There is one living species of Aye-Aye
extant today, and that is
Daubentonia madagascariensis, as
N-Wing so kindly notes. The
Malagasy call it Hay-Hay, Ahay and Aiay. The Aye-Aye is native to
Madagascar, and is only remotely related to the other
lemurs. It is an oddity among
Mammalia, and some
speculate that it has a closer relationship to the
indriids than to lemurs.
Aye-aye forage for their
food at night. They eat
larvae that they find inside dead trees by tapping the bark and listening for
reverberations with their unusually large ears. When they hear a larva scrabbling around inside, they use another unique
adaption to bite through the wood: continuously growing
incisor teeth, which once made
naturalists believe they were rodents. Finally, they reach into the wood with their fantastically long, bony middle
finger and coax out the larva.
Aye-Aye live
solitary lives in the
rainforest of Madagascar. The females give
birth every two to three years, and breeding occurs at any time of year. The females are
dominant during
courtship rituals.
The second,
extinct species of Aye-Aye is
Daubentonia robusta, a much larger creature. The
scant skeletal remains that have been found suggest that it was up to five times larger than the currently living Aye-Aye, which is about the size of a
cat.
Daubentonia robusta was hunted to extinction by
man, and
Daubentonia madagascariensis may meet the same
fate. It is thought to be a bad
omen by the
Malagasy. This is understandable (albeit not excusable); after all, read this description of an Aye-Aye from
The Aye-aye and I by Gerald Durrell:
"In the gloom it came along the branches towards me, its round, hypnotic eyes blazing, its spoon-like ears turning to and fro like radar dishes, its white whiskers twitching and moving like sensors; its black hands, with their thin fingers, the third seeming terribly elongated, tapping delicately on the branches as it moved along."