Tag: Primates

Posted on

Canopy Anyone? by James Penha

the orangutans
will finally cross that bridge
when they come to it

by James Penha

Two years ago, conservationists in North Sumatra, Indonesia built a rope bridge in the jungle canopy hoping that orangutans whose habitat had been truncated by a busy highway would learn to use the bridge and so safely travel throughout their habitat. The Sumatran Orangutan Society set up a time lapse camera awaiting the first simian pontist to dare to cross. In April, they recorded it!

Further reading:

‘Cries of delight’ as Sumatran orangutan filmed using canopy bridge to cross road for first time, 2026, Tomkins, I., The Guardian, available: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/apr/25/first-footage-endangered-sumatran-orangutan-using-canopy-bridge-cross-road-hope-species-aoe?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Author bio:

Expat New Yorker James Penha (he/him 🌈) has lived for the past three decades in Indonesia. His story collection  Queer As Folk Tales  was published by Deep Desires Press in October 2025. His chapbook of poems  American Daguerreotypes is available for Kindle.

Penha edits TheNewVerse.News, an online journal of current-events poetry. You can find out more about his poetry on his website https://jamespenha.com and catch up with him on BlueSky @jamespenha.bsky.social

Read more of James’ sciku here.

Posted on

Aye-Aye!

The northern monkey.

Never in need of a lift

with its pseudothumb.

The aye-aye is a curious primate found in Madagascar that has possibly the most unusual hands in the animal kingdom. Their hands are so elongated that they account for around 41% of their total length of the forelimb. The aye-aye’s long, bony third finger is its calling card – unique in the animal kingdom, it’s a specialised tool for getting grubs out of deep holes and probing for food whilst foraging.

Yet such specialisation can have costs, including weakening the ability of aye-ayes to grip. Hartstone-Rose & Dickinson et al. (2019) suggest that the aye-aye’s pseudothumb may have evolved to combat this disadvantage. The researchers found the pseudothumb has bony, cartilaginous and muscular features, suggesting that it enhances the aye-aye’s grip of smaller items such as thin branches.

A note about the sciku – Aye-ayes are lemurs and are not monkeys (they’re strepsirrhine primates). The sciku calls them northern monkeys because ‘aye’ is a common term in the north of England and in Scotland meaning ‘yes’, and ‘why-aye’ or ‘wey-aye’ are northern (mainly Geordie) terms for ‘well yes’ or ‘well, yes of course’. The term northern monkey is also a derogatory term in the UK for someone from the north of England (the counter of which is southern fairy).

Original research: https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.23936