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Animals / Mammals / Aye-aye

Aye-aye


aye-aye face

What could this beast be? It is from Madagascar. It has long shaggy dark fur with long white hairs. It has the face of Nosferatu. It was first thought to be a rodent. It is the Aye-aye. It is of course nocturnal and has a long bushy tail and big ears. Poor creature, the native people of Madagascar long considered it an omen of bad luck and tried to kill it on sight and it is now considered a "near threatened" species. The Aye-aye builds nests in several locations with twigs and leaves to sleep and keep their young. They have very long middle fingers which they use to reach into the holes in trees to extract tasty insects. They enjoy grooming and sitting still meditating for as long as 2 hours.


aye-aye


aye-aye and tail

Here you can see the distinctively long fingers that the Aye-aye can use to fish insects out of deep holes. You can also see it's long bushy tail.


baby aye-aye

Baby Aye-aye

The baby Aye-aye is born rather underdeveloped and takes some time to mature.


close-up aye-aye

Close-up of baby Aye-aye

 


 

Wikipedia excerpt for "Aye-aye":

The Aye-aye (Daubentonia madagascariensis) is a strepsirrhine native to Madagascar that combines rodent-like teeth with a long, thin middle finger to fill the same ecological niche as a woodpecker. It is the world's largest nocturnal primate, and is characterized by its unusual method of finding food; it taps on trees to find grubs, then gnaws holes in the wood and inserts its elongated middle finger to pull the grubs out. The only other animals known to find food in this way is the Striped Possum. From an ecological point of view the Aye-aye fills the niche of a woodpecker as it is capable of penetrating wood to extract the invertebrates within.
Daubentonia is the only genus in the family Daubentoniidae and infraorder Chiromyiformes. The Aye-aye is the only extant member of the genus (although it is currently classified as Near Threatened by the IUCN); a second species, Daubentonia robusta, appears to have become extinct at some point within the last 1000 years.
The Aye-aye is the world's largest nocturnal prosimian, and dwells predominantly in forest canopies...

See full Wikipedia Aye-aye article

 


 

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Aye-aye Book at Amazon.com: