Madagascar, in the Indian Ocean off the African coast, is the fourth largest island in the world and a biodiversity hotspot. The British primatologist, conservationist and a former vice-chancellor of Cambridge, Dame Alison Richard, has immersed herself in research and conservation projects there since the early 1970s. Her research on lemurs, Madagascar’s endangered indigenous primates, has concentrated on the demography and social behaviour of sifakas, the leaping tree-dwellers found in Madagascar’s coastal forests. Her new book, The Sloth Lemur’s Song, looks at the long history of the island and takes on the persistent myth of it as a timeless, forested paradise destroyed by human settlers. Richard, 74, is the Crosby professor emerita of the human environment at Yale University.
What fascinates you about Madagascar?
Isolated for 88 million years, it is like a floating evolutionary laboratory. It is so incredibly diverse in its topography, vegetation and array of animals, it is more like a continent. The animals are unique, found nowhere else in the world, and they break a lot of evolutionary “rules”, which make them even more interesting. And the sheer magic of its change over aeons from a chunk of land in the middle of Gondwana, the supercontinent, is consuming.
