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Aye-aye

Daubentonia madagascariensis · hard

The aye-aye occupies an ecological role that elsewhere belongs to woodpeckers, and it fills that role with a set of tools no other primate has. It taps a branch rapidly with a skeletal middle finger, listens with enormous mobile ears for the hollow resonance of a grub tunnel beneath the bark, gnaws through with continuously growing rodent-like incisors, and then hooks the larva out with that same thin finger. Biologists call this percussive foraging, and the aye-aye is the only primate that does it.

Everything about the animal reads as assembled from spare parts. It is the largest nocturnal primate, with coarse dark fur, a bushy tail longer than its body, and eyes that reflect torchlight. Its teeth so confused early naturalists that it was first classified as a rodent, and its lineage is old enough that it sits alone in its own family.

It lives only in Madagascar, in forest across much of the island, and it has a difficult relationship with the people who share it. In parts of the country the aye-aye is regarded as an omen of misfortune and killed on sight — a superstition that, combined with the steady loss of Madagascar's forests, has made an already thinly spread animal considerably rarer.

Where it lives

Worml lists the aye-aye as native to Madagascar. Its habitat is rainforest and deciduous forest canopy.

Ranges here are reduced to whole countries for playability and exclude introduced populations — see about the data for what that simplification leaves out.

In the game

Aye-aye is rated hard. To solve the round you need to name the single country it lives in. How scoring works →

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