Romina Rodriguez March 3, 2014 Title: "Cross Dressing" Lemurs Appear Male to Avoid Conflict Author(s): Matt Kaplan

Authors credentials:National Geographic News Summary I found this article on National Geographic and it talks about if cross dressing lemurs it will avoid conflict between the female lemurs. Claudia Fichtel said we knew from our longer term observations that there was a lot of female aggression in red fronted lemurs (Claudia pg:1). Many females became completely fierce and started attacking other female lemurs because of the limited breeding opportunities. When Lemurs are born all of them have the same greysih brown fur with the rusty red crowns that distinguish the adult males (Matt Kaplan Pg:1). But then at 7 to 17 weeks females color of coat changes to a cinnamon color and their crowns start to become a whit color. So most females start telling each other apart and know which ones are male and female. Researchers that were German decided to look at the wild lemur at Kirindy forest in Madagascar for about five months and see what the difference in attitude is taken towards to female lemurs that still look like a male lemur. It was hard for the scientist to determine the which were girls since when they are infants they all look the same for a couple of weeks. Even though it was hard for them to determine they still were able to tell that the the older female did not target the male and all young females that looked like male.

Fichtel and her colleagues thought that appearing males has become something that the lemurs want to do to keep other older females from attacking them. Something else that they notice was that there is a lot of female dominance in this primate group. Even though there has been a long running argument on how mean and aggressive female lemurs are towards their own type male lemurs are still very dependent on them because not all lemurs see color but most female ones do which is why male lemurs are dependent on them since they need to find things like berries. The reason why I think that this article is related to biological anthropology is because it talks about the physical characteristics that lemurs have and that is what I just got done learning in chapter 6. Not all does it talk about what the physical characteristic are about it also explains what they do for them especially what they do for the female ones. The reason why I think that this is a credible source is because it national geographics and it also tells as a lot of facts about the lemurs that I know is true. The main point of the summary is what female lemurs are more feisty towards other females because of the mating situation with males. Reflection a. Which part of this assignment was most difficult and why? I think that the hardest part of this assignment was remembering the dates that you needed to them because we chose the dates we are presenting the first week of class that we if you got something later in the semester you kind of forget or remember late. At least thats what happened to me

b. Identify at least one question you have after reading the original article and explain how you could go about finding an answer. The number one question I have is why are all lemurs born with the same color and then later on all females change their color? I think that the easiest way to find out this is searching it on a reliable source. c. Reflect on how the critical evaluation process impacted your opinion on the article. Honestly when I saw the article I didnt think much of it but when I started to read it I became more interested because I never thought monkeys would kick their own kind out of there group. d. How might the information in the article be useful in the future? I think that this article will be useful in the future because it will give other researcher more information the lemurs.