Achille Raselimanana grew up in a rural area on the high plateau of Madagascar, one of the poorest countries in the world. Today, he is director of biodiversity programs at the Madagascar office of the World Wildlife Fund and serves on the faculty of the nation's leading university.
He also spends summers at the Duke Lemur Center, probing the genetics of the plated lizards found only on Madagascar, a Texas-size island off the southeast coast of Africa. Raselimanana extracts, amplifies, sequences and analyzes the DNA from virtually every population of plated lizards, a subfamily of almost 20 species.
He uses the data to sort out look-alike species and draw evolutionary trees showing which species are most closely related. He also looks at each population's genetic variability, which translates into resilience. Populations under pressure tend to become inbred and therefore more vulnerable to further challenges to their survival, he said. Raselimanana said his research has one main goal: "The results should be applied to conservation of biodiversity."
Raselimanana came early to his fascination with animals, particularly reptiles and amphibians. "When I was a kid, I loved to play with animals -- with snakes, with frogs, with crickets," he said. "In the countryside, I learned a lot of things."
While observing birds' nests, he discovered that a certain kind of bird destroys the eggs of other birds, leaving behind its own eggs in the nests. He came upon this lesson later as well. "When the professor explained about that at university, I thought Oh, that is something I already know," he said, laughing at the memory.
Raselimanana, whose parents were able to read only a few words, approached education as a personal challenge. "After elementary school, I left my parents' house to go to the capital to look for a place to continue my studies," he said. He ended up at the University of Antananarivo, where he studied biochemistry and biology, earning a Ph.D. in 2000 with a thesis on the morphology and ecology of plated lizards.
He continued his affiliation with the university, teaching students and doing biodiversity inventories in the field. After returning this past September from his latest stint at Duke, Raselimanana was appointed to the faculty of his home university.
For someone who loves animals, Madagascar is a kind of paradise, he said. The island supports an incredible array of flora and fauna, including more than 50 species of lemur, more than 60 species of chameleon and more than 12,000 species of plants. Most of Madagascar's plants and animals live nowhere else on Earth.
Unfortunately, the paradise is being destroyed, Raselimanana said. Only about 10 percent of the island's natural habitat remains undisturbed. Driven by crushing poverty, people continue to cut virgin forest to feed their families. In response, in 2003 Madagascar's president, Marc Ravalomanana, declared his country's intention to triple the amount of protected land.
Meanwhile, scientists are racing to learn as much as they can about Madagascar's biota. Raselimanana's work has put him on a rapid assessment team that goes into the field for weeks at a time to catalog plants and animals, a process that regularly turns up new species. This work helps inform the selection of areas to protect. "In Madagascar, there is a problem with poverty and destruction of habitat," he said. "Before everything will be gone, you have to ask, Where is the biodiversity? Where are the most important places for conservation?"
These are the same questions that Anne Yoder, director of the Duke Lemur Center, has been addressing for years as she has studied Madagascar's lemurs, the ancient primate relatives of monkeys, apes and humans. Yoder first met Raselimanana in 1999, when she was at Northwestern University. He mentioned that he wanted to conduct molecular studies on plated lizards but lacked equipment to carry out such work in Madagascar. When Yoder moved to Yale University in 2001, she invited Raselimanana to spend his summers in her lab. When she came to Duke in 2005, he did, too, for his fourth summer rotation.
Both Yoder and Raselimanana, who plans to work at the Duke Lemur Center again this summer, see benefits on both sides of the collaboration. Each time he returns home, Raselimanana carries new knowledge and skills to share, as well as a powerful sense of possibility. He and other scientists have set up a simple lab at the University of Antananarivo, where students are learning to identify and catalog specimens, and, it is hoped, will soon be able to extract and analyze DNA.
In turn, Raselimanana and other Malagasy researchers and students open up a world of biodiversity to scientists in the United States, by sharing firsthand their knowledge of Madagascar's flora and fauna and by collecting and delivering tissue samples of specimens to U.S. researchers. They also provide a support system when Yoder and her students visit Madagascar for research.
"To me," Raselimanana said, "science doesn't have borders."
Yoder agreed: "My collaborations with Achille, and with his Malagasy students and colleagues, have been among the richest of my career. The scientific and personal benefits are without compare."