Madagascar, in the Indian Ocean off the African coast, is the fourth largest island in the world and a biodiversity hotspot. The British primatologist, conservationist and a former vice-chancellor of Cambridge, Dame Alison Richard, has immersed herself in research and conservation projects there since the early 1970s. Her research on lemurs, Madagascar’s endangered indigenous primates, has concentrated on the demography and social behaviour of sifakas, the leaping tree-dwellers found in Madagascar’s coastal forests. Her new book, The Sloth Lemur’s Song, looks at the long history of the island and takes on the persistent myth of it as a timeless, forested paradise destroyed by human settlers. Richard, 74, is the Crosby professor emerita of the human environment at Yale University.
What fascinates you about Madagascar?
Isolated for 88 million years, it is like a floating evolutionary laboratory. It is so incredibly diverse in its topography, vegetation and array of animals, it is more like a continent. The animals are unique, found nowhere else in the world, and they break a lot of evolutionary “rules”, which make them even more interesting. And the sheer magic of its change over aeons from a chunk of land in the middle of Gondwana, the supercontinent, is consuming.
This book is my own interpretation of Madagascar’s past, grounded in science, and I weave in my personal field experiences. I had originally planned to write it together with my husband – who studied Madagascar’s early settlement by people – but he died unexpectedly in 2013. This is a different book, but his ideas are there.
What drew you there?
My lecturer when I was a Cambridge undergraduate, the late, great primatologist Alison Jolly, suggested it. I first went in 1970 to do my PhD research on lemurs’ distinctive social configuration: unlike most primates, females dominate. I was captivated, but I also quickly saw the environmental challenges and that I had to help.
My (then future) husband switched his research focus to Madagascar, and we would take a turn every summer doing our fieldwork there while the other looked after our children (we also lived there on a sabbatical year in the 1980s). I continued to go even when I was a university administrator – it helped keep me sane. Because of Covid I haven’t been for two years now, which feels awful. I’ve never stopped loving my research and being in the field, and I have cherished Malagasy friends and extended family there, built up over 50 years.
Where does the myth of Madagascar as a paradise lost come from, and why is it important to overturn?
It comes from early French colonists [France colonised Madagascar in 1896] and it is still pervasive. It goes that Madagascar was an entirely forested wonder until the Malagasy arrived a few thousand years ago and started cutting and burning it all down, and continue to. It is important to overturn because it is wrong – the truth is more nuanced – and because it is a problematic basis for building a partnership to deal with today’s environmental challenges.
Madagascar’s ancient occupants all but disappeared when the dinosaur-wiping asteroid hit Earth 66m years ago. Who were they and what happened next?
They included several distinctive species of dinosaur, a vegetarian crocodile and – my personal favourite – a giant, possibly dinosaur-eating frog (Beelzebufo). A handful of animals from Africa repopulated it: birds which flew over, but also reptiles and small mammals that beat the odds to cross the deep, wide Mozambique Channel. The evidence for a land bridge or island chain is very slim. Most couldn’t swim or float, so had to come on big mats of vegetation mostly arriving before 23m years when the currents got more treacherous still (though hippos and crocodiles arrived in more recent times). Both Madagascar’s now-extinct megafauna – giant lemurs, including the sloth lemur, giant tortoises and enormous flightless elephant birds – and the unique array of wildlife we see today evolved from them.
When did people arrive, and where did they come from?
The first evidence of humans comes from about 10,000 years ago. Combining information on Malagasy genetics, language and culture, people came first from Africa in small boats, then later, from the seventh century on, Indonesia. They came around the rim of the Indian Ocean in the great trade network or sailed straight across. The genetics suggests that more women came from Indonesia than Africa: perhaps Indonesian families were fleeing the spreading Malaysian empire at the time. Curiously, the Malagasy language is not an African but an Indonesian language.
Can humans be blamed for the extinction of Madagascar’s megafauna? There is cave art depicting a giant sloth lemur hunt, and New Zealand’s giant, flightless moa birds seem to have been hunted to extinction.
The decline of Madagascar’s megafauna started about 1,000 years ago and was complete by the 16th century. Blame isn’t a word I use. [But] people did have an important hand in the extinctions. The decline coincides with the build-up of coastal populations on the island, and cut marks have been found on small numbers of bones. But it is complicated. Nowhere do you find big piles of bones in village settlements; it is extremely improbable that people embarked on mass slaughter to feed themselves. And land clearing was only in some areas. This extinction was more like death by a thousand cuts – a synergy of effects, including local climate change, that took place over a long time span. With the animals’ probably low reproductive turnover and low density, you wouldn’t have to kill too many for those remaining to have difficulty finding mates.
Your particular research focus is white sifakas, and you have studied a population in the south-west for many years. Have you made any interesting observations or discoveries?
It can be comical to watch female social dominance in action. A male who makes the mistake of getting too close to a female while she’s feeding gets snarled at, and if he doesn’t back off, she just whops him. We are far from finding a definitive answer, but I think female social dominance has evolved because having offspring is particularly burdensome for most lemurs. Natural selection has favoured females who face down males for food. Females may also select males who aren’t necessarily the most aggressive: I call it the “wimp hypothesis”.
I have also observed surprising tree-hugging behaviour, where they hug cool trees as a way of managing heat stress. And, in the mornings, they sunbathe before they become active. They may have a reptilian-like capacity – unusual in mammals – to lower their body temperature and metabolic activity in response to the environment. It could be how their ancestors survived on these vegetation mats crossing the Mozambique Channel.
You argue that grasslands already existed in Madagascar and it isn’t all just the result of human destructiveness. Yet modern-day deforestation is happening apace…
Grasslands did develop in Madagascar – and some of the megafauna were grassland animals – though we don’t know the extent. But people have also created grasslands. Human-driven habitat destruction is a huge problem. Of the forest that was present 50 years ago, around 44% has disappeared. People clear forests to make fields to feed their families, but there are also complex market forces at work.
The future seems bleak. Are conservation efforts a waste of time?
It is grim, but I don’t think it’s hopeless. Needed is a strong and less corrupt government to enforce Madagascar’s laws and policies. Meanwhile, there are lots of small-scale examples on the ground. With the aim of improving incomes, I have shipped a half-tonne of salt produced by local Malagasy women to the UK where it is sold through the spice company Steenbergs. It is part of a conservation partnership to find ways for people and nature to live together at Bezà Mahafaly, the village community in the south-west where I do my sifaka work. If these kinds of efforts can scale out, they could have an impact.
Is there a particularly scary or moving encounter you’ve had out in the field?
I’ve occasionally been chased by female lemurs. They came tearing through the forest straight at me, and I had to run. I was habituating them, which is normally quick and easy. Maybe I got too close and they felt cornered. And witnessing nature isn’t always easy. I was following a particular female sifaka one day who was responding to an alarm call for aerial predators – like hawks – and trying to get back to her group. We found the group sitting, staring at this very large boa snake, slowly stuffing a little bulging-eyed mouse lemur down its throat, feet first.
How is climate change affecting things?
There has been a tremendous drought in the south these past three years and people are hungry, which puts pressure on the forest as a resource. Certainly, the models show unequivocally that the south is getting hotter and drier. One of our aims is that south-west sifaka populations can move if it becomes untenable for them under climate change. There are corridors of forest along which they can travel, but we need to help protect them.
When will you next go to Madagascar and what will you be doing?
Hopefully this summer. I’ll be at Bezà Mahafaly, sleeping in my tent, waking at dawn, eating a lot of rice and spending whole days out in the forest with my Malagasy colleagues watching animals we have tagged and are monitoring. We are focused on seeing how the population copes with the current drought. It will give insight into what the future holds with climate change. We will also be visiting villages, talking to elders and meeting with the fierce “salt ladies” who are looking for more salt sales.
• The Sloth Lemur’s Song by Alison Richard is published by William Collins (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
