Field notebook
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Animal profile
Daubentonia madagascariensis
The aye-aye is a nocturnal lemur with coarse dark fur, enormous mobile ears, continuously growing incisors and skeletal fingers. It forages alone at night through the canopy. It is the only living member of its family and looks so unlike other lemurs that early naturalists classified it as a rodent.
An aye-aye drums a branch with a wire-thin middle finger, several taps per second, while swivelling its ears to read the echoes. Where the sound reveals a cavity, it gnaws through with rodent-like incisors and hooks the larva out with a longer finger.
An aye-aye runs its skeletal middle finger along a branch at up to eight taps a second, listens to the returning sound with outsized ears, then gnaws through the bark and hooks the larva out with the same finger. No other primate forages this way.