Endangered
Milne-Edwards' sportive lemur
Lepilemur edwardsi
Milne-Edwards' sportive lemur is a primate in the family Lepilemuridae (order Primates) — Lepilemur edwardsi, recorded as Endangered.
Range and habitat
Milne-Edwards' sportive lemurs occupy the northern-eastern region of Madagascar, and is commonly known to live in the National Park of Akanrafantsika, but can be found in the Mariarano Classified Forest. The habitat undergoes important changes in vegetation, temperature, and climate between the rainy and dry seasons. Deforestation in Madagascar rises to nearly 1% per year on the entire territory.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
Observation shows that Milne-Edwards' sportive lemur generally travels in groups of two to five individuals during the night to feed on the same trees as a group, without showing signs of aggressiveness. Milne-Edward's sportive lemurs are seasonal breeders, where males and females are ready to mate during the months of May to July, and stop from August to December.
Studies show that their main breeding season only last two months per year on average. Annually, females only breed a single offspring, contributing to population decline since they are opposed to anthropogenic degradation.
In crisis
It is threatened by habitat loss. Its population suffers from an estimate decline of more than half of its individuals over less than three decades. Specific information on the current number of individuals is unavalailable, but researchers are finding less and less species over hectares of territory, hence showing concerns on this species population levels.
Hunting is a major factor that contributes to population loss, that is intrinsically linked to an issue of shortages in nutrition from the surrounding villages of Akanrafantsika, leading villagers to hunt wild animals as one of the primary food sources. Inequalities in resources sharing obligates Akanrafantsika's population to find means to cope with food insecurity. In fact, half of the children living there are underweight due to malnutrition, that inevitably force the population to hunt wild animals such as lemurs for survival.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix I. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Milne-Edwards' sportive lemur is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Milne-Edwards' sportive lemur, Wikidata item Q249579. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
