Madagascar?

OK, OK, I know this blog is supposed to be about my trip to KENYA! However, in my effort to keep teaching those of you out there who were once my former students, I just have to share this article. I found out about it through the Madagascar listserv to which I belong, and I thought it was kind of cool. Some of you will remember that I have pointed out how they are constantly discovering new species in Madagascar. Well, now they have 3 new species of mouse lemurs! They were discovered about 5 years ago, but it has now been made official through genetic tests that these are separate species. For a long time, scientists thought that there were only 2 species of mouse lemur on the whole island, but since the 1970s they have determined that there are at least 15 species that they know about. This is good--because it's pretty neat to discover that there are new species out there--and bad--because as the population is divided into all these different species, it turns out that some of them are more in danger of extinction than scientists originally thought when all the mouse lemurs were in two groups. Mouse lemurs don't fall prey to being hunted for food by humans, but they are still at risk of extinction due to a loss of habitat when people cut down and burn the rain forests for firewood and to clear land for subsistence farming. (Remember what that is, kids?) Anyway, I urge you to check out the article at http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/06/060626-lemurs-africa.html because, at the very least, the pictures of these little primates are very cute!