Meet Adam McLain
Primate Conservation Limelight
Adam McLain
Dr. Adam McLain is an Associate Professor of Biology at the State University of New York Polytechnic Institute. He holds a Ph.D. in Biology from Louisiana State University and an M.A. in Anthropology with a focus on primate genetics. Dr. McLain’s research primarily centers on evolutionary biology and applied population genetics in lemurs, particularly the small-statured species endemic to Madagascar. His work has significantly advanced our understanding of lemur biodiversity, including the formal identification of new species such as the Groves’ dwarf lemur (Cheirogaleus grovesi).
We were first introduced to Dr. McLain’s work through his recent research on an isolated population of dwarf lemurs living on the remote island of Nosy Hara, off Madagascar’s northwest coast. Discovered in 2015, this not-yet-formally-named population has raised intriguing questions about speciation, isolation, and conservation in Malagasy primates. NEPC’s Zachary Lussier sat down with Dr. McLain to learn more.
I grew up in Georgia and Virginia. I’ve always been interested in nature and wildlife. Biology always interested me as a subject, but it wasn’t until my twenties that I realized I could make it my career. As an undergrad, I studied history and classical languages, then took some time off. When I was about 27, I went back to get my master’s at Hunter College in New York. There, I took a biological anthropology class with Professor Roberto Delgado, whose work focuses on orangutans. That class is what first got me interested in non-human primates.
I didn’t initially think I’d focus on nonhuman primates, but my interest in genetics and their diversity led me to them. After my master’s, I attended Louisiana State University, where I went more in-depth. I did my PhD there before going on to a postdoc at the Omaha Zoo in Nebraska, where I worked on lemur research in Madagascar — because, by then, I knew I wanted to work with lemurs.
You know, I’ve known a lot of people in my field who came to it sort of randomly, I guess. It was something they never really knew they were interested in until they started doing it, and then it became apparent to them kind of quickly that it’s fascinating and it’s challenging and it gives you the opportunity to do things that not many people get the chance to do. Field work in Madagascar is not something that most people get the chance to do, for instance.
I don't know that this technology is going to be what gets us out of the hole we're in with conservation. When I say "the hole," I mean the extinction crisis. I think what will actually make the difference is uplifting the people who live around the organisms we’re trying to conserve—giving them access to jobs, to education, to a lifestyle that doesn’t force them to hunt or cut down forests just to survive.
The first time I went to Madagascar, we went out to Andasibe-Mantadia National Park, east of the capital of Madagascar, where we saw sifakas and indris.
You’ll never forget indris when you see them in the wild because of the vocalizations they make and because of how big they are. They’re very majestic creatures. Seeing them for the first time, you do suddenly realize that these are living, breathing organisms that have their own thing going on and shouldn’t be taken for granted.
Indris, sifakas, and various dwarf lemurs. My number one “want to see” is Perrier’s sifakas — they’re critically endangered and have this incredible black pelage.
I didn’t do any fieldwork on it, but I worked on a project involving gibbons years ago. We were using DNA that other researchers had collected. It was back in the days when PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) was our main tool, so we focused on something we call “Alu elements” — short, primate-specific sequences that worked well for phylogenetic analysis.
Anyway, I’m probably going a bit too deep into the technical side here. The main thing is, it was fascinating work, and it gave me a real appreciation for the kinds of questions you can ask — and answer — through genetics. Suffice it to say, the tools back then were pretty limited compared to what’s possible now.
At the moment, my main project involves looking at this dwarf lemur population on Nosy Hara, an island off the northwest coast of Madagascar. I’ve been out there once already and, if everything goes according to plan, I should be back there about a month and a half from now.
I’m interested in not only looking at their genome and comparing it to other dwarf lemurs, but I’m also interested in the genetic diversity of the population itself. Nosy Hara is small.
My theory — and I want to be clear that this isn’t something I’ve proven yet — is that this population has been out there since the sea levels rose at the end of the last glacial maximum. That was the period, about 20,000 years ago, when the ice sheets were at their largest and sea levels were much lower. When the glaciers started melting, the oceans rose and isolated all sorts of habitats — which might explain how this group got cut off. So, if you look at Nosy Hara on a satellite map, you’ll see that it’s part of a chain of little islands. At one point, when sea levels were lower, they wouldn’t have been islands at all but a peninsula sticking off the coast of Madagascar.
So, Nosy Hara is a rocky island that has jungles down in its valleys. “Nosy Hara” literally means mountainous island in Malagasy. My theory is that this dwarf lemur population has been out there for roughly 13,000+ years and probably isn’t very genetically diverse because there’s not much space for there to be very many of them. Now, we’ve not been able to do a proper population survey to figure out the population density. But, given the small size of the island and its available habitat, there could only be a few hundred of them out there sustainably.
Again, I need to make clear I’m not stating that as fact. There’s also another possibility, which is that they were introduced by people for some reason.
Nosy Hara is uninhabited, but people have visited it seasonally for things like fishing. I don’t know why people would’ve brought lemurs there. But it has happened with other species. One of the brown lemur species, Eulemur fulvus, for instance, is found on the Comoros Islands, introduced there by people at some point in history, probably around 500 to 1,000 years ago.
Again, I don’t know why. But people took all kinds of African animals to Europe during the Roman era for various reasons. So, people do things like that, and there could be reasons why or there may not be.
The nearest dwarf lemur population is the one at Montagne d’Ambre — “Amber Mountain,” in English, which I am pretty sure you can see from Nosy Hara on a clear day.
But, unlike today, before humans were on Madagascar, most of that area would’ve been forested, and there could have been contiguous populations of dwarf lemurs. When I actually get around to sequencing their genome, I’m expecting they will be closely related to the Montagne d’Ambre population. But that’s not for certain.
Nosy Hara is part of a National Marine Park. It’s my understanding that tourists do visit. There’s a bit of a rock climbing scene, for instance. But as far as I know, not very many people are doing biological work there yet. There’s been some reptile research I know of. The Nosy Hara leaf chameleon (Brookesia micra) is a teeny tiny chameleon found only on this island.
We observed them and got a bunch of photos, and I collected fecal samples. When animals have bowel movements, cells slough off into their feces, which makes it possible to harvest DNA samples from them. It’s ideal since it’s a non-invasive way of getting DNA. So far, though, with the methodology I’ve been using, I haven’t been able to get any from the samples we collected. There might still be DNA in there, and we just need to use another method, so I have them frozen for now.
In May and June of this year (2025), we are going to attempt to live capture individuals to extract hair. We just need a single follicle. We’ve chosen not to draw any blood because I don’t want to cause the lemurs any harm, and we’re not going to use darts to anesthetize and capture them because I don’t want to risk traumatizing them in any way. I would rather do live capture using a “Havahart” trap, designed to capture animals without harming them, so they don’t get hurt. We’ll just do a quick hair pull and release them again.
Still, we’ll see if they even go for that. I don’t know if they’ll take the bait, and there are these large rats on Nosy Hara. They were introduced. The French used to have a Coast Guard station there during World War II. Anytime there are boats and ships, there are rats, right? So, these huge brown rats were getting into the traps last time we were there instead of the dwarf lemurs.
So, we’ll see how it goes this time. We’re going to try a slightly different methodology and see if we have more luck.
So, we weren’t able to get close enough to test that yet. Whenever we saw them, they were up pretty high in the canopy. Though they didn’t run or jump away when we were there, we also weren’t close enough to them to really test that theory. It’s likely that they just don’t have a natural fear of people, which would lend some credence to the idea that they’ve been isolated for a long time.
Nosy Hara is not an environment that’s good for growing crops or doing much of anything, It takes almost an hour to get there by boat. So, it’s not convenient to use as a source of timber. So, people wouldn’t have spent a lot of time there. It’s biologically really fascinating, of course, but that wouldn’t have been of interest to people who were doing subsistence agriculture. There’s the Coast Guard building from the French, and there are a couple of things the Malagasy government has built, for instance, some tent platforms for camping.
Tourism is a more recent development. They still limit how many people can visit the island. You have to get a permit. You’re supposed to have a permit as a tourist, at least. We get permits to do our research. So, they are trying to limit the human footprint, which is positive.
They do seem to be a little smaller. But that’s not something we’ve actually measured yet. If they are, it could be a reflection of resource availability on that island. We’ll be there again during the dry season, the austral winter. That’s when dwarf lemurs go into torpor. So, they become less active, they eat less. It’s possible they just appear to be smaller because they’re consuming fewer resources whenever we happen to be there. Perhaps they’re fatter in the wet season. But physically, I noticed their bodies didn’t look as long. I’ve worked with multiple groups of dwarf lemurs, and these are the smallest ones I’ve seen.
I’ve worked with the dwarf lemurs in Montagne d’Ambre and a couple down in Ranomafana. One of them is Groves’ dwarf lemur (Cheirogaleus grovesi) — we actually named that one. There’s a third one near Ranomafana too, the Lavasoa Dwarf Lemur. And then I’ve seen the Fat-tailed Dwarf Lemurs — they’re pretty common. You find those all along the eastern rainforest belt.
It’s definitely possible—but at this point, it’s still speculative. We just don’t know enough about that population yet. The question of what constitutes a distinct species has been debated in biology for a long time. There are multiple species concepts out there, and scientists don’t always agree on how to define a species.
That said, if the Nosy Hara population has been isolated for thousands of years, there’s a pretty good chance that they could be reproductively isolated. In other words, they might not be able to successfully breed with other dwarf lemur populations. That kind of reproductive barrier is central to the Biological Species Concept, which holds that organisms are considered the same species if they can successfully mate and produce viable, fertile offspring in nature — and which is one way biologists still often think about species.
So what I’d ask is: could individuals from Nosy Hara successfully reproduce with, say, those from the Montagne d’Ambre population? We just don’t know yet. From previous studies—this was more than a decade ago now—we found a surprisingly high level of genetic diversity among the eastern rainforest populations of dwarf lemurs. That study didn’t involve full genomes. In other words, we only focused on specific shared segments of DNA. So there’s still a lot in there we haven’t looked at.
At some point, I’d love for someone to go back and sequence whole genomes from all those populations and really do a thorough comparison. That would give us a much clearer picture of how distinct these populations actually are. I would really love to know whether the work we did all those years ago actually reflects the true genetic diversity across dwarf lemur populations—or whether we just got lucky. It’s possible that the specific regions we looked at only happened to be the most diverse.
If you look back at those papers, you’ll see that we were only examining tiny sections of the genome. And when you consider how huge genomes are — billions of base pairs long — it puts that into perspective. It’s kind of like looking at just a handful of stars in the sky and trying to figure out what the entire galaxy looks like. For example, the human genome has about 3.2 billion base pairs, and primates like dwarf lemurs have genomes in the two-to-three billion range. But we were only looking at fragments that were about 1,000 base pairs long. So, if you’re only analyzing a small fraction of the genome, how much can you really learn from that?
At the time, that was the best we could do, but today, with advances in sequencing technology, someone really should go back and do whole-genome sequencing on those populations. That would tell us so much more about what’s actually going on genetically. I’d be curious to see the results. Maybe we were wrong—maybe the dwarf lemur genus Cheirogaleus isn’t as species-rich as we thought. Or maybe we were right all along. Either way, I’d love to know!
It’s probably not a project I’m going to take on myself—at least not anytime soon—but I think it would make a fantastic PhD project for someone. There’s still so much to discover!
I tell my students this all the time—if you go back and look at papers I published 15 years ago, it feels like reading something from another era. And that wasn’t even that long ago! But the technology has changed so dramatically. Back then, we were limited to analyzing small segments of DNA. Now? You’ve got portable nanopore sequencers, about the size of a hard drive, that can run a whole genome in just a few hours—basically, the entire genetic code of an organism.
And it’s not just nuclear DNA anymore. You get everything—the mitochondrial genome, the microbiome from the gut—it’s all there. It’s like we’re living in Star Trek when it comes to genomics. I mean, think about how space travel seemed decades ago. Now imagine in 20 years, we’re casually flying back and forth to Jupiter. We’d look back at today and think, “Wow, those were the dark ages.” That’s where we are with genomics now. It’s moving that fast.
We’re headed toward a concept called a “pan-genome,” which includes everything: your DNA, your RNA, your mitochondria, the bacteria living in and on you—all of it. It’s wild!
I don’t know that this technology is going to be what gets us out of the hole we’re in with conservation. When I say “the hole,” I mean the extinction crisis. I think what will actually make the difference is uplifting the people who live around the organisms we’re trying to conserve—giving them access to jobs, to education, to a lifestyle that doesn’t force them to hunt or cut down forests just to survive.
You know, there’s a lot of talk these days about things like de-extinction—about using genomes to bring species back. I’m sure you saw the recent stories in the news about dire wolves. But they didn’t actually bring back dire wolves—they spliced a few genes into gray wolves. That’s not the same thing as resurrecting an extinct animal, as cool as that would be.
So yeah, while the technology is incredible—and I do get excited about it—what really gives me hope is people. When communities have the resources and agency to care about conservation, that’s when you start to see change.
I don’t want us to rely on future, non-existent technology to address conservation. What will address conservation is things like ecotourism, and finding other ways to uplift the people who live around the animals that we’re trying to conserve—and that they want to conserve, too. Right? Conservation is not just me flying in and doing research as someone who’s not from Madagascar. It’s about bringing people to a place where they don’t need to deforest. They don’t need to cut down forests to survive because they have another job—like I do. I don’t deforest my property to survive. I go to an office and a classroom, and I teach, and I get paid to do that. I’m not saying that’s what people in Madagascar need to do. I’m just saying that if we can get to a place where they have a sustainable income and a way for these animals to no longer be at risk, that’s how conservation ought to work.
It’s not me coming in as a westerner saying, “Save the lemurs!” with a t-shirt or something. It’s about them figuring out what they want their future to be and how to make that happen.
Do I think we’re in an extinction crisis? Yes. Do I think we’re going to lose some of the things that are alive now? Yes, absolutely. I don’t think there’s any way around that.
Do I also think there’s cause for hope? Yeah. You know, elephants were on the brink—as recently as the 1980s. But global sanctions on the ivory trade made a big difference, and ecotourism made a big difference. Tigers—they’re not looking great, but they’re looking better. The government of India and other countries in South Asia—their efforts to protect tigers have shown progress.
We’ve also lost a lot of organisms in the last few decades, and that’s a shame. And we’re going to lose more. But I think you always have to hold on to hope. I mean, conservation biology is predicated on hope, right? You want to believe that the efforts to keep biodiversity extant are going to be successful. That hope keeps me going.
But I don’t think de-extinction is the magic bullet people hope it is. Will we get there one day, technologically? Probably. We probably will be able to bring back species—truly, not like the dire wolf project. In reality, they didn’t de-extinct anything. Now, that doesn’t mean what they did isn’t fascinating. It is. I just don’t think we should pin all our hopes on some future tech that might bring things back. It’s a lot cheaper—and more effective—to invest in keeping what we have alive now. That would be my two cents.
And like, I’m not even talking about woolly mammoths—species that went extinct because their environment completely changed. That probably wasn’t caused by humans. There just weren’t enough people on Earth back then to account for those extinctions.
That said, maybe in the future, people will bring back mammoths. Maybe they’ll bring back woolly rhinos, or saber-tooth cats—all that stuff. There’s a whole series of movies about why that’s a really bad idea (laughs), but maybe someone will do it.
I’m personally more open to the idea of bringing back things that humans did make extinct—like dodo birds. That’s a cut-and-dry example. The dodo only went extinct because of us. So, should we bring back dodos to Mauritius? Should we release them there? Should we have a wild population if the technology exists?
Those are big, open ethical questions. And a lot of stakeholders will need to be involved in deciding whether we should do something like that. But right now? We can’t yet. So I think we should focus on investing in communities and showing value in keeping organisms that are still alive… alive.
And this is something I teach a lecture on—in my evolution class, I give a whole lecture about extinction. And we talk a lot about this. You get different perspectives from different students: “If we can, should we?” What’s the line? What organisms should we be focused on?
To me, the answer always comes back to: there are only somewhere around 300 Perrier’s sifakas left in the wild in Madagascar. Why don’t we devote the three billion dollars or whatever it might cost to make a woolly mammoth, and invest that money in the communities around those forests—so these sifakas don’t go extinct?
That’s a living, breathing, vibrant organism that exists now. And that just seems ethically reasonable.
And yeah, there probably will be some crazy billionaire who clones a woolly mammoth one day. I mean, we have the genome.
Were the “dire wolves” really cool? Yeah, of course. I was interested in that article just like everyone else was. But number one: are they really dire wolves? No. They’re gray wolves with, like, 20 or 25 genes spliced into their DNA to give them more of a dire wolf appearance.
But what do we actually get by bringing back dire wolves, other than an interesting article in The New Yorker—or wherever you read it?
You’re talking about a large, aggressive predator. An animal that requires a huge home range. And we’re already tight on space. Home ranges are shrinking for extant animals. Go look up the historical range of the grizzly bear compared to where they live now. It’s like going from a mansion to a one-bedroom apartment, in terms of space.
I’d say that extinction is irreversible. Each time we lose a species, we lose a piece of the intricate web of life that Charles Darwin described as “endless forms most beautiful.” Madagascar is home to an extraordinary level of biodiversity, but so are other ecosystems, like the Mississippi River or the Adirondack forests of New York. The reality is that we should care about all biodiversity, because when we start losing pieces — even small ones — it puts the entire system at risk. And, in many ways, we’re already seeing that happen.
Except where otherwise noted, photos courtesy of Adam McLain