Amazing Animals: Aye Aye, The Demon Primate

“My preeeee-cious!”, he says. “Master betrayed us. Wicked. Tricksy, False. We ought to wring his filthy little neck. Kill him! Kill him! Kill them both! And then we take the precious… and we be the master!”

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fw2DtZYJuiI[/youtube]

Look! I caught me a Gollum!!… Well, no. Not really. This is the Aye Aye. A baby aye aye. Adorable, right? Eh, not really. Its hideous. Don’t worry, you can say it, its heard it plenty of times before.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IqK-pIuSLs[/youtube]

The Aye Aye IS actually of this world, not an alien or piece of fiction.  The Aye Aye is a primate, a lil sub-species of Lemur, hailing from Madagascar. He’s got the teeth of a rat, those big, radar ears, a long, thin middle finger to dig ants and lil grubs out of trees(so don’t cut him off in traffic, he can flip quite the bird!), and he fills the same ecological niche as the woodpecker. The name Aye Aye derives from the Malagasy term “hey hey”, which means “I don’t know”. Fitting, right?

The Aye Aye is a solitary animal. Too ugly to make friends, right? They were marked as being extinct in 1937, then redescovered in 1957. Farmers tend to kill them because they ruin their crops. HEY! Quit killin’ the Aye aye!!! They’re super cool!