Ai-ai: Residents of Madagascar are afraid to pronounce his name and believe that the beast brings death. Is it really just because of appearance? (8 photos)

At my university there was a legend that students who complete the entire semester during the session are reborn after death into ah-ah, the living embodiment of lack of sleep, compensated by heavy doses of coffee!





Europeans discovered the Madagascar bat in 1780 and decided to borrow the species name from the local population. It didn’t work out: the Malagasy inhabitants of Madagascar are so afraid of this animal that they didn’t give it its own name! In case of urgent need, they call the animal “aye-aye,” which, with the right level of imagination, can be translated as: “ah, damn it!”



If you see one like this at night, you won’t scream like that.

The superstitious fear of the Malagasy is so strong that in folklore there is not a single mention of aye-aye, and the one who kills this animal is predicted to die within a year. What are you, horror of the Madagascar night? From the moment of their discovery, they were either classified as rodents or separated into a separate order. In the end, scientists agreed that this is a primate from the family of bats, the evil brother of the king of lemurs, Julian. He is the only representative of his family. Apparently, narcissism runs in the family.





Lord Voldemort is surprisingly inharmonious from the animal world: huge ears, fur sticking out in all directions, bulging bright yellow eyes and long thin fingers, one of which is much longer than the others. Freelancer, in his natural habitat, no less.



With living creatures, everything is for a reason, which means that the eerie spring appearance is due to the environment. Huge eyes help the little hand survey Madagascar at night and make plans to seize the coffee machine. Huge ears work in conjunction with a long third finger - ai ai hears its offender many meters away and shows him a huge middle finger.



Jokes aside, in fact, with this finger, the little arm taps the bark of trees. With the help of her subtle hearing, she detects cavities in which delicious food is nestled - insects and their babies. Hearing the desired sound, the aye-aye gnaws through the wood with strong incisors and takes out the chitinous fast food with the same manipulator, pricking larvae on it or scraping out beetles.



And this is the most terrible crime of which he is capable. The 60cm slow-moving primate is completely harmless and spends its nights searching for food. But sometimes sociality takes over and they get together in pairs just to hang out.



The same pairs of arms give birth to children, and the head of the family is the female. After night promenades, the expectant mother builds a nest, and the freshly baked baby is fed milk for about 7 months. After acquiring some independence, the cub remains with the mother and walks with her until adulthood, and the sons begin to terrorize the little ones already at the age of one, but the daughters stay longer - up to two years.



Our distant relative is a typical example of an elephant that was fashioned from a fly; it is not capable of harming a person. But we are easy for him. Despite their large habitat, the natural population of these animals does not number even 10,000 individuals; they must be handled with extreme caution.