Kids t-shirt
At the playground there will not be a single person who can name the creature on this aye-aye kids t-shirt: the portrait is of Stan, a primate that lives only in Madagascar and comes out at night. He is nineteen, with huge dark ears, round amber eyes and a black beanie with a white skull embroidered on it.
Foto: Rafael Peier (@rafaelpeier) / Unsplash (Unsplash License)Daubentonia madagascariensis
Put it under Solofo's name, I was slow today.
Lowland tropical rainforest along the east coast of Madagascar and dry deciduous forest in the west and northwest, in a distribution fragmented into pockets: Masoala, Nosy Mangabe, Mananara Nord —where Aye-Aye Island, or Île Roger, works as a semi-wild sanctuary—, Daraina in the far north, and populations further south such as Ranomafana. It is endemic to Madagascar and lives nowhere else.
At the end of the day, somebody goes round with the sheet noting the rows each of them has cleared. Stan tells him, quietly: "Put it under Solofo's name, I was slow today." Solofo is his cousin. He was not slow: he went faster than anyone, and the two people standing there know it. Nobody argues and he gives no further explanation. Two seasons running he has watched the row leader job go to somebody else, and he carries on the same.
The name did not come from them. Pierre Sonnerat, the French naturalist who described the species in 1782, reported that "aye-aye" was the startled cry his Malagasy guides let out when they came face to face with one. It stuck, and that is still what it is called in almost every language; in German they say Fingertier, "finger animal". It is a twenty-second story, and it covers every time somebody in the street asks what animal that is.
