lemur,” Porton says, sounding a little bitter. “They can do well in a more secondary forest,” the shrubby, fast-growing stuff that fills in after the hardwood is slashed away.
After three nights in muddy tents, the team members gather up their supplies—including the spare liquid nitrogen tank that’s leaking and may have lost them two sets of samples. They traipse back to Rendrirendry, exhausted. Porton takes a sun shower (solar-powered) and marvels, not for the first time, at what a difference a few cups of water can make. Half-dry (one is never entirely dry in Madagascar), she starts her end-of-day ritual: examining every inch of her body for leeches.
“These aren’t very big leeches,” she assured Deem when they arrived. “They look more like inchworms.”
It’s already time for dinner (rice, invariably). Afterward, Porton works on her notes by candlelight, and the vets spin blood in a centrifuge. They’re checking for anemia, counting white blood cells to check for infection, taking protein levels to assess health and nutrition. Back in the States, they’ll get DNA (which, with today’s technology, will yield the kind of information about genetic diversity and family relationships that it used to take Jane Goodall 40 years to gather). They’ll also look for antibodies and pathogens and check fecal samples for internal parasites.
On a normal field day, they would have gotten back to Rendrirendry earlier, by late afternoon, and after the leech inspection, they’d have tea.
“It’s very civilized,” Porton says. “I should bring my mother’s Dutch tea set.”
They capture 23 lemurs, a sizable number, but not enough to make generalizations about the population. They didn’t find Fara, or any of roving Sarph’s offspring, or Hale’s four children or any of their offspring. The agents thought Hale’s daughter had once been part of the same group as the black-and-white ruffed lemur they caught…so the lemur could be one of her offspring. But they won’t find out until summer, when they gather more samples and send the entire batch for DNA analysis. And it’s just a guess.
That’s OK. “Conservation’s long-term,” Porton says. “You’re talking about generations of animals, forests to clear, governments that come and go—or won’t go.” Her ultimate goal is translocation: moving wild lemurs, which already know how to survive in Madagascar, into a new area, to introduce fresh genes to its population that way.
“We want to prioritize individuals whose habitats are themselves endangered, or who are in an area where humans are exploiting them,” she says. For the diademed sifaka, she already has a location in mind: “There’s a mining company chopping down a forest as we speak.”
There’s more at stake than her love affair with lemurs: “They’re an umbrella species,” she notes. “You build the lemur population and the frogs benefit, the vegetation benefits, the ebony and rosewood benefit.” She gives stats, talks crisply about “metapopulation management.” Then she adds, almost to herself, “Just seeing them is a privilege in a lifetime. You think, ‘How many people in the world have ever touched an indri?’”
For years, the running joke was that Porton had never seen a diademed sifaka in the wild. Everybody else on the team had at least one paparazzi sighting. They’d call her, and she’d race to the spot, and the sifaka would be gone.
Finally, in 2011, she managed to see one, and on this trip, she rocked a diademed sifaka in her arms. As he awakened, he gently licked her neck. “Horrible job,” she murmured, nestling against the soft head in the crook of her neck. “But somebody’s got to do it.”
Lemurs & The Lou
In 1988, the Saint Louis Zoo helped found the Madagascar Fauna Group (MFG), an international consortium of zoos and universities with the lemurs’ fate high on its priority list. It eventually renamed itself The Madagascar Flora and Fauna Group, since conservation depended on both, and in 2003, moved its world headquarters to the Saint Louis Zoo. Jeffrey Bonner, president and CEO of the zoo, chaired MFG for years; he recently passed the baton to the zoo’s senior vice president, Dr. Eric Miller. Porton is vice-chair, and as director of the Center for Conservation in Madagascar, part of the zoo’s WildCare Institute, she acts as a liaison for researchers—an increasing number of them from St. Louis.
Experts at Saint Louis University layer satellite maps of Betampona with data on climate, plants, animals, land use, and other stats. “So if there’s a die-off of frog species right over here,” Porton says, pointing to a map, “maybe you can see that it’s related to a change in climate here.” The University of Missouri in Columbia is in Madagascar, too, helping establish a veterinary college and analyzing the lemurs’ nutrition. And a Washington University virologist is studying, well, lemur poop.
“The Missouri Botanical Garden is better known in Madagascar than in Missouri,” Porton remarks. Christopher Birkinshaw, a British plant ecologist who runs the garden’s Madagascar office, worked with MFG to collect seeds from endangered trees. Their saplings now grow in MFG’s tree nursery.
Reforestation is critical. Betampona is a botanical hot spot. But it’s also tangled with invasive guava and wild ginger. (Those white-fronted brown lemurs just love guava, and they carry the seeds all over the island.) The zoo is helping Lala Radiatavy, one of MFG’s Malagasy employees, earn his Ph.D. in natural resource management, and as part of his fieldwork, he’s been comparing manual methods of removing guava.
“I was absolutely sure that when you chop it down low, it would just thank you and grow back even faster,” Porton says. “But this is exciting: There’s a percentage that have not had regrowth.” Coppicing (chopping low) is a whole lot easier than wrapping chains around the guava plant and using the full strength of several workers to uproot it. “Also, you’re not disturbing the soil around the plant. We can plant natives around it that are key food species. And we’re not disturbing the microecosystem. Lala found that when you remove guava, the population of a highly endangered gecko is reduced in that patch. He’s also looking at insects… It’s all intertwined.”
