Yesterday, we filled you in on how to identify your raccoons. Not that hard, given that there are only 3 species, and they are pretty much geographically distinct. Your only real issue is around Panama, which interestingly is pretty much the same as when you are traveling the length of the Americas.
Today, we’re upping our game a bit and bringing it back to Africa (and North Carolina), with a great guide on how to tell lemurs apart. The clever guys at the Duke Lemur Centre have noticed that aside from a few different personality traits and odd bald spots, their Ring-Tailed Lemurs have telltale signs regarding their ear shapes. And they’ve made a quadrant chart to assist them (and others) in how to identify their RTL stock. The four different ear shapes are Round and Elf (most specifically regarding the tufts on the lemurs’ ears), and Cat to Airplane (basically pointing upwards or sideways):
Of course, this doesn’t help distinguish Ring-Tailed Lemurs from other lemurs in the way that yesterday’s raccoon graphic does. But you can use the rings on their tails to do that. And the fact that at the DLC, they’ll be in the Ring-Tailed Lemur enclosure.
I love the personalities in the shot above. Aside from Seagrams (middle-left, just to the right of the word Round), who looks like he’s just been arrested, all of the other lemurs there look like they’ve just gone in for their passport photos, which is actually quite amusing; but I’m wondering if you could further identify at least one of them – it’s Liesl (middle-bottom) – by her amazing resting bitch face.
Wow. Someone got out of bed on the wrong side that morning.
However, when Liesl is happier and Seagrams hasn’t just had a mugshot, remember that ears are the way to go for RTL ID.
So that’s Raccoons: geographic location, and lemurs: shape of the ears.
Will this ad-hoc foreign mammal identification series continue tomorrow?
I don’t think so.
And honestly, that’s probably a good thing.