The ruffed lemurs of the genus Varecia are strepsirrhine primates. They are the largest extant lemur within the family Lemuridae. Threatened by habitat loss and hunting, they are facing extinction in the wild. They reproduce readily in captivity and have been re-introduced into the wild since 1997.
About Ruffed lemur in brief
The ruffed lemurs of the genus Varecia are strepsirrhine primates. They are the largest extant lemur within the family Lemuridae. They live in multi-malemulti-female groups and have a complex and flexible social structure. Threatened by habitat loss and hunting, they are facing extinction in the wild. However, they reproduce readily in captivity and have been gradually re-introduced into the wild since 1997. The extinct genus, Pachylemur most closely resembled the ruffles but died out after the arrival of humans. More recent studies have shown that these extinct species had a similar diet to modern ruffs, but more robust and assumed to be more terrestrial and prone to predation by early human settlers. It is generally accepted that a single rafting event, similar to the one that brought New World monkeys to South America, occurred around 50–80 million years ago. Lemurs are not known in the fossil record on Madagascar until the Pleistocene and Holocene epochs. Today, the endemic primate fauna of Madagascar contains over three-quarters of the extant species of the suborder Strepsir rhini, which had been abundant throughout Laurasia and Africa during the Paleocene and Eocene epochS. Ruffed le murs, along with several species of brown lemur, were once included in the genus Lemur. In 1962, the ruffedLemurs were reassigned to the genus Varecia.
The red ruffed lemur and the black-and-white ruffled lemur were formerly recognized as subspecies, Vareci variegata rubra and Varecina variegatta variegATA. In 2001 both were elevated to species, later later recognized as Vareccia variegta variegati. Three subspecies of black- and-white lemur have been published. The ruffed Lemur is the only lemur species that lives on the island of Madagascar, and it is the most frugivorous of the Malagasy lemurgs. It has a complex social structure, described as fission-fusion. It builds nests for its newborns and carries them by mouth, and exhibit an absentee parental system by stashing them while they forage. Infants are altricial, although they develop relatively quickly, traveling independently in the the wild after 70 days and attaining full adult size by six months. The red lemurs are highly vocal and have loud, raucous calls. They also have short gestation periods and relatively large average litter sizes, such as short gestation and relatively large litter sizes. They are considered an \”evolutionary enigma\” in that they are the largest of the extant species in Lemur families, yet exhibit reproductive traits more common in small, nocturnal lemurred. The genus varecia contains two species, red ruffed lemurs and black and white ruffed-lemur, with the latter having three subspecies.
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This page is based on the article Ruffed lemur published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 19, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
