Due to a poor internet connection and busy lifestyle it was hard to keep up with the blog posts in Madagascar. I am back home now and have so much to tell you about!
Summary of the research: Although we didn’t see the most estrous periods ever we did see the most mating bouts ever. So that means that the females we did observe mating with males, mated with a lot of males each. We even saw two females in estrous at the same time, something relatively rare to see.
What happened was we were watching Jane closely because she was behaving as if she was going to go into estrous: genital marking a lot and allowing males to sniff her genitals without pushing them away. The males were fighting over being close to her as well. Then, I noticed that Juliette was away from the group. She showed up finally with Victor closely guarding her. They were back and Juliette had the telltale white fluid on her genitals where there had been nothing earlier. Doria (my research assistant) and I switched to watching Juliette closely. All the group’s males were paying attention to Juliette now. Then, Doria draws my attention to the fact that Morris (named after the Morrison clan) is now mating with Jane while all the male’s attention is on Juliette. So we had two estrous periods in one day!
Another interesting thing we saw was a lot of harassment of mating events. This was often by a dominant female grabbing and pushing the male. And we have very interesting video of this behaviour!
One thing you might notice from the video is that the female doesn’t seem to show much aggression towards the male. In ring-tailed lemur mating just looking at the pair mating is enough to interrupt the mating bout, so Juliette getting right up in Morris’s personal space is very unusual (at least for me to see). When Morris vocalizes to Juliette it is the “spat” call which is a submissive vocalization.
We also got a photo and video of a female eating her copulatory plug. Strange indeed! But apparently this behaviour is more common than we realize…
eating her copulatory plug
That is all for the summary of research. Stay tuned for the upcoming summary of the conservation education initiatives and what I am up to now.