Getting at this one-of-a-kind data, however, was a difficult task. Much of the data were locked up in handwritten notebooks or typed paper records. "The downside of the paper records is they're vulnerable, they're not digitized, and we only have a single copy -- so they're impossible to analyze," Zehr said.
The center migrated to electronic records in the 1990s, but that still left much of the data buried in odd computer files or hard-to-use databases.
That began to change in 2012, when Zehr and software developers Freda Cameron and the late Richard Roach, formerly of SAS, started working on a project to assemble the information from the various source files and convert it into a single, easily searchable format.
It took them three years to compile and digitize the data and put it online. Visitors to the new database will find birth and death dates for each animal, IDs and ages for its parents, any litter mates or siblings, lifelong weight records, breeding season, gestation length and number of offspring -- much of which would be difficult if not impossible to collect at a similar level of detail for lemurs living in the wild.
Users can also find out whether any biological samples are available for an animal. The bank of biological samples at the Duke Lemur Center contains nearly 10,000 samples for more than 1000 individuals. It's a modern ark of things like blood, serum, DNA, urine, and small pieces of skin, organs and other tissues -- many taken during routine veterinary procedures for diagnostic tests or when an animal dies of natural causes -- all preserved in freezers for the future.
Thanks to the center's captive breeding program the data continue to come in. In the next year they plan to add additional records, such as health and reproductive status, causes of death, behavior, and group size and composition for each animal over time.
Duke Lemur Center had made 48 years of primate data available online.
(Photo Credit: Video by Chris Smith)
The hope is that the data will help institutions better care for lemurs in captivity, and help scientists understand these animals in order to better protect them in the wild.
The database will also allow generations of future researchers to tackle a wide range of questions. Researchers studying aging and longevity, for example, will be able to compare maximum lifespans in captivity for different primate species, and pinpoint cellular and molecular traits that distinguish long-lived primates from short-lived ones.
Blue-eyed black lemurs represent one of the 25 most endangered primates in the world. This infant and his mom are among 27 species of endangered primates at the Duke Lemur Center whose lifelong records are now digitized and available online. Researchers hope the data will help the last blue-eyed black lemurs left in the wild -- now fewer than 7000 -- hold on.
(Photo Credit: Photo by David Haring)
The new database contains over 65,000 weight measurements for more than 2100 animals (27 species), taken over each animal's lifespan.
(Photo Credit: Photo by David Haring)