The Yale professor talks about her lifelong conservation work in Madagascar, the extinction of its megafauna – and her ‘wimp hypothesis’ of natural selection.
Madagascar, in the Indian Ocean off the African coast, is the fourth largest island in the world and a biodiversity hotspot. The British primatologist, conservationist and a former vice-chancellor of Cambridge, Dame Alison Richard, has immersed herself in research and conservation projects there since the early 1970s. Her research on lemurs, Madagascar’s endangered indigenous primates, has concentrated on the demography and social behaviour of sifakas, the leaping tree-dwellers found in Madagascar’s coastal forests. Her new book, The Sloth Lemur’s Song, looks at the long history of the island and takes on the persistent myth of it as a timeless, forested paradise destroyed by human settlers. Richard, 74, is the Crosby professor emerita of the human environment at Yale University.
https://amp-theguardian-com.cdn.amp...ased-by-female-lemurs-madagascar-conservation
Madagascar, in the Indian Ocean off the African coast, is the fourth largest island in the world and a biodiversity hotspot. The British primatologist, conservationist and a former vice-chancellor of Cambridge, Dame Alison Richard, has immersed herself in research and conservation projects there since the early 1970s. Her research on lemurs, Madagascar’s endangered indigenous primates, has concentrated on the demography and social behaviour of sifakas, the leaping tree-dwellers found in Madagascar’s coastal forests. Her new book, The Sloth Lemur’s Song, looks at the long history of the island and takes on the persistent myth of it as a timeless, forested paradise destroyed by human settlers. Richard, 74, is the Crosby professor emerita of the human environment at Yale University.
https://amp-theguardian-com.cdn.amp...ased-by-female-lemurs-madagascar-conservation