research update

Maybe a little update on how work is actually going? The answer--
better than I could have imagined.

The past 2 months I've had 2 teams of people watching different groups
of lemurs. It's been great being able to monitor 2 groups at once and
collect twice as much data during this period of development. The kids
are really exploring, eating tons on their own, and are incredibly
independent. I wasn't expecting this level of independence so soon in
their lives. It's great. They're like real lemurs now. Just tiny
versions.

Mortality from this birth cohort is low so far. However, we're coming
to the time of the year when a lot of babies start disappearing. I
just lost another of my 1 year olds, which isn't so good. Last year's
birth cohort now has over 80% mortality. Tough times in lemur land.

We're also collecting more fecal samples than I know what to do with.
We'll have well over 3000 fecal samples by the time we wrap things up.
We're just too good at it now. This is actually more than I have
supplies to collect it with, so we will end up getting creative for
ways to store all of these fecal samples so we can get them back for
hormone analysis.

A little note about my field assistants. They are awesome. Incredible,
and I'm really lucky to have them around. They have been collecting
incredible amounts of data, make me laugh constantly and only complain
softly at the amount of beans and rice that they're eating. The Beza
Ecological Monitoring Team has been great and without them things
wouldn't be going as smoothly as they have been. I've been fortunate
in all of the people who I've worked with so far and hope that I can
continue working with them all.