So how do female lemurs manage to get their way without the brawn to back up a threat? Lewis thinks that the source of a female’s power is obvious. She has something the male wants: an unfertilized egg. ‘The female has this egg and she can say – you want to fertilize this? Guess what? If you want this, then I eat first,’ Lewis told me. Lemurs have an especially short breeding season – in white sifaka it’s just thirty minutes to ninety-six hours a year, and in ring-tailed lemurs four to twenty-four hours.
