THE STRANGE nature of lemurs could be related to the quality of fruit in Madagascar.

A new study led by Oxford Brookes University scientists proposes that the answer to their unusual habits, which include shunning fruit in favour of leaves, may lie in the fruit they eat.

The study published in the journal Scientific Reports, saw a multi-national team of ecologists and primatologists perform a global comparison to test the idea that fruits in Madagascar contain insufficient proteins to meet primate metabolic requirements.

The work, led by Dr Giuseppe Donati, from Oxford Brookes University and Professor Joerg U Ganzhorn from Hamburg University, used a large data set of fruit protein concentrations from 62 forest sites across three areas.

Results showed that fruits in Madagascar contain lower average proteins than those in tropical America, Asia and continental Africa.

Dr Donati said: “Our results add an additional dimension to the existing hypotheses depicting the island of Madagascar as ecologically challenging environment for primates.

"Lemurs show a number of unusual primate traits. Over the last two decades the most accepted idea to explain many of these traits was based on the driving force of extended periods of food scarcity, the low predictability of fruiting and the high frequency of cyclones which characterise the island of Madagascar.

“Our results indicate that the low nutritional quality of the fruits in Madagascar may have caused lemurs to differentiate their diet and develop some of their unique traits."