Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s previous World of Wonder columns for The Butter can be found here.
This week gives us a little tough dear from the island of Madagascar. I say tough because zoologists thought it was extinct back in 1937, due in part to the unfortunate folklore surrounding these little guys. Legend has it that the aye-aye were/are harbingers of death, and if you saw one, you were supposed to kill it on the spot. But sure enough, after regrouping and laying low (or in their case, laying waaay high in their spherical nests, way up in the tree crowns of forests), the aye-aye were found again in 1957 — and they are still doing their best to shed their “endangered” status.
Image via Flickr
The Daubentonia madagascariensis is not actually a rodent, though I know it’s tempting to call it one if you’re just looking at the crazy-long bottom teeth and the squirrel-pouf of a tail. The aye-aye is actually the largest nocturnal primate in the world at about five pounds and just a little over a foot long. Think of the aye-aye as a very, very specialized form of lemur. And like the lemur, the aye-aye has a surprisingly solid vertical jump as it moves from tree to tree, searching for its favorite dinner: fruit, insects, and various fungi.
My favorite description of the aye-aye is “it looks like a cat was bitten by a vampire, and then halfway through the transformation just said, Screw it!” But perhaps what makes people shudder the most is the aye-aye’s ‘finger-tool’:
Image via Wiki
If you look carefully, its middle finger is actually stick-like, long and pointy, and part of its sad place in folklore is that if you came across an aye-aye and it pointed its finger tool at someone in your village, that person was supposed to be cursed or even die very soon. That, coupled with the wild marble eyes — unknowingly giving everything and everyone it sees during the day a rather horrifying glare — contributed to the myth of the aye-aye being a cursed animal, when all along it was probably just pointing out a tasty beetle on the wall behind the person who assumed the aye-aye had just cursed them. Poor aye-aye!
The aye-aye’s finger can almost spin 360 degrees and is pretty powerful as it knocks on trees and branches, searching for hidden chambers of juicy bugs. It’s the only primate to use echolocation in this way, and the finger then becomes a chopstick of sorts as the aye-aye dines on his discovery.
Dear Readers— What animals make you feel awe for their adaptability and moxie—they keep going, like the aye-aye, even though all the odds are against them? Any animals make you feel lazy with how much they get done in a day? Share below which animals make you want to raise your hand in a fist at the mere mention of their name!
Tags: aimee nezhukumatathil, the butter, world of wonder
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In fairness to the people of yore, I do kind of feel like I’ve been marked for death by just looking at this picture, so…
Dang, if even National Geographic feels the need to melodramatize these critters, what chance do they have? AYE-AYE: THE DEMON PRIMATE (ominous music). Granted, I don’t watch the National Geographic channel (“Nat Geo,” apparently and eye-rollingly), so maybe they do that to every animal these days. PENGUINS: DEADLY SHARK-BIRDS OF THE ANTARCTIC (ominous music). What would Jacques Cousteau say? JACQUES COUSTEAU: FRENCH DRACULA OF THE HIGH SEAS (ominous music).
They’re just lemurs, for crying out loud! I think they’re cute, in a bedraggled, caught-in-the-vacuum-cleaner kind of way. Come to think of it, “lemur” is Latin for “ghost,” so maybe this attitude is just a holdover from the days when all lemurs were considered uncanny supernatural creatures. I have this vision of terrified Victorian naturalists, running through the jungles of Madagascar, pursued by lemurs, like some kind of demented Scooby-Doo chase scene. There goes that same tree again…
(exit, pursued by a lemur)
I love this series! The world is full of wonderful animals and plants and slime molds. They’re not terribly hardy or industrious, but the species a World of Wonder post always makes me think of is the Woolly Aphid — or, as I called them growing up, fairy-flies. They have a huge puff of what looks like white feathers but is actually wax, and they seem to drift on the summer breeze like dust motes. A very magical-seeming critter!
So-called “Lazarus species” like the aye-aye– critters that were believed extinct and later rediscovered– are both inspirational and ultimately also kind of sobering to consider, in that their resurrected status is typically precarious and highly contingent on continued intervention by humans, if only to keep the species from being wiped out by other humans. All too often, the mistaken belief that the animals went extinct in the first place was based on devastating population losses at the hands of humans (or invasive species that we introduced).
On the other hand, where there’s life there’s hope, as the saying goes. One of the more extraordinary success stories of recent years is the Lord Howe’s Stick Insect, which vanished from its native island soon after rats were introduced from a beached ship in the early 20th Century. However, a few years back, some researchers discovered a colony of about two dozen insects, clinging to a single shrub halfway up the side of a huge spire of rock several miles offshore. A few insects were removed for breeding purposes, and so far the program has been a huge success, with a current hatchling population of several thousand, and a plan to reintroduce them to Lord Howe Island in the works. I remember seeing photos of Sir David Attenborough holding one of these critters, and looking as purely delighted as anyone with a giant stick insect crawling on them ever has.