Qualla: Nosy Mangabe

Nosy Mangabe: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Claudia Rahary Soa, CC BY-SA 4.0. After dark on Nosy Mangabe, a strange tapping drifts out of the trees. It is the sound of the aye-aye at work - a creature so peculiar that for most of its history people could not agree whether it was a rodent, a squirrel, or a curse. The aye-aye is in fact a lemur, the largest nocturnal primate on Earth, and this 520-hectare island a couple of kilometers off the town of Maroantsetra was set aside to keep it alive. Cloaked in dense rainforest and ringed by humid green slopes, Nosy Mangabe rises steeply from the calm of Antongil Bay, a self-contained ark holding one of the most misunderstood animals in the world.

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Image: Claudia Rahary Soa | CC BY-SA 4.0

Nosy Mangabe: The Hand of the Aye-Aye

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Frank Vassen from Brussels, Belgium, CC BY 2.0. The aye-aye finds its food by sound. It scuttles along a branch tapping the wood up to eight times a second, listening for the hollow echo of a grub tunnel beneath the bark. When it hears one, it gnaws a hole with ever-growing front teeth and reaches in with its most extraordinar...

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Image: Frank Vassen from Brussels, Belgium | CC BY 2.0

Nosy Mangabe: An Omen With a Finger

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Leyo, CC BY-SA 3.0 ch. For centuries many Malagasy communities regarded the aye-aye as a harbinger of evil, an omen of death whose appearance near a village could mean a person was fated to die. Some held that the only way to lift the curse was to kill the animal on sight. Combined with the loss of its...

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Image: Leyo | CC BY-SA 3.0 ch

Nosy Mangabe: Messages in the Rock

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Nosy Mangabe keeps human history too, etched literally in stone. On the island's west side, on a strand long known as the Plage des Hollandais - the Beach of the Dutchmen - more than forty inscriptions are carved into the shoreline boulders. They were cut between 1601 and 1657 by...

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Image: Public domain

Nosy Mangabe: Last Chance to See

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Frank Vassen, CC BY 2.0. The island has never had a permanent village; a simple campsite serves the biologists, researchers, and travelers who come to walk its forest trails. Besides the aye-aye, four other lemur species live here - the eastern woolly lemur, the white-fronted lemur, the black-and-white r...

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Image: Frank Vassen | CC BY 2.0