Fermenting gooey goodness. All in the name of science.

When we’re in a remote field station, that means deliveries and resupplies are a bit out of the question. That applies not only to our rice and beans, but to our mouse lemur bait as well. We use bananas because the mouse lemurs love ‘em, and apparently they may love ‘em even more as they rot, become mushy and begin to ferment in the skin. As the last days of our trapping roll around, the bananas have been sitting for a good amount of time and they are becoming almost unbearable to our senses. It’s just pure delight setting up all the traps and dropping a piece of that liquidy banana into the trap. But we continued to capture mouse lemurs up until the very last day with those odoriferous fruits. I almost think the mouse lemurs wait until the bananas hit this ultra-ripe stage—what animal doesn’t partake in a little fermented fruit juice?

Photo credits: Patrick H