How eating ‘bacon bugs’ helps save lemurs

“This is how I got my eye amoeba,” Cortni Borgerson says, staring up into the massive branches of a 100-foot-tall tree in search of a rare red ruffed lemur, a cat-size primate that lives only in this area of northeastern Madagascar.

She and Pascal Elison, a Masoala National Park tour guide, had raced to the area a few minutes earlier, as the animal’s roar-shriek echoed through the forest. Dodging face-size leaves, scurrying over slippery tree roots, and carefully avoiding any vines that might be thorny, poisonous, or both, they ran while scanning the canopy above them for glimpses of reddish brown fur.

Suddenly, there’s a sound like the patter of rain on leaves, and then a loud crack as something hits the ground nearby. “Lemur diarrhea,” says Borgerson, a primatologist and National Geographic Explorer, who recalls the splash that once landed on her face and likely gave her the amoeba. Besides pathogens, the poop often includes nuts from one of the area’s colossal trees and nutrients that support future forest growth.

On Madagascar’s Masoala Peninsula, a red ruffed lemur, a commonly hunted species, perches high in the forest canopy.

Wild lemurs are found only in Madagascar, where they act as essential seed dispersers and pollinators that encourage healthy ecosystems. At the same time, the red ruffed lemur is critically endangered, becoming increasingly hard to spot because of hunting and habitat loss.

(Madagascar’s famous lemurs could lose their rainforest by 2080.)

While hunting lemurs has been illegal since the 1960s, when other foods are scarce, people trap and eat them. One reason: Bushmeat consumption improves infant survival rates, says the Chicago Field Museum’s Steve Goodman, a Madagascar expert. United Nations figures say almost half the country’s children suffer from chronic malnutrition, and in this region, called the Masoala Peninsula, nearly 90 percent of locals have eaten lemur, according to Borgerson’s research. Red ruffed lemurs and white-fronted brown lemurs are the most likely to end up in people’s dinner pots, because they’re relatively easy to catch and are considered particularly tasty. What’s more, in Malagasy cities, lemur meat is now offered as a clandestine luxury food, though on a much smaller scale than in the rural areas.

Martin Baba, sector chief for a vast swath of Masoala National Park, says he and his team regularly find lemur traps in the woods—contraptions made from ropes, string, and bait. “It’s really frustrating,” he says, and almost impossible to catch culprits in the dense forest, but “the problem is there isn’t enough meat here.”

Borgerson, who speaks fluent Malagasy and splits her time between working in Madagascar and teaching at Montclair State University in New Jersey, wants to help save lemurs from hunting without leaving Masoala communities hungry. That’s why she’s turned to bugs. They’ve been a food source in Madagascar for at least 400 years, and a specific type called sakondry could be a game changer for lemurs, she says.

Closely related to the cicada, the peculiar-looking bug has a unicornlike pink protrusion in the front (its nose) and a white fluffy backside that strongly resembles a feather boa. The fluff is constantly shed on nearby plant vines. “We’re not sure, but we think it’s a lung irritant to keep predators away,” Borgerson says. Nicknamed the “bacon bug” for its meaty flavor and fat content, the creature has long been considered a delicacy in the area, but it wasn’t farmed. Now that’s changing.

(Trek with community-protected lemurs in Madagascar.)

One September afternoon, in a village abutting Masoala National Park, 14-year-old Kalandy plucks sakondry off lima bean plants in her yard. The plants are flourishing thanks to seeds and guidance supplied by Borgerson. Kalandy rinses the bugs and quickly cooks them with salt before offering photographer Nichole Sobecki and me a taste. I pop one, whole, into my mouth. It does taste unctuous—like bacon. It’s also reminiscent of popcorn. “I may have added too much salt,” Kalandy says, giggling.

Borgerson was first exposed to these bite-size bugs as a “drunk food” that locals snacked on while drinking. Curious, she spent several years learning more, and in 2019 she launched bug farm training in three communities in northeastern Madagascar—going from home to home with local hires to distribute bean seeds and teach people how to tend to the plants and the bugs they attract.

Why sakondry? They’re easy to work with, are quite tasty, and have few predators. They’re also fast-growing—it takes only 72 days from hatching to harvesting. Since the bugs drink only a small amount of their hosts’ sap, the plants continue to grow and serve as human sustenance themselves. The only real catch is that the plants may not survive well everywhere in the country because of climate differences. Borgerson is also studying how densely they can be grown to boost bug yield. Charles Welch, the conservation coordinator at Duke University’s lemur center, says sakondry farming probably won’t be enough on its own to combat lemur hunting, but it’s certainly “part of the solution.”

(‘Every day is survival’: See the extraordinary lives of ordinary bugs.)

Grasshoppers and locusts are “meat and potato” bugs in Madagascar, but sakondry are more like prime rib, says California Academy of Sciences entomologist Brian Fisher, who helped with Borgerson’s early work. Sakondry are so in demand that sometimes they’re priced on par with beef. Borgerson says her program isn’t focused on commercial sales but on saving lemurs.

In just three years, the project has reduced lemur hunting by at least 50 percent in pilot communities and spared at least 58 individual lemurs, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which helped fund the work.

“I’m excited about this new idea,” says Malagasy primatologist Jonah Ratsimbazafy. And the program is expanding. Tim Eppley, chief conservation officer for Malagasy nonprofit Wildlife Madagascar, says his group is planning to partner with Borgerson to bring the bug farming to at least 3,000 more households in northeastern Madagascar in 2024.

Part of the sakondry’s popularity, say Borgerson and Be Noel Razafindrapaoly, country manager for Borgerson’s project, is that the bug is “clean”—it crawls on host plants rather than in the dirt. Sakondry have become an integral part of everyday life here too. In Kalandy’s village, members of the leading men’s soccer team dubbed themselves “Sakondry” and hired an artist to paint the bug on the back of each of their jerseys. “It’s not a silver bullet,” Borgerson says, but the bug farming offers “natural fat and national identity.”

In the village near Masoala National Park, Velombita Dede, the most productive sakondry farmer, grows bean plants to lure the bugs. Last year, Dede says, he had enough sakondry to help feed his extended family of eight, alongside the local staple of rice. He harvested 800 bugs a month and sold the excess. To better attract sakondry, he says, he uses handmade wooden supports that keep the plants upright, and now he trains others in his village.

With their ostentatious anatomy, the insects lining his plants look like they’re queued up to get into a fancy bug club. As we watch, the wind scatters bits of white fluff, like dandelion seeds, onto nearby plants studded with more bugs of varying sizes. The biggest ones, at about two inches long, are ready to harvest.

(Tuberculosis is killing this zoo’s lemurs—but it hasn’t closed.)

This story appears in the May 2024 issue of National Geographic magazine.

The nonprofit National Geographic Society helped fund field reporting for this article.

Nichole Sobecki, a Nairobi-based photographer, focuses on links between nature and people, such as the future of lemurs in Madagascar. A National Geographic Explorer since 2021, she covered cheetah trafficking for us that year.

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