{"id":5287,"date":"2022-01-25T10:23:16","date_gmt":"2022-01-25T15:23:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alumni.cornell.edu\/cornellians\/?p=5287"},"modified":"2022-04-06T14:50:57","modified_gmt":"2022-04-06T19:50:57","slug":"patel-saving-lemurs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alumni.cornell.edu\/cornellians\/patel-saving-lemurs\/","title":{"rendered":"Doctoral Alum Has Devoted His Career to Saving Lemurs"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Working with a conservation nonprofit, Erik Patel, PhD \u201911, protects and studies the endangered primates in their native Madagascar<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Beth Saulnier<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Erik Patel\u2019s fascination with lemurs has the lowliest of origin stories: he first encountered the arboreal primates on a 2000 trip to Madagascar, when he volunteered to gather fecal samples for a fellow grad student\u2019s research project. \u201cI signed up to help collect poo\u2014and I had a great time,\u201d the 2011 PhD alum recalls with a laugh. \u201cAnd I was blown away by how many different species of lemurs there were on one island.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Patel\u2014who also recorded lemur calls for the Lab of Ornithology\u2019s natural sounds library<\/a> on that memorable excursion\u2014went on to devote his doctoral work in biological psychology to the animals. He returned to Madagascar annually for lengthy field work stints and eventually became an authority on one of the most critically endangered lemur species: the silky sifaka, which Patel calls \u201camong the rarest animals in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
The silky sifaka. (Photo provided)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Today, Patel is conservation and research director of the Lemur Conservation Foundation<\/a> (LCF), a nonprofit based in Florida and Madagascar that works to save the primates\u2014whose roughly 115 species are found in the wild only in that island nation, a former French colony 250 miles off the coast of East Africa where economic, political, and other forces have had dire impacts on wildlife.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhen I started work in Madagascar, only 65% of lemur species were threatened with extinction; now we\u2019re at 98%,\u201d Patel notes. \u201cLemurs are completely helpless about what happens to their habitat\u2014and it doesn\u2019t seem right, because they didn\u2019t do anything wrong. They\u2019re just trying to survive. But due to forces out of their control, they might not.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since 2001, Patel\u2019s work has been based in Marojejy National Park, a roughly 200-square-mile refuge in northeastern Madagascar whose rugged, mountainous terrain is home to the silky sifaka. While the park\u2014which is reached by several days of tough trekking\u2014is officially a protected area for them and other lemurs, they still face threats there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I started work in Madagascar, only 65% of lemur species were threatened with extinction; now we\u2019re at 98%.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Widespread poverty drives a trade in illegal bushmeat hunting and trapping, and slash-and-burn agriculture for rice cultivation has encroached on Marojejy\u2019s borders. Due in part to political corruption as well as a severely underfunded parks system with few resources for enforcement, exotic rosewood trees have been illegally logged, destroying habitat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And as Patel notes, \u201cThere\u2019s no question that climate change has been and is affecting lemurs\u201d\u2014not only impacting their food sources and living conditions but potentially driving them outside the boundaries of protected areas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cClimate change seems like it may be more pronounced on small land masses like Madagascar than on larger continents,\u201d Patel observes. \u201cIt\u2019s common knowledge that people there are planting at different times of the year than they used to, and rains are shifting.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A broad approach to protecting lemurs<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

After earning his doctorate, Patel continued his research and conservation efforts in Madagascar as a postdoc at Duke Lemur Center; part of Duke University in North Carolina, it\u2019s one of the world\u2019s leading facilities for lemur research and breeding. At LCF (on whose board he served before joining the staff in 2016), Patel\u2019s work to protect lemurs is multi-faceted\u2014targeting not just the animals themselves but the root causes of the threats they face.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"a
The mongoose lemur. (Photo by Caitlin Kenney)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>
\n

One of those is human overpopulation, which exacerbates poverty and drives both illegal bushmeat consumption and forest clearing for agriculture: in the two decades that Patel has been working in Madagascar, the population has grown from 16 million to 26 million\u2014a figure that the U.N. predicts will double by 2050.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since those increases are driven in part by a lack of available birth control, LCF partners with a group that sends nurses to offer education sessions and implantable contraception; the program, Patel says, has been highly popular and successful in the region around Marojejy, where residents often struggle to feed their large families.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

LCF has also supported efforts at reforestation\u2014planting some 25,000 trees annually\u2014and has promoted alternative ways for people to make a living and produce food, such as fish farming and yam cultivation. At its U.S. facility about seventy miles southwest of Tampa, Florida\u2014which features acres of fenced forest where the animals can roam\u2014it also breeds five species including the red ruffed lemur, the mongoose lemur, and the ring-tailed lemur.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(The latter, the national animal of Madagascar, is familiar to fans of the eponymous animated films\u2014whose characters include the dance-crazy lemur King Julien XIII, voiced in the original by Sacha Baron Cohen.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But unfortunately, the silky sifakas\u2014whose numbers in their native Marojejy have fallen to the hundreds\u2014are not among the species able to be bred at LCF or in other managed programs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThey\u2019re a more challenging species to breed outside their natural habitat, and they don\u2019t do well in zoos,\u201d Patel explains, noting that a major obstacle is that their health is dependent on a highly diverse diet of indigenous flora. \u201cIn the rainforest, they might eat a hundred different foods,\u201d he says. \u201cHow do we do that in Florida?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Studying the elusive silky sifaka<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

An Illinois native, Patel holds a bachelor\u2019s degree in psychology from Indiana\u2019s Earlham College and a master\u2019s in biological anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley; he came to Cornell planning to study primate vocalizations before falling for lemurs during that 2000 trip.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When he returned to Madagascar the following year\u2014this time to Marojejy\u2014he and his research assistant grappled with living conditions that were several notches below rustic, with little in the way of infrastructure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
Marojejy National Park isn’t easily accessed, but it offers rich opportunities for viewing wildlife\u2014and for local residents, its tourism is a needed source of income. (Photo provided)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe kept running out of food\u2014and we couldn\u2019t find any animals,\u201d Patel says, recalling his early days of struggling to study the silky sifakas. \u201cBut there are very few large, charismatic, day-active primates that haven\u2019t been studied yet, and that was the case for these guys. And they were the flagship animal\u2014not just for this national park but for the entire region; when you\u2019d fly into the airport, you\u2019d see a big picture of the silky sifaka. And I thought, That\u2019s pretty special; people come here just to see this animal. That made it worth investing all the time it took to work in that difficult place.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eventually, after two long months of tramping through the rainforest, they finally sighted a group of silky sifakas. \u201cThey would flee from us, and they\u2019d be alarm calling the whole time,\u201d Patel remembers. \u201cBut lemurs habituate to the presence of humans much more quickly than other primates\u2014with great apes it can take five years\u2014and that made our job much easier. Within a few months, we started finding them fairly regularly. They stopped alarm calling and started treating us like we didn\u2019t exist. It was a huge relief.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the intervening two decades, Patel and his colleagues\u2014including staff drawn from the local community\u2014have vastly expanded the research infrastructure in the park. That has not only provided employment for area residents, he says, but played an essential role in supporting ecotourism\u2014starting with the fact that the researchers\u2019 presence in Marojejy helped accustom the silky sifakas to humans, so they wouldn\u2019t hide from visitors eager to spot them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cA lot of people see ecotourism as one of the big hopes for Madagascar and one of the big hopes for lemurs, because it provides a way for local people to earn money,\u201d Patel says. \u201cThat\u2019s especially true at our park: to get there you usually hire a cook, a guide, two silky sifaka trackers, and 10 to 20 porters to carry all the supplies up to the different camps. Unlike in many other parts of Madagascar, you can\u2019t go in and see lemurs in an hour or two and then exit the park.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"a
Red-bellied lemurs. (Photo provided)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Despite those challenges, Patel says, ecotourism was thriving in Marojejy\u2014until the COVID-19 pandemic devastated the global travel industry. It also forced Patel, who normally spends three to four months a year in Madagascar, to cancel research trips; with the country now reopened to visitors, he has plans to return for two months starting in late February.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During the closure, he says, local staff made the most of the downtime by renovating campsites and other infrastructure for research and tourism, including a large new dining area, built into a cliff face, that offers spectacular mountain views. They\u2019ve also stepped up park patrols to locate and destroy bushmeat traps as well as illegally planted vanilla plots that harm habitat\u2014ways in which desperate residents try to earn a living, but at the expense of endangered lemurs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe silky sifakas are very peaceful, beautiful animals; it\u2019s just nice to be around them,\u201d Patel observes. \u201cThey don\u2019t fight very often, they play a lot, they\u2019re incredibly acrobatic, they\u2019re fun to watch. Once every five or ten years we capture the group for health checks\u2014and when you actually hold one in your arms, it\u2019s just over<\/em>. They\u2019re warm, they\u2019re soft and fuzzy. They\u2019re just the sweetest things.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Top image: Patel in Madagascar. (Photo by Erik Vance\/The New York Times\/Redux)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Published January 25, 2022<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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