Philippine Tarsier, who is he? Funny animal tarsier Types of tarsier and their habitat.

A look like no other animal, super long fingers, velvety fur, good reflexes to catch insects or even birds - tarsiers are an unusual genus of primates! Here are a few facts that make tarsier an absolutely amazing animal.

Main distinguishing feature Tarsier is their eyes. They have the largest eyes relative to body size among mammals. The diameter of each eyeball is about 16 mm and is larger than the brain, but large eyes are very important for tarsiers, since they are nocturnal animals. The eyes are so large that they are unable to turn them, but instead this work performed by the neck. Tarsiers can turn their necks a full 180 degrees in each direction, like the owls or tarsier in the photo below:

They use this ability to silently wait for prey. Tarsiers are completely carnivorous primates. Taste preferences depend on the species, but everyone has one common feature: They do not eat plant foods at all. Tarsiers hunt insects, reptiles (lizards and snakes), frogs, birds and even bats. Even though they are small and cute, they are quite ferocious predators, which can wait for hours for their prey and catch birds during the flight.

Photo: Khoroshunova Olga/Shutterstock

Tarsiers get their name because of their extremely long hind limbs, which help them climb trees well. They have quite a long tail, and the hind legs are twice as long as the head. Tarsiers can jump up to 40 times their body length, flying more than 4 meters in a single jump.

Photo: Ekaterina Pokrovsky/Shutterstock

They don't jump around the treetops as you might expect. Instead, they tend to live 1-2 meters above the ground. Tarsiers need large quantities leaf cover, especially for sleeping, as in the photo below:

All tarsier species are vulnerable and endangered due to habitat loss and fragmentation. Without significant efforts to conserve their habitat, they are undoubtedly at risk of extinction. The tarsier's special needs for both habitat and food production make captive breeding programs nearly impossible. Only about 50 percent of tarsiers survive in captivity. Preserving their habitat is their only hope for salvation.

Classification

Previously, tarsiers were classified as an obsolete suborder of prosimians; today they are considered as one of the families of dry-nosed monkeys ( Haplorhini). In the Eocene and Oligocene, there was a family close to tarsiers called Omomyidae, whose representatives lived in Eurasia and North America. They are considered the ancestors of tarsiers.

Depending on your point of view, there are from three to eight species of tarsier. While five of them can be considered subspecies, the following have undisputed species status:

Spreading

Notes

Links

Tarsiers in culture and art on the portal Philippines.RU

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Scarface (film)
Glussky district of Mogilev region

See what “Tarsiers” are in other dictionaries:

tarsiers- a family of prosimians of the primate order. Body length up to 16 cm, tail up to 27.5 cm. Fingers are long, with widened pads at the ends. The eyes are large and glow in the dark. 3 species, on the islands of the Malayan arch., all in the Red Book of the International Union... ... Big Encyclopedic Dictionary

tarsiers- ov; pl. (unit tarsier, a; m.). A family of prosimians of the primate order with long fingers and eyes that glow in the dark. * * * tarsiers are a family of prosimians of the order of primates. Body length up to 16 cm, tail up to 27.5 cm. Fingers long, with... ... encyclopedic Dictionary

Tarsiers- (Tarsiidae) family of mammals of the primate order. The body length of males is 8.5-16 cm, the tail length is 13.5-27.5 cm, they weigh 80-150 g. The head is large, very mobile: it can rotate almost 360°. The ears are large, the muzzle is short, flattened,... ... Great Soviet Encyclopedia

The tarsier genus is divided into at least three species.

Classification

Depending on your point of view, there are from three to eight species of tarsier. While five of them can be considered subspecies, the following have undisputed species status:

Spreading

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Notes

Excerpt characterizing Tarsiers

Pierre looked at him silently.
– Comment dites vous asile en allemand? [How do you say shelter in German?]
- Asile? - Pierre repeated. – Asile en allemand – Unterkunft. [Asylum? Refuge - in German - Unterkunft.]
– Comment dites vous? [How do you say?] - the captain asked incredulously and quickly.
“Unterkunft,” Pierre repeated.
“Onterkoff,” said the captain and looked at Pierre with laughing eyes for several seconds. – Les Allemands sont de fieres betes. “N"est ce pas, monsieur Pierre? [These Germans are such fools. Isn’t it so, Monsieur Pierre?],” he concluded.
- Eh bien, encore une bouteille de ce Bordeau Moscovite, n "est ce pas? Morel, va nous chauffer encore une pelilo bouteille. Morel! [Well, another bottle of this Moscow Bordeaux, isn’t it? Morel will warm us another bottle. Morel !] – the captain shouted cheerfully.
Morel served candles and a bottle of wine. The captain looked at Pierre in the light, and he was apparently struck by the upset face of his interlocutor. Rambal, with sincere grief and sympathy on his face, approached Pierre and bent over him.
“Eh bien, nous sommes tristes, [What is it, are we sad?],” he said, touching Pierre’s hand. – Vous aurai je fait de la peine? “Non, vrai, avez vous quelque chose contre moi,” he asked again. – Peut etre rapport a la situation? [Perhaps I have upset you? No, really, don’t you have something against me? Maybe regarding the position?]
Pierre did not answer, but looked affectionately into the Frenchman’s eyes. This expression of participation pleased him.
- Parole d"honneur, sans parler de ce que je vous dois, j"ai de l"amitie pour vous. Puis je faire quelque chose pour vous? Disposez de moi. C"est a la vie et a la mort. C"est la main sur le c?ur que je vous le dis, [Honestly, not to mention what I owe you, I feel friendship for you. Can I do something for you? Use me. This is for life and death. I tell you this with my hand on my heart,” he said, hitting his chest.
“Merci,” said Pierre. The captain looked intently at Pierre the same way he looked when he learned what the shelter was called in German, and his face suddenly lit up.
- Ah! dans ce cas je bois a notre amitie! [Ah, in that case, I drink to your friendship!] - he shouted cheerfully, pouring two glasses of wine. Pierre took the glass he had poured and drank it. Rambal drank his, shook Pierre's hand again and leaned his elbows on the table in a thoughtfully melancholy pose.
“Oui, mon cher ami, voila les caprices de la fortune,” he began. – Qui m"aurait dit que je serai soldat et capitaine de dragons au service de Bonaparte, comme nous l"appellions jadis. Et cependant me voila a Moscou avec lui. “Il faut vous dire, mon cher,” he continued in the sad, measured voice of a man who is about to tell a long story, “que notre nom est l"un des plus anciens de la France. [Yes, my friend, here is the wheel of fortune. Who said I wish I would be a soldier and captain of dragoons in the service of Bonaparte, as we used to call him. However, here I am in Moscow with him. I must tell you, my dear... that our name is one of the most ancient in France.]
And with the easy and naive frankness of a Frenchman, the captain told Pierre the history of his ancestors, his childhood, adolescence and manhood, all his relatives and property, family relationships. “Ma pauvre mere [“My poor mother.”] played, of course, important role in this story.
– Mais tout ca ce n"est que la mise en scene de la vie, le fond c"est l"amour? L"amour! “N"est ce pas, monsieur; Pierre?” he said, perking up. “Encore un verre.” [But all this is only an introduction to life, its essence is love. Love! Isn’t it so, Monsieur Pierre? Another glass. ]
Pierre drank again and poured himself a third.
- Oh! Les femmes, les femmes! [ABOUT! women, women!] - and the captain, looking at Pierre with oily eyes, began to talk about love and his love affairs. There were a lot of them, which was easy to believe, looking at the smug, Beautiful face officer and the enthusiastic animation with which he spoke about women. Despite the fact that all of Rambal's love stories had that dirty character in which the French see the exceptional charm and poetry of love, the captain told his stories with such sincere conviction that he alone experienced and knew all the delights of love, and described women so temptingly that Pierre listened to him with curiosity.
It was obvious that l "amour, which the Frenchman loved so much, was neither that lower and simple kind of love that Pierre once felt for his wife, nor that inflated by himself romantic love which he felt for Natasha (Rambal despised both types of love equally - one was l'amour des charretiers, the other l'amour des nigauds) [the love of cabbies, the other was the love of fools.]; l'amour, which the Frenchman worshiped, consisted mainly in the unnaturalness of relationships with women and in a combination of ugliness that gave the main charm to the feeling.
So the captain told the touching story of his love for one charming thirty-five-year-old marquise and at the same time for a charming innocent seventeen-year-old child, the daughter of a charming marquise. The struggle of generosity between mother and daughter, which ended with the mother, sacrificing herself, offering her daughter as a wife to her lover, even now, although a long-past memory, worried the captain. Then he told one episode in which the husband played the role of a lover, and he (the lover) played the role of a husband, and several comic episodes from souvenirs d'Allemagne, where asile means Unterkunft, where les maris mangent de la choux croute and where les jeunes filles sont trop blondes [memories of Germany, where husbands eat cabbage soup and where young girls are too blond.]
Finally, the last episode in Poland, still fresh in the captain’s memory, which he recounted with quick gestures and a flushed face, was that he saved the life of one Pole (in general, in the captain’s stories, the episode of saving a life occurred incessantly) and this Pole entrusted him with his charming wife (Parisienne de c?ur [Parisian at heart]), while he himself entered the French service. The captain was happy, the charming Polish woman wanted to run away with him; but, moved by generosity, the captain returned his wife to the husband, saying to him: “Je vous ai sauve la vie et je sauve votre honneur!” [I saved your life and save your honor!] Having repeated these words, the captain rubbed his eyes and shook himself, as if driving away the weakness that had seized him at this touching memory.

If not for them, the Philippine Bohol would remain just one of the palm and coconut islands with azure waves and colorful fish in reef gardens; True, there are also chocolate hills here - millions of years old Coral reefs, due to geological uplift, found themselves on land so quickly that the sedimentary layer did not have time to “mask” them. It turned out to be an interesting place - 1300 identical hills lie evenly, like truffles in a box; but not all tourists are so interested in geological natural monuments, right?
No, Bohol would never have become world famous if it weren’t for them – the tarsiers.
The name sounds courageous, as if we are talking about medieval knights; but in fact they are tiny - the body is no more than ten centimeters in length - and the tarsier (this is the Russian version of the name) looks like a brownie from the cartoon. Although there is a version that the image of Master Yoda from “ Star Wars» inspired precisely by tarsiers.
Tarsiers are nocturnal animals; in the dark they hunt locusts and other small animals, making jumps several meters long in the treetops (relate them to body size!) and eating all kinds of insect pests in the amount of 10% of their own weight during the night; and during the day they doze in an embrace with some twig, touchingly folding their tiny long-fingered hands under their chin and covering their unrealistically huge eyes (in terms of the ratio of the size of their eyes to everything else, tarsiers are record holders among all living creatures, and as such are listed in the Guinness Book). The tarsier, covered with silky gray-brown fur, has facial muscles on its “face”; it can change the expression of its muzzle, which makes the animal very “human”. At the same time, their appearance is touching, completely infantile, and it is not surprising that these cute little animals are such an effective bait for tourists.
Scientists first described the Philippine tarsier at the beginning of the 18th century, calling it Cercopithecus luzonis minimus (“tiny Luzon monkey”). Then the great systematizer Carl Linnaeus renamed the animal Simia syrichta (“Syricht’s monkey”), a little later the tarsier was named by the general generic name Tarsius syrichta (“Syricht’s tarsier”), and this name has been preserved to the present day. Tarsiers (from the word tarsus - ankle) - have lived on Earth for at least 45 million years, they are one of the oldest animal species. They were once found in Europe, Asia, and North America, and now they can only be found in remote corners of the planet - for example, in the Philippines. But even in these parts there are few of them left: local residents, on the one hand, they were afraid of tarsiers, considering them to be pets of forest spirits (the proof was the head, “not attached to the body” (since the head of a tarsier can rotate almost 360°)), but miraculously these fears did not prevent them from killing tarsiers and eat. But main factor rapid decline in the number of tarsier - destruction of its habitat.
For quite a long time this problem did not attract the attention of the Philippine public, which was occupied with much more pressing political and economic problems; But the era of tourism arrived, and it turned out that the charming living symbol of Bohol could very well bring in money. And this discovery, like any other, had ambiguous consequences...
In 1997, the Philippine Tarsier Foundation Inc., www.tarsierfoundation.org, was founded on the island of Bohol in Tagbilaran. The Foundation acquired an area of 7.4 hectares in the department of Corella in the province of Bohol, where the Tarsier Center was established. The question is being raised about purchasing an additional 20 hectares to expand the protected zone.
In the Center, about a hundred tarsiers are kept behind a high fence; they are fed, reproduced, and the animals are shown to visitors. Tarsiers are free to leave the territory of the Center, which some of them do at night, climbing over the fence into the neighboring forest, returning in the morning. However, for the most part, tarsiers are homebodies, and each is committed to his favorite tree. This greatly simplifies the task for the Center’s guides: our guide, a cheerful young guy, confidently leads us along a path laid from one “Tarsier” tree to another, and almost always the owner of the tree is in place. Miniature “houses” (more like awnings) have been made for the tarsiers in the trees, and the tarsiers willingly use them, hiding under the roof from both rain and bright lights. sun rays, and (as the guide explains) from enemies: after all, many would not mind snacking on the tasty little tarsier, from birds of prey to snakes and feral cats. But the house is open, both a snake and a cat can easily fit into it - I ask; By the time she gets in, the tarsier will have time to escape - that’s protection, the guide replies, and, musical, like all Filipinos, he continues the aria from the Titanic, decorating it with magnificent flourishes to his own taste... But we don’t let the guy play music to his heart’s content: you’re a guide , come on, tell me!
And he says that the maximum recorded life expectancy of the Philippine tarsier is 13.5 years (in captivity), that the animal weighs 120-130 grams, that tarsiers sometimes create “married” pairs, that the female carries a baby for as long as six months, that the only cub appears on the light is quite developed, and moves with the mother, clinging to the fur on her stomach, then moves onto her back, and after a month he already knows how to jump.
A tour of the Center, during which we pass close to one and a half dozen tarsiers, freely located on their trees, leaves us with a wonderful impression!
But not everyone watches tarsiers here at the Center. Along with the state center, where tarsiers cannot be touched, there are many private shops where tarsiers can be touched. And the point is that the tarsier is an untamed animal, from regular touch human hands he dies very quickly, as in general from increased human attention (loud sounds, camera flashes, etc.). He does not tolerate cages at all - he can smash his head to death on the bars... I read reviews on the Internet from compatriots who visited Bohol: “... but in the state center they don’t let you touch the tarsiers, but the main thing for us is to touch them! And so we went there and there, and there, for a reasonable fee, we cuddled the cute little tarsier as much as we wanted..."
This is the review of another sentimental “blonde”. It would be good if she didn’t know that by squeezing the little Tarsier, she took part in his murder through slow torture. That he will soon die, and the businessman will put the next tiny suicide bomber into the hands of such “touch lovers.”
Or maybe she knew, but that didn’t stop her? “The main thing for us is to touch!” Just like under water, most “dummies” divers grab with their hands every coral they like, and it is useless to explain that the skin oil from your fingers is a “trace of death” on the stomata coral polyps... Why is there such a strong latent desire in people to destroy - to “consume” - what is seen as beautiful?
It is also not very clear why the state does not stop such a tarsier business - apparently, no suitable law has been issued? Now in the markets of Manila, a tarsier costs about 6,000 pesos, and in many restaurants on the Loboc River, tarsiers are openly kept in captivity to attract visitors... But the tarsier has been declared a specially protected animal, and government funding is allocated for its conservation...
A date with a tarsier leaves an ambivalent feeling. As Carlito Pizarras, a Bohol resident and tarsier advocate known as Tarsier Man, says: “Maybe my children and grandchildren won’t see them at all.”

Monkey tarsier belong to the genus Primates, and they differ from all their relatives in their exotic appearance. It is thanks to their unusual appearance that they became heroes of many films and cartoons. Even by photo it's clear that tarsier, a very small animal whose body weight may not exceed 160 grams.

Males weigh more than females. They are about 10-16 cm tall and can easily fit in your hand. In addition, these small animals have a tail of 30 cm and long paws, with the help of which they repel.

On all limbs they have long, adapted fingers with thickening at the tips, which allow such animals to easily move through the trees.

The length of their jump can be a couple of meters due to the special structure of their legs. Compared to the whole body, the head of these animals has much larger size than the whole body. It is also connected to the spine vertically, which allows you to turn your head almost 360˚.

Usually Philippine tarsier has large ears that are capable of hearing sounds with frequencies up to 90 kHz. The ears and tail are not covered with hair, but the rest of the body is covered.

There are facial muscles on its face that enable the animal to change its facial expression. These animals have lived on Earth for 45 million years and are the oldest animal species in the Philippine Islands.

At one time they could be found in Europe and Northern Europe. But now their population has greatly decreased and they can only be seen in remote corners of the planet.

A unique feature that this animal has is its large eyes. Their diameter can be up to 16 mm. In the dark they glow and allow him to see perfectly.

The entire body of the animal is covered with short, dark hair. It is precisely because of their peculiarity that many people want to purchase such animals for themselves.

To tarsier buy, you need to go to their habitats, where local guides and hunters can offer a suitable option. The habitat of such animals is Southeast Asia, and more specifically Sumatra and the Philippine Islands.

Character and lifestyle

Most often they live in dense forests, in trees. It is on the tree that they spend most time. These animals are very shy, so during the day they hide in dense foliage. But at night they become dexterous hunters who go out hunting to make money.

They move through trees by jumping, but in this case their tail serves as balancing. They lead a solitary lifestyle and are nocturnal in their lifestyle.

Tarsiers very rarely descend to the ground and are constantly found on tree branches. In a day, this small animal can cover up to 500 meters, bypassing the place where it lives. When morning comes, they hide in a tree and sleep.

If this animal is unhappy with something, then it can emit a very thin squeak, which a person cannot always hear. With his voice, he informs other individuals that he is there. He can also communicate with other individuals using ultrasound at a frequency of 70 kHz. But the human ear can only perceive 20 kHz.

Tarsier food

Usually, pygmy tarsier feeds on small vertebrates and insects. Unlike all other relatives, they eat only animal food, but do not eat plants.

During the hunt, they are in a wait-and-see position for a long time until the prey itself approaches it or is at a distance of one jump.

With their hands, a tarsier can hold a lizard, and any other insect, which they immediately eat, decapitating them with their teeth. They also consume water by lapping it up like a dog.

In a day, a tarsier can eat approximately 10% of its weight in food. In addition, he has many natural enemies, which include birds (owls). The greatest damage is caused to them by people and feral cats.

People have tried many times to tame this animal, but an animal born in captivity wants space, which is why tarsiers have repeatedly attempted to escape. They are very freedom-loving animals, but people try to take that away from them.

Usually price on tarsier It depends on the animal itself and the place where it will be purchased. The lowest price will be in close proximity to their habitat.

Reproduction and lifespan

Tarsiers are considered loners and can only be seen in pairs during the breeding season. According to some sources, a male can date several females at once, as a result of which only one baby can be born.

On average, a female's pregnancy lasts about six months, and the child is immediately born as a very developed animal. He grabs his mother's stomach and moves through the trees with her. During the first seven weeks of life, he drinks mother's milk, and later switches to animal food.

Today these animals are in great danger. After all, man not only destroys the forests where they live, but also tries to make tarsier lemur pets. Very often they succeed in doing this, but in captivity the animals quickly die.

The female tarsier has several nipples, but when feeding her baby she uses only the breast pair. After a month, after birth, the cub can jump in trees. The father does not take any part in raising the child. Tarsiers do not make nests for their babies, since the mother constantly carries the child with her.

The animal reaches sexual maturity after one year of life. After one year they leave their mother and begin to live independently. Average, goggle-eyed tarsier has a lifespan of about 10 years.

The life record for this animal in captivity was 13.5 years. They are the size of an adult's palm and spend most of their time sleeping. Every year their number decreases, which is why this animal is protected in order to save this unusual species.

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