Ready for another round of “how is this impossibly cute thing real?”
Today’s Moment of Squee, er Science… Bush babies.
A five inch long critter with a semi-prehensile tail, outsized ears, and eyes that would look perfectly normal on a Disney creation, my first thought when I saw the galago was “it’s definitely not a hippopotamus, but I can’t get much more specific than that.” These sub-saharan African natives are evolutionary cousins of the lemur. Sometimes called ‘nagapies,’ roughly meaning ‘little night monkeys’ in Afrikaans, over twenty species of the galago have been identified so far.
There are a few stories on how the nickname ‘bush baby’ came to be, but it’s most likely due to all the goddamn noise. Their high pitched cries are used to communicate with each other. It’s also deployed to tell other critters to get off their fucking lawn. Or, in this case, tree, as they live a mainly arboreal existence.
Galagos are nocturnal, a life for which they’ve carved out an evolutionary niche. Their wide, round eyes give them night vision, while their bat-like ears help them hunt insects. They eat a lot of fruit as well, and the biggest staple of their diet? Tree gum, generally acacia tree gum. They’ll reportedly jump through hundreds of trees during nightly meal time to get their fill. They’re also incredibly springy buggers, able to jump vertically over two meters in one leap, bringing the life of an unsuspecting insect to an adorable, swift demise.
They’re territorial animals, and how exactly do they mark this territory? Piss. Being clever little pissers, they don’t just lift a leg like my dumbass dog who thinks he owns my couch now, no. They pee directly on their hands so that they can get that scent all over the place. You want some privacy, monkey piss on your hands will do it.
Though their population is fairly stable, they’re susceptible to quite a few predators, including snakes, owls, mongooses, and even domesticated cats and dogs. The exotic pet trade is also an ongoing threat because fucking hell, just look at them.
Should you get one as a pet because now that you’ve seen videos of someone else with their bush baby pet, your soul is infected with a yearning that you will never be free of?
No. My answer will always be no. This isn’t even out of an ideological “I’m against exotic pets in general” reason. Which I am, but this time it’s much more practical. It’s because these little galagids will love you and want you and your possessions to be theirs. So they’re going to mark goddamn everything in your house that they think is theirs with piss.
They’re gonna want to let you know your face is theirs. With their unnaturally cute pissy little hands.
This has been your Moment of Science, pretty sure most of you are looking up things like “galago diaper” and “does galago pee smell that bad really,” because goddamnit.
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