It has been a very busy past couple weeks! We are finishing up our hormone manipulation with the female lemurs (this will help us figure out the role of hormones in female dominance). I also started working at the Drea Lab at Duke, which was an unexpected surprise! It has been really great so far and I'm learning lab skills that will be helpful in the future. Most of the work I'm doing in the lab is for the Kalahari Meerkat Project, which is really interesting! More info: http://www.kalahari-meerkats.com/

Here are some recent pictures of my furry friends...

Fox and Iroquois eating lunch

Foster (mom) and Hemsworth (baby)
These guys aren't in our study, but are super
cute blue-eyed black lemurs!

Hopkins (dad)

Nef and Geb being super cute as always

Sierra Mist sunning herself

Beatrice eating her veggies

Maddie, being her adorable self

Big stretch (look at those feet!)

Maddie soaking up the sun

Happy weekend!

Weekend with mom!

My mom visited this weekend and we had a lovely time exploring and hanging out with the lemurs. Besides taking her around to meet all of our lemur couples and seeing the Lemur Center, we went hiking in the Duke Forest, went to the Durham Farmer's Market, cooked lots of yummy food, went swimming, explored Duke and went to the Duke Gardens, visited the Museum of Life and Science and went to the Butterfly house... so much fun! 

Here are some butterflies from the Magic Wing's Butterfly House:

 

 

 We even found an Asian market called Li Ming's! AND they sell vegetarian sticky rice!!!

And we caught some frogs :)

Mom and a narrowmouth toad!

Mom and I at the Duke Gardens

While we were hiking yesterday we came across a group of tiger swallowtails hanging out on the ground along the river. There were at least 25 of them with their tongues sticking into the dirt along the river. We discovered later that this behavior is called "puddling" and is exhibited by male swallowtails. They cluster in a group and extract sodium and amino acids from the earth, or whatever else they may find. They then transfer all the good nutrients to the females in their spermatophores-- how cool!!

           

Pudding male tiger swallowtails

     

Beautiful lichens!

Another week at work (I have the best job ever)

Miaro, one of the buildings at DLC

Looking out from one of the natural habitat enclosures

Iroquois, one of our male Eulemur rubriventer

Sierra Mist (left) and Berisades (right)
She's making sure his face is clean.

Geb hoarding apple slices before the sifakas come.

Interspecific snacking

Geb eating a cucumber (obviously after all the apples
have been eaten... next he will move on to his celery)

Wonderful primate anatomy

Sifaka watching Geb and Nef eat

Geb goes so high!

Bertha showing off

Mom meets the lemurs!!!

Look at those hand prints

That tail!

Mom and David, the Research Tech with the ring tails

Looking out over her territory

I'm so in love :)

More lemur loving

Casual pine sapling munching

The lemurs do the Sound of Music
So long, farewell...

Loving it...

I love it more and more here everyday. I am starting to get to know the lemurs and their personalities better and better... it's such an incredible experience. The people at DLC are awesome and I love working with them. I am learning so much about lemurs, animal behavior, data collection, experiment design, and so much more! 

This is Paco...SO happy about his kale snack.

Today I spent the morning with Geb and Nefertari, my favorite lemur couple! They are a pair of crowned lemurs (Eulemur coronatus) and live in one of the natural habitat enclosures with a group of sifakas.

Geb and Nef

Nefertari... could she be any cuter?!

I'm also loving exploring Durham. The farmer's market here is great and I'm soo loving living off the wonderful fruits and vegetables here :)

Durham Farmer's Market

And of course all the other animals that are around! There are five-lined skinks (Eumeces fasciatus) running around everywhere when it's sunny out (they are so fast though-- I finally got a picture of one!). There are also some beautiful grey foxes (Urocyon cinereoargenteus) that hang out around my cabin. And of course the frogs!

Five-lined skink (Eumeces fasciatus) 

My first Microhylid frog! Eastern narrow-mouth toad
(Gastrophryner carolinensis)

Grey tree frog (Hyla versicolor)

Happy Friday!