Aye-aye — printable fact sheet
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Aye-aye
Daubentonia madagascariensis
The aye-aye is a lemur that hunts like a woodpecker, and it has assembled a toolkit no other primate has. It taps rapidly along a branch with a specialised, skeletal middle finger, listens to the returning echo with enormous mobile ears, and identifies the hollow chamber where a…
Did you know?
- Some local legends in Madagascar consider the aye-aye an omen of bad luck, leading to it being persecuted in some areas.
- It finds grubs by tapping wood and listening to the echo with huge ears — a kind of knocking echolocation found in no other primate. Its ever-growing incisors are so rodent-like that it was originally classified as a rodent. Its skeletal middle finger sits on a ball-and-socket joint, so it can hook and rotate inside a tunnel to spear the grub. It fills the woodpecker's role on an island that has no woodpeckers.
What I learned
Draw the aye-aye
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