(Photo: gailhampshire)
This is a white-footed sportive lemur (Lepilemur leucopus). This primate species lives on the southern tip of Madagascar. They're the lemur equivalent of the people who write graffiti in public restrooms. Usually these lemurs live alone, but they use community latrines. Besides the coventional purpose of a latrine, the lemurs use them to communicate.
Researchers Iris Dröscher and Peter Kappeler spent more than a thousand hours watching these lemurs relieve themselves at these facilities. They determined that the lemurs use the latrines as social networking tools by leaving scent marks directed to not only the entire group, but also specific individuals. From Physorg:
Males visited the latrines more often during nights when an intruder invaded the territory. In addition, the males placed scent marks from their specialized anogenital glands preferentially in latrines. "This indicates that latrine use in this primate species should also be connected to mate defense," says Iris Dröscher, a PhD student at the German Primate Center.
"Scent marks transmit a variety of information such as sexual and individual identity and may function to signal an individual's presence and identity to others," continues Dröscher. "Latrines therefore serve as information exchange centers of individual-specific information."
I'd like to think that somewhere among these latrines, there's a lemur equivalent of Neatorama.
-via Ian Chant