Status of Fat-tailed dwarf lemurs
I was recently browsing the Illustrated Checklist of the Mammals of the World (and I am glad I did not buy it) and was looking at lemurs specifically. It seems that in recent years every population that is geographically somewhat separated is worthy of treatment of a species, which seems more of a taxonomic issue than a real speciation issue to me.
But that is beside the point. I was wondering how the population of Fat-tailed dwarf lemurs (Cheirolageus medius) in Ankarafantsika NP was treated nowadays. But I was surprised to see that according to the distribution map in the checklist (and the IUCN red list map too) none of the currently recognized Cheirolageus species is supposed to occur there.
Can anyone tell me why this is so and which species is supposed to occur there now? The only explanation I can get from scientific papers on lemur taxonomy is that the area isn’t sampled, so the status is unclear…. Seems a bad reason to pretend the species doesn’t occur in a region where it certainly does….
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Murray Lord
According to the new Handbook of Mammals of Madagascar by Nick Garbutt, “Populations north of Tsingy de Bemaraha to Sahamalaza and Ambanja in north-west, including forests such as Namoroka, Tsiombikibo, Anjamena, Ankarafantsika, Bongolova and Anjajavy, may correspond to this species [i.e. Cheirogaleus medius] or an undescribed species (Frasier et al. 2016).”