Astonishing Animals by Tim Flannery

Author:Tim Flannery
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Aye-aye

(Daubentonia madagascariensis)

Great-tailed triok

(Dactylopsila megalura)

SOMETIMES THE environment exerts similar evolutionary pressures on different animals, so that over time they end up looking remarkably similar. A striking case involves some of the world's rarest possums and primates. The great-tailed triok is a marsupial that inhabits the middle elevations of New Guinea's mountains, while the aye-aye is a lemur restricted to the moist forests of Madagascar. Both eat the larvae of wood-boring insects, which they must detect then extract. To this end, both have very good ears in order to hear the grubs chewing deep in the tree, and both have very sharp, chisel-like front teeth to tear through the timber.

Even more amazing is the similarity of their fingers. The German name for the aye-aye translates as ‘finger-beast’, drawing attention the creature's almost skeletal middle finger, which bears a sharply hooked nail. In the triok, it is the fourth finger that is specialised, having become greatly elon- gated, slender and similarly clawed. The animals use these tools to ‘fish’ for the grubs in their burrows.

But why do the aye-aye and great-tailed triok both have such splendid, bushy tails? Perhaps they act as a counterbalance. And why is the triok striped like a skunk? Indeed, it even smells somewhat like a skunk. The great-tailed triok is so rare, unfortunately, that only half a dozen specimens have ever been collected. No European scientist has ever studied one in the wild, so these questions remain unresolved. Until recently the aye-aye was considered to be equally rare, though surveys have now revealed that it exists in considerable numbers. One other difference is size: at three kilograms the aye-aye is six times as heavy as the triok.

Aye-ayes looks ghostly, and because the animal is nocturnal some Madagascans superstitiously believe that if one is seen near a village it must be killed or disaster will befall them.

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