New Zealand Zoo More than Doubles Its Population of Endangered Lemurs

A ring-tailed lemur mother with her offspring tastes a frozen snack given to the animals to cool down in the DierenPark in Amersfoort, The Netherlands, 19 July 2022. (EPA)
A ring-tailed lemur mother with her offspring tastes a frozen snack given to the animals to cool down in the DierenPark in Amersfoort, The Netherlands, 19 July 2022. (EPA)
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New Zealand Zoo More than Doubles Its Population of Endangered Lemurs

A ring-tailed lemur mother with her offspring tastes a frozen snack given to the animals to cool down in the DierenPark in Amersfoort, The Netherlands, 19 July 2022. (EPA)
A ring-tailed lemur mother with her offspring tastes a frozen snack given to the animals to cool down in the DierenPark in Amersfoort, The Netherlands, 19 July 2022. (EPA)

New Zealand's Wellington Zoo has more than doubled its population of endangered ring-tailed lemurs after its four females gave birth to twins, the zoo's primate manager said on Tuesday.

Ring-tailed lemurs, endemic to Madagascar, are on the endangered list. Wellington Zoo has only had ring-tailed lemurs for 18 months and got Zeus, their male, at the beginning of 2022 with the hope they might be able to add to their population.

Primate manager Lisa Ridley said given all four adult female lemurs were first-time mums, they were not sure whether they'd have success with breeding them.

"We're very, very excited that we've had four sets of healthy twins and they're doing well," she said.

The first set of twins was born in August and the final set was born last week.

The population of ring-tailed lemurs, made famous by King Julien in the 2005 movie "Madagascar", is declining in the wild. One of the challenges is female ring-tailed lemurs are only sexually receptive for one or two days a year.

"The window is literally 24 to 36 hours - that was all the time our male had to do his job," said Ridley. "Zeus is a really, really nice male. He's laid back. He is very respectful of the females and he understands his position within the mob."

Ridley said the zoo was not sure of the sex of the young lemurs as they try not to interfere with them until they are older.

Once they mature, any new males and Zeus would likely be separated to create a bachelor group, as would naturally occur in the wild.

Zeus would be used for breeding for a few more years before being replaced to prevent the genetic pool from becoming too small, Ridley said.



The Surprising Reason Why There Are No Human Remains in the Titanic

The RMS Titanic sank at 2:20 am Monday morning on April 15, 1912 after hitting an iceberg in the North Atlantic. (Universal History Archive/Getty Images)
The RMS Titanic sank at 2:20 am Monday morning on April 15, 1912 after hitting an iceberg in the North Atlantic. (Universal History Archive/Getty Images)
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The Surprising Reason Why There Are No Human Remains in the Titanic

The RMS Titanic sank at 2:20 am Monday morning on April 15, 1912 after hitting an iceberg in the North Atlantic. (Universal History Archive/Getty Images)
The RMS Titanic sank at 2:20 am Monday morning on April 15, 1912 after hitting an iceberg in the North Atlantic. (Universal History Archive/Getty Images)

The Titanic, a symbol of hubris and human tragedy, has been a source of fascination for more than 112 years.

But the fact is, the sunken ocean liner was more than just movie fodder or a deep-sea explorer’s holy grail, it was a very real ship on which more than 1,500 people died.

And yet, whilst experts, using the most sophisticated submersible and underwater filming equipment, have found some extraordinary relics from the wreckage, they have never found any skeletons or bones.

“I’ve seen zero human remains,” James Cameron, director of the iconic 1997 film, told the New York Times back in 2012.

“We’ve seen clothing. We’ve seen pairs of shoes, which would strongly suggest there was a body there at one point. But we’ve never seen any human remains.”

Given that Cameron has visited and explored the wreck some 33 times (and claims to have spent more time on the ship than the ship’s captain), if he hasn’t seen any human remains we can assume that there really aren’t any there. So why is this?

It’s a question that has recently been perplexing Reddit users but, luckily, it has some relatively simple answers.

Whilst there was a notoriously insufficient number of lifeboats on the ship, many passengers and crew members still managed to put on life jackets. This means that they remained buoyant even after they succumbed to the freezing cold waters of the Atlantic.

And so, when a storm followed the sinking of the “unsinkable” ship, they were likely swept away from the site of the wreckage and carried further away over subsequent weeks and years by ocean currents.

“The issue you have to deal with is, at depths below about 3,000 feet (around 914 meters), you pass below what's called the calcium carbonate compensation depth,” deep-sea explorer Robert Ballard explained to NPR back in 2009.

“And the water in the deep sea is under saturated in calcium carbonate, which is mostly, you know, what bones are made of. For example, on the Titanic and on the Bismarck, those ships are below the calcium carbonate compensation depth, so once the critters eat their flesh and expose the bones, the bones dissolve,” he said.

Nevertheless, some people believe that there may still be some preserved bodies in sealed off parts of the ship, such as the engine room.

This is because fresh oxygen-rich water that scavengers rely on may not have been able to enter these areas.

Nevertheless, more than a century since the tragedy, it seems likely that such searches for remains would be fruitless.