Species-level diversity among malagasy lemurs

Abstract

The number of Malagasy lemur species recognized has skyrocketed over the past quarter-century, from 22 in 1982 to almost 100 today. This is largely a result of the wholesale application of phylogenetic species concepts and the elimination of subspecies from the lemur fauna. I argue that "silver-bullet" approaches to species recognition ignore real biological complexity, and that species are best recognized through weighing all available evidence including that furnished by morphology, molecules, behavior, communication, demography, and distributions. Only about 50 lemur species are fully justi fied by current evidence, although this is certainly a conservative estimate.