Scholars@Duke
Marina Blanco

Selected Publications

The gut microbiome of Madagascar's lemurs from forest fragments in the central highlands.

Journal Article Primates; journal of primatology · May 2025 The gut microbiome is now understood to play essential roles in host nutrition and health and has become a dominant research focus in primatology. Over the past decade, research has clarified the evolutionary traits that govern gut microbiome structure acr ... Full text Cite

Food deprivation is associated with telomere elongation during hibernation in a primate.

Journal Article Biology letters · February 2025 Telomeres, the protective ends of chromosomes, progressively shorten due to incomplete mitotic replication and oxidative stress. In some organisms, transient telomere elongation may occur, for example, when individuals have an energy surplus to counter str ... Full text Cite

Integrative taxonomy clarifies the evolution of a cryptic primate clade.

Journal Article Nature ecology & evolution · January 2025 Global biodiversity is under accelerating threats, and species are succumbing to extinction before being described. Madagascar's biota represents an extreme example of this scenario, with the added complication that much of its endemic biodiversity is cryp ... Full text Cite

Primate hibernation: The past, present, and promise of captive dwarf lemurs.

Journal Article Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · October 2024 The dwarf lemurs (Cheirogaleus spp.) of Madagascar are the only obligate hibernators among primates. Despite century-old field accounts of seasonal lethargy, and more recent evidence of hibernation in the western fat-tailed dwarf lemur (Cheirogaleus medius ... Full text Cite

Paternal behavior in captive fat-tailed dwarf lemurs (Cheirogaleus medius) is preserved under socially relevant conditions.

Journal Article Primates; journal of primatology · September 2024 Fat-tailed dwarf lemurs (Cheirogaleus medius), primates endemic to Madagascar, are obligate hibernators that form stable, lifelong pairs in the wild. Given the temporal constraints imposed by seasonal hibernation, infant dwarf lemurs must grow, develop, an ... Full text Cite

Dietary and Nutritional Selections by Ecologically Diverse Lemurs in Nonnative Forests

Journal Article International Journal of Primatology · August 1, 2024 Full text Open Access Cite

Telomere dynamics during hibernation in a tropical primate.

Journal Article Journal of comparative physiology. B, Biochemical, systemic, and environmental physiology · April 2024 Hibernation is a widespread metabolic strategy among mammals for surviving periods of food scarcity. During hibernation, animals naturally alternate between metabolically depressed torpor bouts and energetically expensive arousals without ill effects. As a ... Full text Cite

Morphological variability or inter-observer bias? A methodological toolkit to improve data quality of multi-researcher datasets for the analysis of morphological variation.

Journal Article American journal of biological anthropology · January 2024 ObjectivesThe investigation of morphological variation in animals is widely used in taxonomy, ecology, and evolution. Using large datasets for meta-analyses has dramatically increased, raising concerns about dataset compatibilities and biases intr ... Full text Cite

Forest access restores foraging and ranging behavior in captive sifakas.

Journal Article Zoo biology · March 2023 Captive wildlife benefit from ecologically informed management strategies that promote natural behaviors. The Duke Lemur Center has pioneered husbandry programs rooted in species' ecology for a diversity of lemurs, including housing social groups in multia ... Full text Open Access Cite

Seasonal variation in glucose and insulin is modulated by food and temperature conditions in a hibernating primate.

Journal Article Frontiers in physiology · January 2023 Feast-fast cycles allow animals to live in seasonal environments by promoting fat storage when food is plentiful and lipolysis when food is scarce. Fat-storing hibernators have mastered this cycle over a circannual schedule, by undergoing extreme fattening ... Full text Open Access Cite

Population genomic structure in Goodman's mouse lemur reveals long-standing separation of Madagascar's Central Highlands and eastern rainforests.

Journal Article Molecular ecology · October 2022 Madagascar's Central Highlands are largely composed of grasslands, interspersed with patches of forest. The historical perspective was that Madagascar's grasslands had anthropogenic origins, but emerging evidence suggests that grasslands were a component o ... Full text Cite

Variation in gut microbiome structure across the annual hibernation cycle in a wild primate.

Journal Article FEMS microbiology ecology · July 2022 The gut microbiome can mediate host metabolism, including facilitating energy-saving strategies like hibernation. The dwarf lemurs of Madagascar (Cheirogaleus spp.) are the only obligate hibernators among primates. They also hibernate in the subtropics, an ... Full text Open Access Cite

Of fruits and fats: high-sugar diets restore fatty acid profiles in the white adipose tissue of captive dwarf lemurs.

Journal Article Proceedings. Biological sciences · June 2022 Fat-storing hibernators rely on fatty acids from white adipose tissue (WAT) as an energy source to sustain hibernation. Whereas arctic and temperate hibernators preferentially recruit dietary polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs), tropical hibernators can re ... Full text Open Access Cite

Body Mass and Tail Girth Predict Hibernation Expression in Captive Dwarf Lemurs.

Journal Article Physiological and biochemical zoology : PBZ · March 2022 AbstractHibernation, a metabolic strategy, allows individuals to reduce energetic demands in times of energetic deficits. Hibernation is pervasive in nature, occurring in all major mammalian lineages and geographical regions; however, its expression is var ... Full text Open Access Cite

Gut Microbial Diversity and Ecological Specialization in Four Sympatric Lemur Species Under Lean Conditions

Journal Article International Journal of Primatology · December 1, 2021 The gut microbiome is gaining recognition for its role in primate nutrition, but we stand to benefit from microbiome comparisons across diverse hosts and environmental conditions. We compared gut microbiome structure in four lemur species from four phyloge ... Full text Open Access Cite

Living in tiny fragments: a glimpse at the ecology of Goodman's mouse lemurs (Microcebus lehilahytsara) in the relic forest of Ankafobe, Central Highlands, Madagascar.

Journal Article Primates; journal of primatology · November 2021 Habitat fragmentation is one of the major types of anthropogenic change, though fragmented landscapes predate human intervention. At present, the Central Highlands of Madagascar are covered by extensive grasslands interspersed with small discrete forest pa ... Full text Cite

Molecular Adaptation to Folivory and the Conservation Implications for Madagascar’s Lemurs

Journal Article Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution · October 6, 2021 The lemurs of Madagascar include numerous species characterized by folivory across several families. Many extant lemuriform folivores exist in sympatry in Madagascar’s remaining forests. These species avoid feeding competition by adopting different dietary ... Full text Open Access Cite

Gut microbiota of frugo-folivorous sifakas across environments.

Journal Article Animal microbiome · May 2021 BackgroundCaptive animals, compared to their wild counterparts, generally harbor imbalanced gut microbiota owing, in part, to their altered diets. This imbalance is particularly striking for folivores that fundamentally rely on gut microbiota for ... Full text Cite

On the modulation and maintenance of hibernation in captive dwarf lemurs.

Journal Article Scientific reports · March 2021 In nature, photoperiod signals environmental seasonality and is a strong selective "zeitgeber" that synchronizes biological rhythms. For animals facing seasonal environmental challenges and energetic bottlenecks, daily torpor and hibernation are two metabo ... Full text Cite

Cryptic Patterns of Speciation in Cryptic Primates: Microendemic Mouse Lemurs and the Multispecies Coalescent.

Journal Article Systematic biology · February 2021 Mouse lemurs (Microcebus) are a radiation of morphologically cryptic primates distributed throughout Madagascar for which the number of recognized species has exploded in the past two decades. This taxonomic revision has prompted understandable concern tha ... Full text Cite

Next-generation technologies applied to age-old challenges in Madagascar

Journal Article Conservation Genetics · October 1, 2020 Madagascar is a biodiversity hotspot that is facing rapid rates of deforestation, habitat destruction, and poverty. Urgent action is required to document the status of biodiversity to facilitate efficacious conservation plans. With the recent advent of por ... Full text Cite

Ecology and morphology of mouse lemurs (Microcebus spp.) in a hotspot of microendemism in northeastern Madagascar, with the description of a new species.

Journal Article American journal of primatology · September 2020 Delimitation of cryptic species is increasingly based on genetic analyses but the integration of distributional, morphological, behavioral, and ecological data offers unique complementary insights into species diversification. We surveyed communities of no ... Full text Cite

Conservation genomic analysis reveals ancient introgression and declining levels of genetic diversity in Madagascar's hibernating dwarf lemurs.

Journal Article Heredity · January 2020 Madagascar's biodiversity is notoriously threatened by deforestation and climate change. Many of these organisms are rare, cryptic, and severely threatened, making population-level sampling unrealistic. Such is the case with Madagascar's dwarf lemurs (genu ... Full text Cite

Comparative Genomic Analysis of the Pheromone Receptor Class 1 Family (V1R) Reveals Extreme Complexity in Mouse Lemurs (Genus, Microcebus) and a Chromosomal Hotspot across Mammals.

Journal Article Genome Biol Evol · January 1, 2020 Sensory gene families are of special interest for both what they can tell us about molecular evolution and what they imply as mediators of social communication. The vomeronasal type-1 receptors (V1Rs) have often been hypothesized as playing a fundamental r ... Full text Link to item Cite

Tropical heterothermy is "cool": The expression of daily torpor and hibernation in primates.

Journal Article Evolutionary anthropology · July 2018 Living nonhuman primates generally inhabit tropical forests, and torpor is regarded as a strategy employed by cold-adapted organisms. Yet, some primates employ daily torpor or hibernation (heterothermy) under obligatory, temporary, or emergency circumstanc ... Full text Cite

Transcriptomics in the wild: Hibernation physiology in free-ranging dwarf lemurs.

Journal Article Molecular ecology · February 2018 Hibernation is an adaptive strategy some mammals use to survive highly seasonal or unpredictable environments. We present the first investigation on the transcriptomics of hibernation in a natural population of primate hibernators: Crossley's dwarf lemurs ... Full text Cite

Hibernation in a primate: does sleep occur?

Journal Article R Soc Open Sci · August 2016 During hibernation, critical physiological processes are downregulated and thermogenically induced arousals are presumably needed periodically to fulfil those physiological demands. Among the processes incompatible with a hypome tabolic state is sleep. How ... Full text Link to item Cite

Geogenetic patterns in mouse lemurs (genus Microcebus) reveal the ghosts of Madagascar's forests past.

Journal Article Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · July 2016 Phylogeographic analysis can be described as the study of the geological and climatological processes that have produced contemporary geographic distributions of populations and species. Here, we attempt to understand how the dynamic process of landscape c ... Full text Cite

Species discovery and validation in a cryptic radiation of endangered primates: coalescent-based species delimitation in Madagascar's mouse lemurs.

Journal Article Molecular ecology · May 2016 Implementation of the coalescent model in a Bayesian framework is an emerging strength in genetically based species delimitation studies. By providing an objective measure of species diagnosis, these methods represent a quantitative enhancement to the anal ... Full text Cite

Underground hibernation in a primate.

Journal Article Scientific reports · January 2013 Hibernation in mammals is a remarkable state of heterothermy wherein metabolic rates are reduced, core body temperatures reach ambient levels, and key physiological functions are suspended. Typically, hibernation is observed in cold-adapted mammals, though ... Full text Cite

Lemur habitat and dental senescence in Ranomafana National Park, Madagascar.

Journal Article American journal of physical anthropology · June 2012 Not only can teeth provide clues about diet, but they also can be indicators of habitat quality. Conspecific groups living in different habitats with different kinds of foods may exhibit different rates of dental attrition because their teeth are less well ... Full text Cite