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Aye-aye Portrait

Island Of Madagascar

Off The East Coast of Africa

Palmarium Reserve

 

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Endangered lemur photographed at night aided by a guide holding a spotlight. One of my favorite lemurs due it's strange appearance and odd behavior.

 

Wikipedia - The aye-aye (Daubentonia madagascariensis) is a lemur, a strepsirrhine primate native to Madagascar that combines rodent-like teeth that perpetually grow and a special thin middle finger.

 

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 using its forward slanting incisors to create a small hole in which it inserts its narrow middle finger to pull the grubs out.

 

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.

 

The aye-aye is the only extant member of the genus Daubentonia and family Daubentoniidae. It is currently classified as Endangered by the IUCN.

 

The aye-aye is an arboreal animal meaning that it spends most of its life high in the trees. Aye-ayes sleep, eat, travel and mate in the trees and are most commonly found close to the canopy where there is plenty of cover from the dense foliage.

 

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Uploaded on March 15, 2019
Taken on November 27, 2017