It started with a squeak: Moonlight serenade helps lemurs pick mates of the right species

User rating: 3 / 5 after 1 vote(s)

Micocebus murinus on the lookout for a mate. Credit: Tiho Hannover
Micocebus murinus on the lookout for a mate. Credit: Tiho Hannover

Lonely hearts columns testify that finding a partner can be hard enough, but at least most human beings can be fairly certain that when we do we have got one of the right species. Things aren’t so simple for all animals. Some Malagasy mouse lemurs are so similar that picking a mate of the right species, especially at night time in a tropical forest, might seem like a matter of pot luck. However, new research in BioMed Central’s journal BMC Biology has shown that our desperately cute distant cousins use vocalisations to pick up a partner of the right species.


Full story »

All News summaries from General Science news
All News summaries for May 07, 2008