Silky Sifaka Research Paper

Conservation of the Silky sifaka

Possibly the rarest mammal in the world, the Silky simpona, or most commonly known as the Silky sifaka or Propithecus diadema candidus have a small home range in forests with elevations between 4101 ft. and 6152 ft. in north-east Madagascar (Andriaholinirina, Baden, Blanco, et. al and Gron, 2008). The Silky sifaka belongs to the suborder strepsirrhini; due to their wet noses, infraorder lemuriformes; because they are a lemur, and family Indriidea, because they are a type of sifaka. (Gron, 2008).

Silky sifakas are approximately 1.6 ft. in body length with their tail being roughly the same length and weigh about 13.2 pounds (Maria Correa, 2013). Often call the ‘angel of the forest’ Silky sifakas have a distinctive

many believe that the Silky sifakas have a six-month gestation period with infants being born in the summer months with females giving birth to one offspring every one to two years on average. Silky sifakas spend much time with their young and its has been observed that everyone in the group, regardless of status, tends help to take care of the infant, but as the infant's age the less and less others will help out. As little as we know about the Silky sifakas reproductive life and how the take care of their young we know even less about how old they live to do to them being unable to survive in captivity, the closest to knowing how long a Silky sifaka will live is to look at the cloest living relative the Verreaux's sifakas which live to approximately twenty-three years old (Maria Correa, 2013).

The Silky sifaka have an extremely complex diet consisting of mostly leaves, fruit, seeds from 76 different species of plants and have been known to occasionally eat dirt (Gron, 2008 and Maria Correa, 2013). Silky sifakas are creatures that enjoy their using time wisely, spending about 45% of their time resting, and the rest of their day is

While none of these groups specifically work to save the Silky sifaka they work to save all lemurs. All of these groups focus on saving the lemurs natural habitat, working with local communities, and education (lemurconservationnetwork.org, n.d). In order to educating locals about why they should care about saving the Silky sifakas, Erik Patel of Duke University, likes to use a two step approach consisting of first teaching the locals about the the Silky sifakas and why they are so unique and then taking the locals to see the lemurs in nature, hoping that the locals will gain an emotional connection to the animals. Another method Erik has been using is he has started to do presentations to the local school children in their local language also he tried to make the presentations are interesting as possible, as well as taking the a select few of the school children on field trips to the national parks the Silky sifakas in person. He has also been working with the local radio stations to get the word out to their audience (Patel, 2005). These methods have indeed had an impact on the conservation of the Silky sifakas and more and more programs are starting as more locals are taking interest, but will this be enough to save the