Ring-Tailed Lemur

Every lemur descends from ancestors that reached Madagascar and diversified with no monkeys or apes to compete against. What emerged looks like nothing else: over a hundred species on one island, ring-tails among them, and in almost all of them the females outrank every male in the troop. A female eats first and decides where the group goes.

Madagascar has lost the large majority of its original forest cover, and the remaining habitat is cut by charcoal production, cattle grazing and fire. Ring-tail numbers fell sharply in the early 2000s, and the species is now Endangered — a status that applies, in some form, to roughly ninety-five percent of all lemurs.