A Natural History of the Brown Mouse Lemur

by Sylvia Atsalis

This text can be used for any undergraduate or graduate course with a primate behavior or primate ecology component. It can also be used as supplemental reading, for any advanced animal behavior class. There are very few books that address the biology of nocturnal primates. There are even fewer that delve with any detail regarding the behavior of specific species. These animals are difficult to follow. Their diminutive size, the thickness of the vegetation, and their nocturnal habits, make the study of their habits a demanding task.Through a trial of patience, Sylvia Atsalis has undertaken this task. Here she provides an in depth view at the life and behavioral patterns of these tiny primates. A Natural History of the Brown Mouse Lemur provides the most complete look at the behavior and ecology of mouse lemurs.

Genres: Nonfiction

256 pages, Hardcover

First published October 19, 2007

Reviews

[James F · Rating 2 out of 5]

In the series, Primate Field Studies. This book contains the description and conclusions of a field study the author carried out in Ranomafana National Park, Madagascar, over a two year period in the 1990's on the Brown Mouse Lemur (Microcebus rufus). There was much new information here on the diet, life cycle and reproduction. The author discovered that the key plant food source is the fruits of a mistletoe known as Bakerella, and proposes that M. rufus is one of the rare mammals which is an important disperser of a particular plant species. While lemurs are omnivorous, the study found that this species relies more on fruit than insects (predominantly beetles). The research confirmed that M. rufus is essentially solitary, with a multi-male multi-female promiscuous mating structure; found that females were largely philopatric, while males tended to disperse; that hibernation is not obligatory, is more frequent and of longer duration with females than males, and that the same individuals may hibernate one year and not another. She investigated the reproductive cycle and found no evidence for multiple litters in one breeding season, which some had proposed.

With references to much work by other researchers on lemurs and comparison with studies on other species (I was interested to learn that in the first decade of this century -- i.e. since the books I read about primates last year, which were written in the early nineties -- many new species of lemur had been discovered or recognized as separate species), and full of methodological descriptions, raw data and statistics, this is a more technical book than I expected; it reads like a journal article or a PhD dissertation.

Unfortunately, the physical production of the book was quite poor, especially for a major publisher (Pearson Prentice-Hall): the print was faded and broken, the few photographs were unscreened black and white or very grainy halftones, and the pages began falling out as soon as I opened the book, which I'm sure I was the first to have checked out since it was acquired by the library.