unexpected
Monday, October 18, 2010
exotic adventure
You'd be hard pressed to find a cuter or more loveable creature than this one, a Philippines tarsier. Tarsiers like this are among the smallest primates on the planet, and although they used to be relatively widespread, they're now only found in small pockets of forest on several of the Philippines islands, and in Indonesia on the islands of Borneo and Sulawesi. This one was at the Tarsier Visitors Center on the island of Bohol, which runs the foremost preservation effort for them in the country. Not only are tarsiers one of the smallest primates, they're also one of the most ancient, having been around for 45 million years, fossils showing that they once also lived in North America, Europe and mainland Asia. Tarsiers get their name from the extremely long tarsus bones in their feet. Imagine this little fluffball without all of its fur and you'll realize just how long those feet and legs are, enabling this pint-sized critter to jump an extraordinary four meters from tree to tree, all the better to catch the insects which are their main prey. Their toes are almost sucker-like, with peculiar looking grooming claws which stick straight out from some of the toes. If the legs are out of scale, then so too are the eyes, which occupy a very large proportion of the skull. They have the largest eyes compared to their size of any mammal, and if tarsiers were the same size as a human then those eyes would be 150 times the volume of our own. The large eyes are an adaptation which allows them to move and hunt at night. Those eyes are practically immobile, but tarsiers make up for that by their ability to turn their head 360 degrees around, and they can also rotate their ears in a large arc to catch the noise of jungle insects, as well as birds and snakes, which they're also said to occasionally feed on. They're the only primate which is exclusively carnivorous.
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