Madagascar lemurs, new research

This video is called Madagascar Wildlife Safari.

From Wildlife Extra:

Lemurs get messages when they go to the toilet

Public toilets are often a place humans use to communicate thoughts to others, and it is a habit not just restricted to humans, new research has discovered.

Scientists from the German Primate Center (DPZ) have found that White-footed sportive lemurs in southern Madagascar also use communal toilets as places to air their thoughts, only instead of writing on the walls, they use scent-marks on latrine trees to communicate with each other and warn intruders that that there is a male that will defend his partner.

This is an important method of communicating for them because although White-footed Sportive Lemurs are nocturnal tree-dwellers that live together in families consisting of parents and their offspring, the individuals do not interact much.

But what they have in common are latrines that are located in the core of their territory, which the whole family uses, and so it is a very useful place to leave messages for each other and keep in contact.

“Scent marks transmit a variety of information such as sexual and individual identity and may function to signal an individual’s presence and identity to others,” says Iris Dröscher, from the German Primate Center. “Latrines therefore serve as information exchange centres of individual-specific information.”