New York, Oct 30 (PTI) Climate changes may be forcingbamboo lemurs - one of the most endangered primate species onEarth - to change their dietary habits, causing them to slowlystarve, an international study warns.
The study, published in the journal Current Biology,analysed the anatomic, behavioural and paleontological data oflemurs along with climate data.
Lemurs almost exclusively eat a single species of bamboo,including the woody trunk, known as culm.
However, they prefer the more nutritious and tenderbamboo shoots and use their specialised teeth to gnaw on culmonly when necessary, during the dry season.
Researchers suggest that as Earth's climate changes,bamboo lemurs will gradually be forced to eat culm for longerperiods and this could slowly starve them.
"For extreme feeding specialists like the greater bamboolemur, climate change can be a stealthy killer," said PatriciaWright at Stony Brook University in the US.
"Making the lemurs rely on a suboptimal part of theirfood for just a bit longer may be enough to tip the balancefrom existence to extinction," Wright said.
Wright and her colleagues from Finland and Australiafirst showed that the greater bamboo lemurs are equipped withhighly complex and specialised teeth, just like giant pandas -the only other mammal capable of feeding on culm.
These teeth make it possible for them to consume andsurvive on woody culm for parts of the year, researchers said.
The team spent hours watching them in their naturalhabitat in Madagascar's Ranomafana National Park over a periodof 18 months.
Researchers collected more than 2,000 feedingobservations in total. Those data showed that the lemurs spend95 per cent of their feeding time eating a single species ofwoody bamboo.
However, they only eat the culm from August to November,when dry conditions make tender shoots unavailable,researchers said.
Climate models suggest that the areas where the lemurscurrently are found are likely to experience longer and longerdry seasons in the future. As the lemurs are left with onlyculm to eat for longer periods, it could put their survival atrisk, they said.
The findings may have implications for understanding thefate of bamboo-feeding giant pandas, too. Giant pandas arethreatened by deforestation and changes in the distribution ofbamboo.
However, the new data suggest that a changing climate mayalso endanger bamboo feeders in a more subtle way, byaffecting the seasonal availability of preferred and morenutritious bamboo parts. PTI APAAPA.
This is unedited, unformatted feed from the Press Trust of India wire.