Why the lemur is the Freddie Mercury of Madagascar

NEXT time you play a Queen song, you may want to keep an eye open for lemurs.

Scientists have discovered that the rare indri lemur has a sense of rhythm similar to humans – and they sing with long and short notes just like the drum-beats and handclaps at the start of We Will Rock You.

Actually, ‘singing’ is putting it a bit high.

The creatures emit piercing howls for about four minutes at a time, so they’re hardly in Freddie Mercury territory.

But even so, while songbirds and people have a sense of rhythm, the scientists say it had not previously been found in another non-human mammal. They figured this out after spending 12 years recording 346 duets and choruses of family groups of 39 indri lemurs in the Madagascan rainforest.

Male and female indri songs have a different tempo but the same rhythm. And like opera singers, they can achieve ‘ritardando’ – the flourish where a singer pauses to make their audience wait before delivering the final note. Turin University’s Dr Marco Gamba, senior author of the study published in the journal Current Biology, said: ‘The rhythmic pattern could help them to understand whose turn it is when they are singing.’

The indri are the largest lemurs alive but only 1,000 to 10,000 remain in the wild.