Romeo and Juliet's romance might not work out after all.
When a team of primatologists led by Primate Center director Ken Glander captured a female lemur in Madagascar last month, they had hoped this Juliet would become a mating partner for Duke's own Romeo. The male sifaka has been waiting six years for a mate.
However, while Juliet and her current mate were being acclimated to captivity in Madagascar, scientists realized that the two may be of a previously undiscovered subspecies of sifaka.
The newly captured lemurs will undergo DNA testing in the next few months to discover if they are indeed a new subspecies. If so, primatologists say it would be scientifically irresponsible to breed Romeo and Juliet. However, they still applaud the find.
"If genetic testing reveals that the two animals do indeed represent a subspecies unknown to science, it would be a profound tragedy if they were lost," Glander said. He said lemurs in that area are being hunted and could face extinction without breeding programs.
Juliet and her current mate were captured Oct. 10. Also during the trip, an older female sifaka was killed when a tranquilizer dart hit her in the stomach. Glander will return to Madagascar next year in an effort to capture more lemurs for captive breeding programs.
Discussion will recall massacre: To mark the 20th anniversary of the Greensboro Massacre (see story, page 1), the history department will hold a panel discussion at 3 p.m. Friday in room 139 of the Social Sciences Building. A video about the shootings will also be shown and a singing group, The Fruits of Labor, will perform.
The three panelists-Dr. Marty Nathan, Sally Bermanzohn and Kwame Cannon-will discuss the Nov. 3, 1979 shootings of communist union organizers at an anti-Ku Klux Klan rally, stressing the massacre's impact on survivors and on activism.
Bermanzohn, now a political science professor at Brooklyn College, was at the demonstration with her husband, who was wounded and remains paralyzed. Nathan, a rally participant whose husband was killed, is administrator of the Greensboro Justice Fund, which was formed with money she received in a civil trial.
Cannon's mother was an activist who was involved in the successful civil suit against Greensboro police, the KKK and Nazis six years after the 1979 killings.
A year after the Greensboro suit, Cannon was convicted of burglary; advocates were convinced that his sentence was a form of retaliation against his mother.
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