CSBR:Continued Support of the Duke Lemur Center for the Study of Primate Biology and History

Duke University, Durham NC

Investigators

Abstract

This award will provide support to the Duke Lemur Center (DLC), a unique living stock collection of the world's most endangered and biologically diverse primates - the lemurs of Madagascar. Lemurs are exclusive to the biodiversity hotspot of Madagascar, and due to their critically-endangered status, are not a renewable resource. Serving as a living laboratory for advancing interdisciplinary research, scholarship, and conservation, the DLC is the only place in the world where lemurs are readily available for comparative study together with associated biological samples, decades of medical records, life history data, and fossil relatives of living taxa. The diversity of the colony enables an expansive scope of science to be conducted and communicated, covering disciplines ranging from behavioral ecology, cognition, sensory communication, biomechanics, anatomy, life-history strategy, metagenomics, phylogenomics, population genetics, metabolomics, and more. In addition, the DLC is an exceptional training ground for students across academic levels. Over its 54-year history, thousands of students ranging from K-12 through postgraduate levels have been engaged in and inspired by their experiences at the DLC. The veterinary department supports educational activities via work-study opportunities and veterinary student training, including an internship for Malagasy veterinarians. Critically, the DLC is committed to conservation activities via both ex situ captive management and extensive community-based Madagascar programs. Hundreds of thousands of visitors from the general public have been exposed to the concepts of biodiversity discovery and conservation, as well as the power of biological research via their exposure to the DLC's staff, students, and collections. The overarching aim of this award is to strategically enhance the value of the DLC’s living collection through eight short-term goals that will provide significant opportunities to generate additional research and build multi-disciplinary collaborations, increase the digital availability of data from living stocks, biological tissues, and natural history collections, and increase education outreach and veterinary training activities. The first five goals directly facilitate and enhance ongoing and planned research to identify species (in particular genomic and paleontological data), understand organismal systems (in particular biomechanics, endocrinology, physiology, microbial ecology, behavior, and metabolics – including torpor), and more broadly, to understand evolutionary patterns and the links across biological scales between genotypes and phenotypes. The remaining goals facilitate outreach and education activities so that the significance of the research will be communicated to a broad audience. Colony support is central to meeting these goals for advancing key programs in biological research, education, and conservation. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.