Cute but deadly furball launches death attack

(Image: Jurgen Freund/naturepl.com)

WITH their massive eyes, tarsiers are high on most people’s cute list. But extreme cuteness comes at a price. The eyes are so big that each eyeball, at 16 millimetres in diameter, takes up the same volume as the entire brain. The skull is madly shaped to accommodate this arrangement, and the eyes themselves are so big they can’t move. If the creature wants to look somewhere, the entire head moves instead – it can rotate, owl-like, through 180 degrees.

This one – a spectral tarsier (Tarsius tarsier) – lives in Tangkoko National Park in North Sulawesi, Indonesia. As nocturnal hunters, their hearing is as good as their vision, and they are the only primate to communicate in ultrasound. They are partial to insects, happily tackling and eating grasshoppers and beetles half their size. At rest they are only 9 centimetres tall – the shortest primate in the world. But their legs are monstrously long, the result of an extension of the tarsal bones in the foot that allows them to leap up to 6 metres. They might be primitive on the primate family tree, but they are still pretty cool.

Jürgen Freund, who is based in Cairns, Australia, says you never get much time with tarsiers. “It was always a short photo session as they would bounce away into the forest in no time,” he says. Freund got up at 3.30 am to get this shot.

Oh yes, and there are the “toilet fingers”. These are specially adapted claws for scratching in those hard-to-reach places. Cute.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Cuteness, weaponised”