The primate that hunts with a long skeletal tapping finger
This primate has a long bony finger it uses to tap on wood and fish out grubs.
Which one is REALLY true about the Aye-Aye?
The short version
The aye-aye, a nocturnal Madagascar lemur, has an elongated skeletal middle finger it taps on branches up to 8 times a second, using its huge ears to hear grub tunnels by echo (percussive foraging). It gnaws a hole with ever-growing teeth and hooks the grub out — the only primate that hunts this way.
Why it's so weird
- ✓The Aye-Aye is a lemur from the island of Madagascar.
- ✓The Aye-Aye has a long, skeletal middle finger far thinner than its other fingers.
- ✓The Aye-Aye taps on tree branches up to eight times every second and listens for the echoes.
- ✓The Aye-Aye uses its huge, bat-like ears to hear grub tunnels hidden inside the wood.
- ✓The Aye-Aye gnaws a hole with ever-growing teeth, then hooks the grub out with that finger.
You could line up about 3 of them along a 7-year-old!
The full story
This strange little primate hunts using a long, skeletal middle finger. Meet the aye-aye, a nocturnal lemur from Madagascar with one of the weirdest feeding tricks in all of nature. That spindly finger is far longer and thinner than the others, almost like a twig with a claw on the end. It taps rapidly on tree branches, up to eight times every second, and listens to the echoes with its enormous bat-like ears to find hollow tunnels carved by grubs hiding inside the wood. When it hears one, it gnaws a hole with ever-growing, rodent-like teeth, then sends that long finger inside to hook the grub straight out. It is the only primate known to hunt by tapping like this. With huge glowing eyes and a ghostly stare, locals once feared it as a bad omen. Follow for more weird animal facts.
When the aye-aye taps its skinny finger super fast, it sends tiny sounds into the wood. A grub tunnel or hidden gap reflects those sounds a little differently than solid wood, and the aye-aye's giant ears are sharp enough to hear the difference, so it can 'see' the hidden tunnel with sound. Its front teeth keep growing all its life, so even though gnawing slowly wears them down, they never get too short — letting it chew through tough wood and then hook the grub out with its thin, bendy finger.
📚 Source: Duke Lemur Center - Aye-aye ↗In lab studies of tap-scanning aye-ayes, scientists found that even when they backfilled the hidden tunnels with gelatin or foam the animals still located them, showing the aye-ayes were reading the sound of the wood itself rather than just an empty air echo.
📚 Source: Percussive Foraging: Stimuli for Prey Location by Aye-Ayes (Erickson et al., International Journal of Primatology) ↗Watch the 45-second version
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“The Aye-Aye is a nocturnal lemur from the island of Madagascar.”
“The Aye-Aye has a whole forehead made of a clear fluid-filled dome, so you can look straight into its skull.”
“The Aye-Aye has a long, skeletal middle finger far thinner than its other fingers.”