5-Year-Old Is Praised By San Francisco Zoo After Finding Their Missing Lemur

Every morning, experts at the San Francisco Zoo do their rounds. They check the cages to make sure there was no damage done in the middle of the night, and they check the animals to make sure no sudden illnesses or injuries appeared while they were left alone for some time. For the most part, the procedure offers peace of mind, but in 2020, the staff found something seriously wrong.

A Broken Enclosure

On October 14th, 2020, at 9:40 AM, officials at the San Francisco Zoo noticed that all was not right: Maki the lemur was missing, and there was evidence his cage had been forced open. Frantic, they called the police. Maki wasn't an ordinary lemur.

Maki's Special

Ring-tailed lemurs — native only to Madagascar, an island off the east coast of Africa — live to be about 16 years old. Maki, however, was 21. He was an old man of a dying breed, and he required specialized care. There was no way he could last more than a few days on his own.

Life with Maki

Born in 1999, Maki'd spent enough time in the zoo to have little lemur family — one of the other primates in the habitat was his offspring! He was "highly endangered" according to zoo officials, and one of seven Madagascan lemurs in the habitat. The animal was special.

Police Arrive

Police arrived on the scene shortly after the phone call, but there were no smoking guns to be found. Clearly, the Lipman Family Lemur Forest enclosure had been forced open by a burglar in the middle of the night, but the motive was a mystery, and the initial suspect list contained a whopping zero names. Zoo officials were devastated.