Meet Fota’s newest member

Meet the newest member of the family living at Ireland’s wildest visitor attraction — the first of its kind to be born there.

The bosses at Fota Wildlife Park released the first images yesterday of the month-old black and white ruffed lemur.

Native to Madagascar, it is a member of a critically endangered species with fewer than 500 left in the wild.

The animal, which has yet to be named, was born four weeks ago to mother Pudden and father Podge.

It spent the first three weeks in a tree nest which the mother started to build a week before the birth.

Black and white ruffed lemurs are the only primate species to build a nest because newborns are not fully developed and therefore can’t cling to their mothers.

They are considered an “evolutionary enigma” because while they are the largest of the extant species of lemur, they are the only primates that build such nests.

They also carry their babies by mouth, and exhibit an absentee parental system by stashing them in a nest while they forage for food.

However the babies develop relatively quickly, travelling independently in the wild after 70 days and attaining full adult size by six months.

Fota is home to three of the 16 species of lemur in the world today. The ruffed lemurs live on separate islands near each other in the park’s ‘lakes area’.

The park is hoping to add to its collection of lemurs in the coming years, and it supports scientific work to help the species in the wild, along with the Jersey-based Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust.