Heidelberg (dpa / lsw) – The Heidelberg Zoo has reunited two crowned sifaka brothers. Last week, three-year-old Toky met his older brother Jao at the Heidelberg Tiergarten, the zoo announced on Wednesday. The lemurs grew up together in the French zoo in Mulhouse until Jao moved to Heidelberg in September 2021. After more than a year, Tokyo followed him.
Just a few days after the meeting, the two black and white lemurs are inseparable, as the zoo further announced. So they groom each other and snuggle up to each other while they sleep. The siblings share their territory with three other flatmates, two crowned lemurs and a male ring-tailed lemur.
Heidelberg Zoo is the only one in Germany that keeps crowned sifakas. Together with other European zoos, the Heidelberg Zoo is involved in the Sifaka Conservation Project, which works to protect this rare lemur species on the island of Madagascar. The prosimians live only in Madagascar, where they mainly stay in the dry forests in the northwestern part of the island. According to the zoo, the destruction of their habitat is causing the number of animals living in the wild to drop steadily.
