Greetings, my witty word nerds! It’s that time again, the time for An Assemblage of Grandiose and Bombastic Grandiloquents! Today we are taking a trip off the Eastern coast of Africa; that’s right, we’re going to Madagascar to talk about the ‘aye-aye’!

No, I am not saluting you, captain, nor am I celebrating in Spanish! Instead I am referring the aye-aye, a long-fingered lemur native to Madagascar with rodent-like teeth that perpetually grow, and a special thin middle finger. I know what you’re thinking, savvy listener: ‘Good gracious! Please tell me more about this charmer of an animal!’ And that I will! The aye-aye, or ‘Daubetonia madagascariensis’ is a solitary quadruped, and the world’s largest nocturnal primate. It is characterized by its unusual method of finding food: it taps on trees to find grubs, then gnaws holes in the wood using its forward-slanting incisors to create a small hole in which it inserts its narrow middle finger to pull the grubs out. I told you - charming!

They spend most of their life high up in the trees, coming down to the ground on rare occasions. Though not a social primate, the males are known to share habitats until they hear the call of the female. The aye-aye were very difficult to class, first being thought as rodents due to their continually growing teeth, and as a squirrel at that. However, the aye-aye is also similar to felines. Their classification as primates was also uncertain, until molecular research concluded that aye-ayes are the most basal of lemurs. 

The French naturalist Pierre Sonnerat was the first to use the name aye-aye in 1782 when he described and illustrated the lemur, though it was also called the ‘long-fingered lemur’ by English zoologist George Shaw in 1800—a name that did not stick. According to Sonnerat, the name ‘aye-aye’ was a ‘cry of exclamation and astonishment’. However, American paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall noted in 1982 that the name resembles the Malagasy name ‘hai hai’ or ‘hay hay’, which refers to the animal and is used around the island.  Another proposed hypothesis is that it derives from ‘heh heh’, which is Malagasy for "I don't know". If correct, then the name might have originated from Malagasy people saying ‘heh heh’ to avoid saying the name of a feared, magical animal.

Isn’t language wonderful?

Written by Taylor Davidson, Read by Zane C Weber

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