A superstition in the night. (Photo by Frank Vassen)
In Madagascar, a land of strange creatures, one of the strangest of all comes creeping out after dark. Nearly two feet long from head to tail with another two feet of bushy tail behind it, this creature’s large, red eyes peer out through the leaves of a tree. Soon you see its fingers — long, thin, alien, the things of nightmares. With a tap-tap-tapping of its thinnest, almost skeletal finger on the tree, it comes toward you.
The aye-aye is an oddity. Once thought extinct, it was rediscovered in the 1950s and still roams the forests of eastern Madagascar. We call it a lemur, but in truth we aren’t one hundred percent certain what it really is.
The aye-aye, if it is a lemur, is the world’s largest nocturnal primate. The creepy thin hands it sports are a unique evolutionary adaptation that allows it to reach a food source untouched by other animals on the island — insect larvae living beneath the bark of trees, the same food source used by woodpeckers in other parts of the world.
While the woodpecker bores holes in trees with its beak, the aye-aye taps its incredibly thin middle finger up to eight times per second along the bark as it moves. It is able to hear the echoes of its tapping and determine where there are hollow spaces. The creature then gnaws a hole in the bark with its long teeth and inserts its longest finger into the hole to pull out any grubs or other insects living within.
Its teeth grow constantly throughout its life, exactly like a rodent’s teeth, and this prompted early scientists to classify the aye-aye as a rodent. In addition, it climbs trees in a very similar manner to a squirrel, and has some anatomical similarities to rodents as well. Is it possible that some lone species of rodent somehow crossed to Madagascar and evolved into something so strange?
It is possible, but scientists now believe the aye-aye is a primate. What sort of primate is up for debate, but current general consensus is that it is a unique type of lemur, distantly related to the others, highly evolved and specialized to take advantage of a certain food source that none of the other lemurs can access. But in truth, we’re only making educated guesses. It is the only primate known to use echolocation, and we don’t know for certain how it fits into the classification scheme.
The native people of Madagascar don’t know either, and in fact they are just as creeped out by the long fingers and red eyes as we are. The aye-aye also has a somewhat fearless nature, and has been known to stroll into villages or approach humans in the forest. People are afraid of them.
Looking at this, I’m not entirely sure we can blame them. (Image by Joseph Wolf)
In addition to natural fear, the native people believe the aye-aye is evil, a harbinger of death. It is claimed that if an aye-aye points his thinnest tapping finger at you, it has marked you for death. Some believe that the creatures can break into houses in the night and kill a man by piercing the heart with that same long, thin finger. For these reasons, the aye-aye is traditionally killed on sight by natives.
Combined with deforestation, this means that the creature is considered near-threatened, and a second species of aye-aye is believed to have gone extinct within the past thousand years. And there is nothing inherently evil about them, no more so than any other animal and less perhaps than some. They look rather disturbing compared to other animals we are used to, but they are harmless. They eat insects, and will occasionally steal fruit from villages; the rest is superstition brought on by the strange appearance they have evolved to reach their food.
However, even without the superstition, aye-ayes can damage local crops, and are killed by farmers for this reason. Madagascar is not a wealthy nation, and many of its people are poor. Any threat to local food supplies, whether in the field or through thievery from storage areas at night, prompts unfortunate but understandable reactions.
And if you’re wondering where the name “aye-aye” came from, no one quite knows that either, but it’s not because it was named by affirmative sailors. It might refer to a sound that the animal makes; it might refer to the sound the natives make when they see it and run away; or it might come from “heh-heh”, which in a Malagasy language means, simply and appropriately, “I do not know”.
Aye-aye distribution
The Book of Beasts 