Much of Madagascar's flora and fauna, including its famous lemurs, are unique to the island.
Lemurs are primates so distantly related to humans they look more like cats than monkeys.
Alison Jolly came to Madagascar as a postgraduate student in 1963 to study the lemurs' behaviour.
ECONOMIST: Madagascar's natural history: Tales in a twist | The
Something similar has since been found to apply to fish, lizards, ring-tailed lemurs, rhesus monkeys, chimpanzees and humans.
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The zoo runs the European breeding programme for white-collared lemurs and is home to 10 of Europe's 14 animals.
Wearing his jaunty red knit cap, he has frolicked with lemurs in Madagascar and stared down deadly fer-de-lance snakes in Ecuador.
In contrast to previous tests with primates, the lemurs were able to use gaze to increase their chance of finding food.
In researching the lemurs for over 40 years, Ms Jolly came to know and love both them and the Madagascan people.
ECONOMIST: Madagascar's natural history: Tales in a twist | The
More than half of Madagascar's lemurs are on the verge of extinction.
His self-styled journey of discovery included stories on endangered lemurs of Madagascar, dying Arabic-Swahili music styles in Tanzania and bungee jumping over the Zambezi River in Zambia.
But local conservation experts raised concerns over the impact on native species, notably the dwarf gecko - and those concerns were echoed by world authorities on lemurs.
"The information from this equipment will be fed back to the European zoos breeding lemurs, to help them manage their lemur environments and captive programmes more effectively, " she added.
Here lemurs and other wildlife showed no fear of the local Tandroy tribesmen who lived a traditional life with the zebu cattle that form the basis of their wealth.
ECONOMIST: Madagascar's natural history: Tales in a twist | The
The boss of the Virgin business empire owns two of the smaller British Virgin Islands (BVI), and planned to have lemurs living in the forest on one of them, Moskito (also Mosquito) Island.
With the animals coming from zoos - some, reportedly, kept in poor conditions - the immediate outlook for the lemurs themselves was clearly positive, as they'd have forest to roam through rather than a cage to stare through.
In addition to six performances at NYSCI, Maker Space was the site of a three-week education program that introduced 60 Queens middle-schoolers to the fundamentals of music composition through the use of iPads, Lemurs and other digital music-making tools.
About 90% of its plant species exist nowhere else on the planet, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society, and many of its bird, reptile and animal species -- including all the world's lemurs in the wild -- are endemic.
"The debate about the plight of the lemurs and what should be done about them, and whether or not my idea was a good idea or bad idea was certainly an eye-opener to me and I suspect to all of us, " he said in a recent e-mail.
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