Tarsiers: Creepy Little Ninjas

the tar CA looks like a little teddy bear who's seen way too much and with those giant eyes they definitely have hi I'm Daniel Defoe and you're watching Animalia logic tarsi a's are one of the smallest primates in the world ranging in size from 10 to 15 centimeters in length about the size of a grapefruit a really really creepy but cute grapefruit they weigh at most 150 grams there are eight species of tar ca and they can be found in the jungles of the Philippines Thailand and Malaysia their territory used to be much larger but deforestation has led to their extinction in much of their historic range pig meat rca's which until recently were thought to be extinct are the tiniest weighing only 57 grams and also the cutest or creepiest it's hard to say they get their name from their elongated tarsal bone basically their heel bone they also have elongated fingers with the third finger being about as long as their upper arm tarsi fingers are padded and they have claws on the second and third digits while they're slow creepy head turns might make you think that there are kin to sloths tarski eyes are actually lightning-fast jumpers they use their elongated legs to leap from tree to tree hunting prey they can jump 40 times their body length leaping up to 5 meters in a single bound they are the only exclusively carnivorous primates and eat mostly insects but will eat anything that they can catch including bats lizards and small birds due to this rather particular diet tarsi a's are incredibly difficult to keep in captivity tarsiers generally find captivity to be highly stressful and in several cases tarsi is attempting to escape captivity have bumped their heads on their cages cracks they're very thin skulls and died so in case you were wondering no you can't have one they mostly use their jumping ability to get away from predators and when hunting they're barely pounds farther than sixty centimeters up to a third of their prey is caught while in midair they're like tiny big eyed ninjas wait tiny big eyes pointy ears jumpy attack style guys tarsiers or Yoda Percy has spent most of their lives up in trees but not too far up they live at heights of one to two meters the tarsiers most distinctive feature are their giant eyes and they measure up to sixteen millimeters in diameter remember their bodies are only 15 centimeters long so the diameter of their eyes are roughly 10% of the length of their bodies each of their massive eyes are larger than their brains which unlike their eyes are rather tiny their eyes are so huge that they can't move them and like owls they have to move their entire heads in order to look around their necks are incredibly flexible and can rotate a full hundred and eighty degrees in either direction like if the Exorcist was cute tarsiers have such huge eyes so that they can see well at night but maybe not quit as well as you think if you shine a light near a cat's eye at night you'll see them seem to light up this is because they have a layer of crystal at the back of their eye that reflects light back to the retina it's called a taproom lucidum and it amplifies the light coming into a cat's eye giving light two chances to be absorbed by the retina before bouncing back out of the pupil tarsi a's don't have this instead like other primates they have a phobia which is a little pit in the retina that is packed with cones their fovea have an increased amount of photoreceptors and ganglion cells which function to greatly improve image quality perfect for sit and wait ambush hunters the reason that RCA's have different and are you ibly worst night vision than other nocturnal mammals is that tarses evolved from Journal or day active ancestors at some point along their evolutionary timeline tirsia switched from D Arnold to nocturnal and their eyes had to play catch-up you may have noticed that their eyes aren't their only exaggerated feature they also have large gremlin desk ears their large ears can move independently they give them excellent directional hearing and they can hear the very high-pitched sounds that insects make the philippine tarsier for example has a frequency cutoff of 75 to 90 kilohertz which is among the highest in the animal kingdom adult humans on the other hand have a cut-off of about 15 kilohertz and can't hear say a dog whistle which is in the range of around 30 kilohertz tarsiers can hear these super high frequencies due to a structure in their ear called the bony lamina the same thing that dolphins and bats use to communicate ultrasonically though tarsiers are unique because they've also developed long cochlea z' which allowed them to hear low frequencies as well unlike many other primates tarsiers are typically solitary occasionally tarski ice will form mated pairs which will share a territory but seldom interact though in some species these mated pairs will sing - what's with each other at the end of the night adorable despite being so small their gestation period is very long lasting six months for just one baby for comparison brown rats which are twice as large as at RCA just ate for just three weeks the result of this long gestation period is a baby tar CA that is born almost fully developed and large weighing 20 to 30 percent of their adult weight at birth that would be like a woman giving birth to a 17 kilo baby tarsiers are born able to climb with fur and open eyes at 1 month old they can jump and when they start jumping they start hunting but probably the most important thing to know about RCA's is don't ever feed them after midnight what animal should I check out next please let me know in the comments and be sure to subscribe for new episodes of Animal Logic every other week thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Animalogic

Views: 892,624

Keywords: animals, animal, logic, education, show, animalogic, crazy, ugly, weird, gross, beautiful, interesting, facts, animalsfacts, about, information, info, school, research, learn, learning, fun, easy, smart, tarsier, tarsiers, teddy, bear, bohol, phillipines, primate, creepy, cute, gremlin, yoda, star wars, strange, tiny, monkey, tarsal, nocturnal, eyes, night, big

Id: pgo14umnNV0

Length: 6min 35sec (395 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 13 2018