Most people who've met PJ (my advisor) have come to understand that there is one non-human primate above all others in his eyes:
As a result of PJ's aye-aye enthusiasm, most of us in the Perry Lab have developed an appreciation for these creepy/cute weirdos. I've been seeing aye-aye-related things pop up all over the place lately, and in order to properly highlight my friend Megan Aylward's super exciting preprint up on bioRxiv, I've decided that this week's blog post will be All About Aye-ayes. | Be sure to grab some snacks! |
I acknowledge that unless you have experiences with either Madagascar, lemurs, or people/organizations who conduct research concerning either of those first two things that you might not fully understand why I wanted to write an entire blog post about these bizarre creatures. So why don't we begin with a quick, accurate, and hilarious introductory video:
Let's go semi-chronologically from now on: I began appreciating aye-ayes pretty much as soon as I found out they existed. I mean look at that thing ^ Only in Madagascar, commonly regarded as a hotspot of biodiversity, could such a thing have come into existence. By the end of my first year of graduate school I had actually met an aye-aye in person at the Duke Lemur Center. His name is Merlin, and he is every bit as magical as his name would suggest. I even bought a DLC t-shirt because I was so excited by the adorable aye-aye logo.
Speaking of t-shirts, Amanda J. Hardie (Anthropology Ph.D. grad student at UW-Madison) opened up a Threadless store where you can purchase this beauty on a piece of clothing, a bag, or even a phone case. There are other paleo/people/primate designs if this blog post does not make you fall in love with aye-ayes, so please go check it out anyways. But I digress, let's get back to our aye-aye admiration adventure. |
PJ loves aye-ayes so much that he purchased a cast of an aye-aye skull (anthropologists, scientists in general, sometimes make funny-sounding purchases, alright?). The cast ended up being a bit smaller than he thought it should be, and he realized that he had purchased a juvenile skull cast. Well at some point between the Fall 2016 and Spring 2017 semesters, PJ decided that the best thing to do with this juvy aye-aye was to have the lab decorate it with our accomplishments, as part of our celebrations. Example: when my Nature Ecology and Evolution review paper was published, I copied one of my figure art pieces onto the juvy aye-aye's palate [left]. |
We've amassed quite a few achievements since then, as you can see here:
2016 was also the year that Megan Aylward brought her DNA extractions to Penn State to develop library prep techniques in our lab. Let's backtrack a bit. Megan was, at the time, a Ph.D. grad student in Dr. Steig Johnson's lab at the University of Calgary. She researches dispersal and phylogeography in aye-ayes, which is a hell of a lot trickier than it might sound on the surface. For one thing, aye-ayes are nocturnal, and it's quite difficult to spot them in the darkness. For another, they have absolutely absurd home ranges for a primate of that size, and are rather solitary animals - additional factors that make them hard to find, let alone study and potentially get samples from for genomic work.
PJ had already encountered these difficulties with wild aye-ayes during his work on several earlier aye-aye-focused publications. One of his former undergrad students, Kate Thompson, published her findings from her senior thesis project in which she attempted to understand why aye-aye home ranges are so large. [Image of Kate shamelessly borrowed from PJ's website.] |
This project involved Kate traveling to Madagascar with, amongst other equipment, a huge 3D acoustic tomograph to try to tease apart the resource availability and foraging behaviors of a few radio-collared aye-aye individuals around the Kianjavato Ahmanson Field Station (KAFS). Even though they are being tracked, the aye-ayes are rarely ever spotted. [Penn State News piece about Kate's project here. It even made the cover of the International Journal of Primatology!]
Megan also collected samples from around KAFS - as well as the Manombo Special Reserve and Tsingy de Beanka - but of a very different nature than Kate's. The main thing they had in common was their search for aye-aye-gnawed holes [below]. Each of their projects also shared a collaboration with Dr. Edward Louis and the Madagascar Biodiversity Partnership (MBP) - KAFS is actually one of MBP's long-term monitoring sites.
Megan was trying to determine if she could collect DNA from the holes aye-ayes leave behind when they forage, so she collected bits of tree material that the aye-ayes' buccal cavities (AKA mouths/saliva-makers) and teeth had brushed against [see below]. These trick for collecting DNA not from the host organism but from its environment are collectively called eDNA (environmental DNA) methods, and they are especially useful for species as cryptic as the aye-aye.
But I don't want to give away Megan's findings because they are super cool! I'll give you a small hint: it pretty much worked. Go check out the preprint of her work on bioRxiv and let us know what you think :)