Lemurs of Madagascar: Surviving on an Island of Change

The Uncommon Aye-Aye: An Interview with Eleanor Sterling

What was it like following aye-ayes so intensely for two years?

It was one of the most amazing experiences of my life. There were no roads—just barely paths—and I lived in a tent surrounded by the sea. I would wake up in the afternoon and start work at 5 p.m. to find where a radio-collared aye-aye was sleeping in a nest. I’d wait for it to wake up, then two other people would keep the aye-aye in the crossbeam of their flashlights while I would watch it with binoculars. We’d follow it all night over rugged mountainous terrain, and I was trailing headphone wires and antennae that constantly got caught in the thick vegetation we were wading through. Aye-ayes can move easily in the canopy, but I would have to go down and up and down on the ground, leaping over dark canyons and doing other Herculean things to keep up. If I lost the animal, I had to go back to the tent and start again the next night. It was interesting to get to know an animal as well as we did, to get a sense for not just how it lives but how we can do a better job of conserving it.

What is the conservation status of aye-ayes on Madagascar? 

We know there was another kind of aye-aye once. It was bigger than the existing species and lived when humans first arrived on the island about 2,000 years ago. The paleontological evidence for it includes teeth with holes bored in them, so humans may have used the teeth in some kind of jewelry. That aye-aye is now extinct. We don’t know why or how just yet.

As for the smaller aye-aye that now remains, people were unclear about the animal’s status for a long time. Some of the French explorers in the early 1900’s noted that it was quite rarely encountered on Madagascar. In fact, in 1935 they declared it extinct, because they hadn’t seen it in a while. Then a group of scientists from Paris visited Madagascar in the 1950’s and found a couple of aye-aye populations. They captured nine aye-ayes and put them onto the island of Nosy Mangabe as a protected reserve.

Are aye-ayes really that rare?

We know that the chances of people running into an aye-aye are much lower than for diurnal lemurs, which come out during the day. Aye-ayes tend to wander about alone and don’t congregate often. So you have to be at the right time and place to run into one.

Today, we can tell definitively that an aye-aye has been in an area by the particular marks they make on nuts they crack open. The good news is that aye-ayes are fairly widely distributed around Madagascar. But we still don’t know the population size in any one of those places. There’s a lot more work on the aye-aye that needs to be done.

Print friendly format