Crazy Animal Adaptations

     One animal I have always found interesting is the Aye Aye, found in the forests of Madagascar. The Aye Aye is the only member of the family Daubentoniidae, and I only recently found out about this species' amazing adaptations for eating. Aye Ayes have an insanely long third finger, which basically looks like a skinny little stick. The Aye Aye will climb on tree trunks and begin to tap its fingernail from the long digit on the tree trunk, figuring out where the hollow spaces in the trunk are. It presses its large ears up close to the tree trunk, and can hear when there is a bug inside. When it has located a grub, the Aye Aye will then use its modified incisors to carve out a hole in the trunk leading into the hollow tunnel. Then it uses that long digit to poke down into the tunnel until it hooks the grub and can bring it up and out to eat. 

I literally have not been able to stop thinking about this since I found out how they eat.

Here's a video of the process-


 

Comments

  1. Emmary's Blog: EvolutionOctober 28, 2021 at 10:03 PM

    Thank you for sharing the video! It was an interesting watch for sure. I had no idea that an animal like this existed. I'm not going to lie, the tapping is rather creepy lol. Did you find any information on how the Aye Aye evolved to have this weird finger? Or why? If I had to take a wild guess, I would say that these lemurs live in an environment where their food was hard to reach, so they had to evolve to have a weird long finger so they could reach their food.

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  2. Hannah NineOctober 29, 2021 at 7:07 PM

    Hi Katie! I think the Aye Aye is a very interesting animal, but disturbing nonetheless, lol. It seems like so much work that the Aye Aye has to go through to grub on a grub, pun intended. Thanks for sharing and I'm glad I read this post!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Tatum GlaserNovember 4, 2021 at 10:28 AM

    Hi Katie! I have never heard of the Aye Aye before but that definitely is an interesting adaptation! I wonder if only one of the fingers is long because if they were all long that would hinder their abilities to do other things? Pretty cool how evolution allowed for just one finger to have that change!

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