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The Labor party has a legacy of action for the natural world. Now is the time for us to do better | Felicity Wade

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Thursday, April 10, 2025

I’ve been wondering if I remember all my surprise encounters with animals in the wild.I remember sitting totally still on a riverbank watching a platypus going about its business as the dusk descended, by a logging road on the boundary of Tasmania’s world heritage area. And a moose in the Yukon, blundering out of the scrub at full speed right in front of us, as terrified and surprised as we were. A huge thing, my vision filled with moose. It turned and kept bolting. And summer evenings camping on the Thredbo River where wombats make for strange silent sentinels, munching grass as humans rustle plastic and wrangle gas stoves, the fuss of cooking al fresco.I remember them because they are moments of such stark joy. They are usually times of quiet in the soft evening light. Australian animals are generally both silent and reserved. And these moments are rare.In the way of oil and water, my love of nature gets expressed by being deep in the political process, with all its banality and disregard. I sit in the heart of a major political party, the Labor party, trying to build the bridge from where we are to where we need to be. This may seem quixotic, but I prefer it to melancholy resignation.Maybe politics can’t solve it. But it’s the best we’ve got.Labor has a deep legacy of action for the natural world. The Whitlam government brought environment into the heart of governing. In 1983, one of the first acts of the Bob Hawke government was to protect the Franklin River from a hydroelectric dam. Hawke ended rainforest logging, expanded Kakadu national park, led the international campaign to ban mining in Antarctica and began work on limiting greenhouse gases, appearing with his granddaughter in a 1988 documentary on climate change.An ALP brochure from Australia’s 1990 federal election with a message from Bob HawkeBut the legacy is a 20th century one.The past two decades have been dominated by responding to climate change. In the economy of politics, climate has taken all the space allotted to the environment. Finding the pathway to a safer climate hasn’t been easy, with the conservatives and vested interests weaponising it at every step, but Labor has stepped up in this term and a transition is under way. The gradual but certain collapse of the biosphere is threatening us just as comprehensively as a warming planet. And the political and policy response has been inadequate.If re-elected, now is the time for Labor to do better. Governments can only do a certain number of things at once and we muffed the environmental law reform process this term. The power and ferocity of vested interests made clear how hard it is to shift the balance between commerce and the wild.But in the last week, the prime minister has recommitted to the reform and the creation of an Environmental Protection Authority. Rewritten environment laws are the foundation on which we can turn it around. The central innovation is the creation of national standards, rules by which decisions are made about the environment. With proper application by an independent EPA there is a chance that we can begin to address our appalling record of stewardship.But it will take more than laws. And more than money. It will only happen with strong and clear leadership. There’s a complex set of community capabilities and attitudes that need to underpin working out how to live well on our continent. And a tangled mess of overlapping responsibilities at different levels of government to address. We’ll also need incentives to make business consider its impacts on the uncosted natural capital it mines.All this is politically possible because Australia is defined by its strange and magnificent environment. It shapes our culture, it sustains our leisure time, it marks who we are. As social researcher Rebecca Huntley says, “Twenty years of researching what Australians think is unique to our country, it’s not ‘mateship’ or a ‘love of sport’ but our unique natural places and iconic animals. We know they are the envy of the world, and what sets us apart.”This fact is a potent political asset to be capitalised on. Addressing the Australian extinction crisis and the decline of our environment won’t become possible because the community decides it’s their number one concern, it will be because political leaders embrace it and argue the case, grounded in our national pride in our place.

Addressing the Australian extinction crisis and the decline of our environment will be possible when political leaders embrace it Explore the series – Last chance: the extinction crisis being ignored this electionGet Guardian Australia environment editor Adam Morton’s Clear Air column as an emailI’ve been wondering if I remember all my surprise encounters with animals in the wild.I remember sitting totally still on a riverbank watching a platypus going about its business as the dusk descended, by a logging road on the boundary of Tasmania’s world heritage area. And a moose in the Yukon, blundering out of the scrub at full speed right in front of us, as terrified and surprised as we were. A huge thing, my vision filled with moose. It turned and kept bolting. And summer evenings camping on the Thredbo River where wombats make for strange silent sentinels, munching grass as humans rustle plastic and wrangle gas stoves, the fuss of cooking al fresco. Continue reading...

I’ve been wondering if I remember all my surprise encounters with animals in the wild.

I remember sitting totally still on a riverbank watching a platypus going about its business as the dusk descended, by a logging road on the boundary of Tasmania’s world heritage area. And a moose in the Yukon, blundering out of the scrub at full speed right in front of us, as terrified and surprised as we were. A huge thing, my vision filled with moose. It turned and kept bolting. And summer evenings camping on the Thredbo River where wombats make for strange silent sentinels, munching grass as humans rustle plastic and wrangle gas stoves, the fuss of cooking al fresco.

I remember them because they are moments of such stark joy. They are usually times of quiet in the soft evening light. Australian animals are generally both silent and reserved. And these moments are rare.

In the way of oil and water, my love of nature gets expressed by being deep in the political process, with all its banality and disregard. I sit in the heart of a major political party, the Labor party, trying to build the bridge from where we are to where we need to be. This may seem quixotic, but I prefer it to melancholy resignation.

Maybe politics can’t solve it. But it’s the best we’ve got.

Labor has a deep legacy of action for the natural world. The Whitlam government brought environment into the heart of governing. In 1983, one of the first acts of the Bob Hawke government was to protect the Franklin River from a hydroelectric dam. Hawke ended rainforest logging, expanded Kakadu national park, led the international campaign to ban mining in Antarctica and began work on limiting greenhouse gases, appearing with his granddaughter in a 1988 documentary on climate change.

An ALP brochure from Australia’s 1990 federal election with a message from Bob Hawke

But the legacy is a 20th century one.

The past two decades have been dominated by responding to climate change. In the economy of politics, climate has taken all the space allotted to the environment. Finding the pathway to a safer climate hasn’t been easy, with the conservatives and vested interests weaponising it at every step, but Labor has stepped up in this term and a transition is under way. The gradual but certain collapse of the biosphere is threatening us just as comprehensively as a warming planet. And the political and policy response has been inadequate.

If re-elected, now is the time for Labor to do better. Governments can only do a certain number of things at once and we muffed the environmental law reform process this term. The power and ferocity of vested interests made clear how hard it is to shift the balance between commerce and the wild.

But in the last week, the prime minister has recommitted to the reform and the creation of an Environmental Protection Authority. Rewritten environment laws are the foundation on which we can turn it around. The central innovation is the creation of national standards, rules by which decisions are made about the environment. With proper application by an independent EPA there is a chance that we can begin to address our appalling record of stewardship.

But it will take more than laws. And more than money. It will only happen with strong and clear leadership. There’s a complex set of community capabilities and attitudes that need to underpin working out how to live well on our continent. And a tangled mess of overlapping responsibilities at different levels of government to address. We’ll also need incentives to make business consider its impacts on the uncosted natural capital it mines.

All this is politically possible because Australia is defined by its strange and magnificent environment. It shapes our culture, it sustains our leisure time, it marks who we are. As social researcher Rebecca Huntley says, “Twenty years of researching what Australians think is unique to our country, it’s not ‘mateship’ or a ‘love of sport’ but our unique natural places and iconic animals. We know they are the envy of the world, and what sets us apart.”

This fact is a potent political asset to be capitalised on. Addressing the Australian extinction crisis and the decline of our environment won’t become possible because the community decides it’s their number one concern, it will be because political leaders embrace it and argue the case, grounded in our national pride in our place.

Read the full story here.

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Amendment restricts protection for animals to allow faster house buildingHousing secretary Steve Reed has told Labour MPs to vote down an amendment to the new planning bill intended to protect British wildlife and its habitats from destruction.The amendment, which was passed with a large majority in the House of Lords, restricts the most controversial part of the draft bill by removing protected animals such as dormice, badgers, hedgehogs, otters and nightingales, and rare habitats such as wetlands and ancient woodlands, from new rules which allow developers to sidestep environmental laws to speed up house building. Continue reading...

Housing secretary Steve Reed has told Labour MPs to vote down an amendment to the new planning bill intended to protect British wildlife and its habitats from destruction.The amendment, which was passed with a large majority in the House of Lords, restricts the most controversial part of the draft bill by removing protected animals such as dormice, badgers, hedgehogs, otters and nightingales, and rare habitats such as wetlands and ancient woodlands, from new rules which allow developers to sidestep environmental laws to speed up house building.Under the draft legislation proposed by Labour, developers will be able to pay into a national “nature recovery fund” and go ahead with their project straight away, instead of having to carry out an environmental survey and to first avoid, then mitigate damage, before putting spades into the ground.Experts say this is a regression on decades-old environmental law and it has been criticised as “cash to trash” by ecologists and environmental groups.The Lords’ amendment would mean the nature recovery fund is restricted to impacts from water and air pollution, meaning developers would still have to take the usual measures to mitigate damage to wildlife and habitats.Reed has recommended rejecting the amendment when the bill returns to the Commons on Thursday for the final stages before being passed into law.In a letter to MPs some of the UK’s biggest nature charities, including the Wildlife Trusts and RSPB, say the government rollback of environmental law “lacks any rigorous scientific or ecological justification.“There is no credible, published, or well established evidence that this model can simply be scaled or replicated for multiple species nationwide without risking serious ecological harm, legal uncertainty, and increased costs for both developers and land managers,” the letter reads.The Guardian revealed this week how the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, and housing minister Matthew Pennycook have met scores of developers in the past year over the planning bill. Reeves has not met a single environmental organisation or the body for professional ecologists, while Pennycook has had just four meetings with such groups, compared with 16 with leading developers.A spokesperson for the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government said: “The planning and infrastructure bill will remove barriers to building vital new homes and infrastructure and this amendment is an unnecessary limit on the benefits which the nature restoration fund will create for both nature and the economy. There are already safeguards in our legislation to ensure environmental delivery plans are effective for the environment, as we get Britain building again and deliver the homes we need.”

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I discovered a new Australian native bee, but there are still hundreds we need to identify

The discovery of a horned native bee that pollinates a rare plant highlights how little we know about Australian pollinators.

The female of the species has devil-like black horns, and a taste for extremely rare pollen. But until now, this Australian native bee has never been officially named or identified. My discovery of Megachile (Hackeriapis) lucifer, underscores the lack of knowledge and investment in Australia’s unique native bees. Whilst considerable funding and attention has been focused on the introduced European honey bee, Apis mellifera, there are still hundreds of native bees that are yet to be identified and named. How was this bee found? This fascinating new megachile (or leaf cutter) bee was first discovered while on a surveying trip in the Bremer Ranges in the goldfields region of Western Australia in 2019. I was conducting surveys for pollinators – such as bees, other insects, flies and wasps – of a critically endangered plant called Bremer marianthus, or Marianthus aquilonaris, which is only known in this region. Sadly, as is common for many threatened plant species, the pollinators for this straggly shrub with blue-tinged white flowers were completely unknown. One of the native bees collected on this visit immediately caught my attention because the female had large devil-like horns protruding from her clypeus – the broad plate on the front of a bee’s head. When I investigated, it was clear this wasn’t a species that had been found before. Whilst some native bees have horns or prongs, none have the large and slightly curved horns of this one. Comparing it with museum specimens, along with DNA barcoding, confirmed this species was new to collectors and to science. DNA barcoding also revealed a male native bee I had collected at the site was her partner, but he lacked horns. This is the opposite of the situation in much of the animal kingdom, where the males are more likely to be amoured. Bringer of light When you discover a new species, you have the honour of choosing a name. The first new species of native bee I “described” (or scientifically identified) in 2022, Leioproctus zephyr, is named after my dog, Zephyr. For this new species, the horns meant the name Lucifer was a perfect choice. Lucifer is also Latin for “light bringer”, and I hope this new species brings to light the wonders of our native bees. Australia has more than 2,000 species of native bees. They help keep our ecosystems healthy and play a crucial role in pollinating wildflowers. We need to understand native bees This new native bee, Megachile lucifer, is only one of an estimated 500 native bees that are not described. Far more attention has been given to the introduced European honey bee Apis mellifera. Whilst the honey bee is important for crop pollination, this species is not threatened, and can in fact harm our native bees. The truth is honeybees compete with native animals for food and habitat, disrupt native pollination systems and pose a serious biosecurity threat to our honey and pollination industries. Currently, there no requirement to survey for native bees in areas about to be mined, farmed or developed. Even if they are found, any species that has not been officially identified it has no conservation standing, which is one reason why taxonomic research is so important. Protect the pollinators Megachile lucifer was collected on a flowering mallee plant that attracted thousands of native bees and other insects. In subsequent years of surveying this site, the mallee was not flowering, Megachile lucifer was not seen, and far fewer insects were recorded. With no monitoring of native bees, we also don’t know how their populations are faring in response to threatening processes, like climate change. More interest and investment into the taxonomy, conservation and ecology of native bees, means we can protect both them and the rare and precious plants they pollinate. Kit Prendergast received funding from the Atlas of Living Australia, with a Biodiversity Mobilisation Grant and Goldfields Environmental Management Group Grant. The surveys were conducted as an ecological consultant, subcontracted to Botanica Consulting, who were commissioned by Audalia Resources Limited.

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Margay Rescued in Costa Rica After Backyard Sighting

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Humans love to watch birds in nature. So why do we ignore the lives of the birds destined for our plates? The post Birding’s Tragic Blind Spot appeared first on The Revelator.

Birding is having a moment. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, there are more than 90 million birders in this country, making birding one of the most popular recreational activities, second only to walking. Bookstores have embraced this, with recently bestselling bird memoirs by authors Amy Tan and Margaret Renkl, as well as actor Lili Taylor. I too am a birder, though one troubled by a blind spot I see in too many of my fellow enthusiasts. Perhaps this blind spot is a side effect of looking at the world through binoculars. We spend so much time focused on distant birds that we don’t always see the birds closest to us. Like the birds on our plates. Consider the chicken. Globally, more than 80 billion chickens are killed each year, a number so big it borders on the unimaginable. I’ll break it down this way: By the time you finish reading this essay, nearly 18 million birds will have perished. Most chickens never see the sky, never set foot on planet Earth. They are born under artificial lights and die under artificial lights six horrific weeks later. Cage-free chickens may experience a bit more room and possibly a bit of sunshine, but the end result is equally dismal. A few chickens survive. Some are rescued (or stolen, depending on your perspective) from animal warehouses. (And yes, warehouse is a more appropriate term than farm.) In case you’re doubting how these birds differ from the ones we seek and celebrate, you might want to meet a few of them. Odds are, you’ll find an animal sanctuary near you — check the Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries website for a list. Perhaps you’re near the Woodstock Farm Sanctuary in High Falls, New York, where you can meet Peppermint, rescued from a live kill market, or The Iowa Survivors, 10 of the more than 1,400 chickens collectively saved when an egg facility in Iowa was preparing to kill 140,000 chickens during the darkest days of COVID. On my side of the country, at Tikkun Olam Sanctuary in Southern Oregon, you can meet Scissors, a bird born with a crossed beak, a genetic condition that makes it nearly impossible for her to eat like the other birds — a death sentence nearly anywhere but at a sanctuary. And if you hold Scissors in your arms as I have (she loves to be held), you might wonder how such a beautiful bird can be viewed by so many as disposable. If she hadn’t found her home at the sanctuary, she wouldn’t be alive today, deemed too much trouble to feed in reward for her eggs. As for turkeys, the United States has a national holiday to blame for the more than 200 million turkey deaths each year. And even ducks, for whom we happily make way in Boston, died to the tune of 28 million in 2024. How do we remove these birding blind spots? The first step is to acknowledge that all birds have equal value, including those we eat and those we may consider pests (such as starlings and pigeons). A bird’s relative scarcity on this planet need not be a prerequisite of its perceived value. Similarly, just because a bird species is in no danger of extinction does not make it any less valuable. Second, I encourage birders to reconsider the food on their plates. This may seem a tall ask; I too once devoured chicken wings and nuggets. But I can state now that the plant-based alternatives are just as good and carry none of that guilty aftertaste. There are also many environmental benefits to giving up chicken: chicken manure’s nitrous oxide emissions are a major contributor to global warming, and the nitrogen itself ends up in waterways, resulting in dead zones and countless numbers of dead fish. And then there’s this: If every birder in the United States gave up eating chicken, more than 2 billion chickens would be spared this year alone. In a world where we often feel powerless against the wanton destruction of environmental protections, we still have immense power at our disposal simply by changing the way we eat. Third, I urge birding, bird conservation, and bird-science organizations to explicitly support the protection of all birds. For instance, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology has never officially opposed the eating of chicken, turkeys, or duck, nor has The Audubon Society. They understandably don’t want to make their members uncomfortable, yet it seems curious to bemoan the loss of so many bird species, as they do, when the number of chickens slaughtered each year outnumbers all of the wild birds on this planet. Birders are precisely the humans birds need as advocates: those who care about them and care about this planet. A chicken, a duck, a turkey: Each is as much a bird as Flaco the owl. And no less deserving of protection. So the next time you think about going birding, consider a detour to a local sanctuary. The chickens would love to have a word. And you can leave your binoculars at home. Previously in The Revelator: Bird Bias? New Research Reveals ‘Drab’ Species Get…Less Research The post Birding’s Tragic Blind Spot appeared first on The Revelator.

Animals

Conservation

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Lemurs Are Having a Mysterious 'Baby Boom' in Madagascar. Here's Why That Might Not Be a Good Thing

Researchers are investigating a sudden spike in pregnancies in one black-and-white ruffed lemur population that might signal environmental stress to the mammals

Lemurs Are Having a Mysterious ‘Baby Boom’ in Madagascar. Here’s Why That Might Not Be a Good Thing Researchers are investigating a sudden spike in pregnancies in one black-and-white ruffed lemur population that might signal environmental stress to the mammals Elizabeth Preston, bioGraphic November 7, 2025 8:30 a.m. A population of black-and-white ruffed lemurs on Madagascar is experiencing changes in the cadence of its breeding, researchers say. Inaki Relanzon / Nature Picture Library Every August, about halfway through his journey into Madagascar, veterinarian Randy Junge decides he’s never doing it again. After 30 hours of travel from the United States to reach the island off the southeast coast of Africa, he and his colleagues face a 12-hour trip by car over roads that are “bad to nonexistent,” he says. Then a team helps them carry their gear to camp—a hike of 18 miles through the rainforest. Once he recovers a little, though, Junge—who is the vice president of conservation medicine at the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium in Ohio—always changes his mind. He’ll be back. What stands to be learned about the long-term consequences of environmental change to the health of Madagascar’s lemurs is just too important. Junge works with Andrea Baden, a biological anthropologist at Hunter College in New York, on a long-term project monitoring a remote population of black-and-white ruffed lemurs (Varecia variegata). Baden started the project at Ranomafana National Park in southeast Madagascar in 2005. Junge joined in 2017. Every summer, they camp out at the park for about ten days and work with a Malagasy team to capture lemurs; conduct medical exams; and collect blood, feces and other samples for later analysis. They also observe lemur families and social interactions. For the rest of year, Malagasy research technicians, guides and graduate students keep tabs on the lemurs’ activity. Because the site is so arduous to reach, it remains a relatively pristine habitat with undisturbed lemurs. But there are signs that the globally transforming climate is changing these lemurs, too. One of the researchers’ interests is the black-and-white ruffed lemurs’ fertility. The species breeds sporadically, but in 2024 the Ranomafana population had babies for an unprecedented second year in a row. The scientists fear that what looks like a miniature baby boom might actually be a sign that this species is in danger. Did you know? Where do lemurs live? Lemurs are only found in the wild on Madagascar and the nearby Comoro Islands. Like humans and chimpanzees, they are primates, though lemurs are more distant relatives of ours than the apes are. Black-and-white ruffed lemurs are largely arboreal, walking and leaping between tree branches across their forest habitat in search of fruit. Goran Safarek / Shutterstock Wild animals face challenges that their captive counterparts don’t. Back in Ohio, Junge’s animal patients at the zoo “live a pretty soft life,” he says. The lemurs he sees in the rainforest, by contrast, bear signs of their tougher environment, such as cracked teeth or broken fingers that have healed crooked. The environment also shapes reproduction. The pampered black-and-white ruffed lemurs in zoos breed every year and often bear litters of three to five infants. In their native habitat of Madagascar, where all wild lemur species dwell, the black-and-white ruffed lemurs have fewer babies at a time—if they get pregnant at all. Like other lemur species in the wild, black-and-white ruffed lemurs live in the treetops, eat mostly fruit and breed within a specific window of time. But unlike their cousins, which breed annually or at regular intervals such as every other year, black-and-white ruffed lemurs have unpredictable gaps between birth years. Their fickle fecundity is reinforced in a surprising way. Most of the time—as is the case with other lemur species—a female black-and-white ruffed lemur’s vulva has no opening at all. “They could not have sex if they wanted to,” Baden says. But for 24 to 72 hours around July of a lucky year, she says, “Their vagina will open like a flower.” There’s a brief frenzy of mating. Then the females close up shop again. “It’s totally weird,” Baden says. Researchers Randy Junge and Andrea Baden visit the Ranomafana forest in Madagascar each year to study black-and-white ruffed lemurs with their Malagasy colleagues. Randy Junge The result is a boom-or-bust baby cycle: In the years when the Ranomafana population breeds, usually 80 to 100 percent of adult females end up giving birth that October. A mother normally has two or three infants at a time, born helpless and with their eyes closed, “like puppies,” Baden says. Unlike nearly every other hairy primate, young black-and-white ruffed lemurs are unable to cling to their moms’ fur. For the first month or so of life, the mom has to stay with her young nearly full-time in the nest—a high platform of branches and leaves. For maybe an hour each day, she leaves to forage fruit and to socialize. “Mom takes off and will literally make a beeline to other females’ nests and pop in and pay little visits,” Baden says. After about a month, the mother moves her infants to a new nest, carrying them one at a time in her mouth. Outside this nest, an adult male or female will stand guard, letting the mother spend more time away. Some moms continue parenting like this, Baden says. Others change tack, teaming up with their neighbors instead. They carry their babies to the nests of relatives or friends, or to crooks of trees, and park the kids together under the eye of a sentinel male, while all the moms go out. Baden compares this arrangement to a kindergarten. The mothers who take advantage of shared nests spend more time feeding themselves, and their infants seem more likely to survive, perhaps because more regular meals for mom translate into richer milk. The synchrony of their reproductive habits helps to make this communal care possible. “Something in their environment tells them ‘yes’ or ‘no,’” Baden says. The availability of certain resources may serve as a signal to breed. But no one knows exactly what that signal is, she says. “We’re only just starting to understand this system.” Black-and-white ruffed lemurs typically birth two to three babies at a time, but their pregnancies can be as long as five years apart. Lauren Bilboe / Shutterstock From 2005 to 2023, Baden always saw two or more years between breeding seasons at Ranomafana. Gaps between breeding years seem to be the norm in other black-and-white ruffed lemur populations, too. In Madagascar’s Manombo forest, other researchers observed a stretch where black-and-white ruffed lemurs didn’t breed for five years. That’s why, at Ranomafana in 2024, field observers were startled to see the lemurs mating for the second year in a row. To learn more about what was going on with the population, the U.S. scientists brought a portable ultrasound machine on their annual field visit. (Coincidentally, Baden was eight months pregnant at the time. She sent a graduate student in her place to make the long journey and hike. “I’m tough, but not that tough,” she says.) The Ranomafana population consists of about 40 lemurs, with 15 or so adult females. As in other years, the team used tranquilizer darts to capture some of the lemurs. After using a net to catch each sleepy animal falling from the tree canopy, they collected medical data, conducted ultrasounds on the females and replaced radio collars as needed. The team managed to get ultrasounds on seven of the females. The blurry black-and-white images revealed another surprise: pregnant mothers—but only some. Four of the seven females were pregnant (three with twins and one with a single fetus). In normal years, either none of the females get pregnant, or nearly all of them do. “Not half,” Junge says. Furthermore, he says, one fetus was about twice as big as all the others, suggesting its mother had bred early, outside of the usual window. Junge and Baden brought a portable ultrasound into the field to determine if any females were pregnant for an unprecedented second year in a row. Randy Junge The scientists didn’t know how many of these fetuses would survive to term. Come fall, though, the infants arrived—not in October but mid-September, in yet another aberration from their usual pattern. Multiple litters were born. Some lemur moms successfully reproduced for the second year in a row. Two years of babies might seem like a good thing. But Baden worries that the consecutive breeding years in Ranomafana hint at something different—perhaps a scrambling of whatever environmental cues usually synchronize their boom-or-bust communal breeding. “We’re seeing kind of wonky timing of reproduction, and we’re seeing the plants are fruiting and flowering at different times,” likely due to climate change, Baden says. “We’re seeing way drier wet seasons.” All in all, she says, “There may be some sort of breakdown in the system.” Researchers estimated in 2019 that this species had declined by at least 80 percent over the prior two decades. If scientists can figure out what environmental cues influence the black-and-white ruffed lemurs’ reproduction, that knowledge could be critical for keeping them alive. Junge is studying the lemurs’ blood to see if the presence of a certain vitamin or mineral in their diet, for example, predicts when they’ll breed. “For instance, if there was a critical nutrient they get from one tree that isn’t fruiting, it could upset the whole reproductive cycle,” Junge speculates. “It’s a little scary, because that ability to succeed may be a very fine line.” A black-and-white ruffed lemur on a branch Diego Grandi / Shutterstock Climate change is rattling Madagascar and its wildlife beyond Ranomafana National Park. In addition to warming and rainfall changes, cyclones are becoming more common and intense on the island. These storms knock down trees and leave holes in the canopy. Increasing storms could disrupt the lemurs’ food supply. Because black-and-white ruffed lemurs have a more selective fruit diet than other species do, they may struggle to adapt when cyclones destroy their preferred feeding trees. The five-year breeding gap in one black-and-white ruffed lemur population came after an intense cyclone tore through their forest. But climate change is only one of the environmental factors threatening Madagascar’s lemurs. Habitat loss is an ongoing problem that’s difficult to combat, as Harizo Georginnot Rijamanalina, one of Baden’s Malagasy graduate students, has seen firsthand. Rijamanalina recalls visiting a forest in his village as a child. He was tagging along with his father, who was on a mining expedition. While his dad’s team dug their pit, Rijamanalina explored the forest, collecting sticks to make into toy weapons, while lemurs swung overhead. That forest is still intact; Rijamanalina went home for a visit in 2022 and identified about 11 lemur species living there. After finishing his PhD at the University of Antananarivo in Madagascar’s capital city, he plans to take his expertise back home and work on conserving that site and its wildlife. But other areas of lemur habitat across the island have shrunk as he has grown up. The impacts of climate change on the forest, Rijamanalina says, are “exacerbated by intervention of local communities, who struggle from the difficult life.” In trying to survive, they log the forests, mine them for gold or gemstones, or hunt the lemurs themselves for meat. “You see, every year, the forest [gets] pushed back,” says Tim Eppley, chief conservation officer at the U.S.-based conservation nonprofit Wildlife Madagascar. “It’s largely driven by lack of opportunity and food for the local human populations.” All wild lemurs live in Madagascar and the nearby Comoro Islands, and most populations have been impacted by the forces of development and climate change. Luca Nichetti / Shutterstock As a result, Eppley says, lemurs today are in “a very precarious situation.” Nearly all of Madagascar’s more than 100 lemur species are threatened with extinction. “Many of them have very small populations that exist just within a single forest, or maybe a series of forest fragments,” Eppley says. Every population is critical to protect, scientists say. Baden and her team hope that continuing the ultrasounds in coming field seasons, along with their other biomedical research, will unlock secrets about the black-and-white ruffed lemur’s fertility and unusual reproductive habits that could help safeguard the species. By tracking which lemurs get pregnant, then comparing the data to how the lemur families look later, the team can find out how many pregnancies arise from the short breeding season—and how many of those fetuses make it to term and survive. Lemurs have semi-opposable thumbs that help them grip branches. Pav-Pro Photography Ltd / Shutterstock Even though some Ranomafana females gave birth in two consecutive seasons, “I’ll be curious to see what mortality looks like this time,” Baden says. She’s noticed more infants in recent years not making it to their first birthday. It could be yet another sign that, between the poorly understood lemurs and their shifting environment, some equilibrium is slipping. Was the Ranomafana lemurs’ one weird year in 2024 the start of a trend that could hurt their odds of survival? Or just a fluke? In 2025, the Malagasy team didn’t notice the lemurs mating and assumed things were back to normal. The U.S. researchers brought the portable ultrasound with them when they returned to the rainforest in August, though, just to be sure. And what they found was unprecedented: At least two females were pregnant, yet again. If the babies make it to term, it will be one mother’s third straight year of breeding. She’ll birth those infants, though, into an uncertain future. This story originally appeared in bioGraphic, an independent magazine about nature and regeneration powered by the California Academy of Sciences. Get the latest Science stories in your inbox.

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