How can we save aye ayes

Then the aye-aye inserts its slender and highly flexible third finger into the hole, and when the prey is located, it is hooked with the tip of the finger and removed. Unlike other lemurs, aye-aye breeding can occur at any time of year. The first recorded birth of an aye-aye in human care was Blue Devil in , whose mother, Endora, was captured in Madagascar while pregnant.

Angelique, born at Duke in , was the first aye-aye ever born to parents who themselves were born in human care. In the wild, infants are weaned as early as 7 months, but they will continue nursing as long as they remain with their mothers and do not have any younger siblings.

In human care, females give birth every years. Aye-aye females reach sexual maturity at around 2 years old. The gestation period is, on average, days. While the majority of their time is spent in the trees, traveling on the ground is reasonably common. Males have huge home ranges, between to acres and ha , while the home ranges of females are much smaller, usually between 75 to acres 30 and 50 ha.

Female ranges do not overlap with those of other females, but they always overlap that of at least one male. Aye-ayes sleep in elaborate tree nests during the day, with different animals using the same nest on different days. Wild aye-ayes spend most of their lives alone. The only social interactions occur during courtship and when an infant is dependent on its mother. During these interactions, females are considered to be dominant over males, giving them preferential access to food.

When aye-ayes get excited or agitated, their long, mostly white guard hairs stand on end and give the poofed-up lemur the appearance of an animal twice its actual size! This adaptation may have evolved as a strategy to make the aye-aye look more threatening to would-be predators, but it can also be seen at times when the animal is not being threatened. For example, our animal care technicians have reported seeing it during play behavior between a mom and an infant or juvenile, and it can also be observed in instances similar to those of Grendel pictured below : he just moved into a brand new room and, although the size and shape of the new room were exactly the same as the old, the layout of branches and many of the smells were totally different.

At first, Grendel just wasn't sure what to make of it. Once considered one of the most endangered mammals in the world, the aye-aye has in recent years been shown to be much more widely distributed than originally thought.

This is due to the fact that recent years have seen an influx of researchers into Madagascar, including those specifically looking for this rare and elusive animal. Current findings indicate that the aye-aye is distributed along the east coast and in the northwestern forests of Madagascar but as the population is not dense, seeing one in the wild remains incredibly rare.

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A lack of diversity could leave a population more vulnerability to disease or changes in its environment, for example. Many plants and animals, including lemurs, are unique to Madagascar. Lemurs are also increasingly hunted for meat. Aye-ayes appear particularly vulnerable. Earlier genomic work found evidence that aye-ayes belong at the far low end of genetic diversity among primates.

While genetics has been used on a limited scale in conservation for about two decades, the process of decoding an organism's genetic sequence has become faster and cheaper in recent years. This change potentially gives researchers access to a much greater volume of information.

The resulting data can, for example, reveal genetically distinct populations that may have otherwise appeared to be a single group, or bring to light the history of interbreeding between populations.