Animal of the Week March 14, 2011 -- World's smallest primate sucks bugs

Having not followed Hollyoaks for the past couple of months, you might feel that my opinions on what qualifies as good television aren't really worth much. But recently, using the BBC iPlayer, I watched a quite marvellous hour featuring the man, the legend, David Attenborough.

Following on from the Madagascar series, Dave was making a return trip to the world's fourth largest island ostensibly to investigate the story of the extinct elephant bird. On an earlier visit for the Zoo Quest series in the 1960s, Attenborough had been handed the fragments of an almost complete egg that was laid by the largest bird ever to have lived: its eggs had a circumference of 1 m and a volume equivalent to 160 chicken eggs. Although David did have his egg dated (about 1400 years old) and had a look at the reasons why the birds might have become extinct (climate change, habitat loss, human's eating their eggs -- the olden-day Madagascans must have been stacked), the show was far more a return journey to the island he had first visited 50 years earlier than an investigation of the bird. Contrasting new footage with old, there was a quite magical sequence in which Attenborough filmed indris, whereas for Zoo Quest to film these lemurs had taken days of painstaking observation for a few minutes film, now David was able to get up close to a study group. The obvious joy on his face as an adult indri reached down and took leaves from his hand was a pleasure to behold. Anyway, yeah, watch it, it's on iPlayer and it's great.

Mark Carwardine

But it's not the elephant bird that's animal of the week, and it's not the largest living lemur the indri, no it's the smallest lemur, indeed the smallest primate Microcebus berthae (Madam Berthe's mouse lemur), which Attenborough also encounters as one of the new species not known when he first visited the island. Weighing just 30 g and measuring only 9 cm in length, it's no surprise that Madame Berthe's mouse lemur was discovered in just 2000 in Kirindy Mitea National Park.

In fact, many of the mouse lemurs have only been described in the past 20 years. Until 1977, all mouse lemurs were thought to be once species, the grey mouse lemur. But then some primatologist with a lot of time on his or her hands decided that some of the mouse lemurs in the south-west of Madagascar were more red than the others and recognised the reddish-grey mouse lemur as a species distinct from the grey mouse lemur. Genetic investigations in the 1990s and 2000s really opened the floodgates and now 17 species are recognised including Jolly's, Margot Marsh's, Claire's, and the smallest, this week's AOTW Madame Berthe's.

Whereas the grey and reddish-grey mouse lemurs are fairly widespread and resistant to extinction for the time being. Madame Berthe's and several of the others are found only in very limited areas and so are vulnerable to habitat loss. Mouse lemurs are omnivores and eat anything from tree sap, to insects, lizards and fruit, Madame Berthe's is, however, a specialist and obtains 50% of its food from an unusual source, the sticky secretions left behind by one species of plant-sucking bug.