aerial view of Western's campus at night facing northwest, with golden lights surrounded by dark trees

Did you know that May 4 is not only Star Wars Day, but also International Tarsier D̶a̶y̶/Night?

Myron Shekelle

Myron Shekelle with two Philippine tarsiers at a government facility for captive tarsiers on Bohol Island. Photo courtesy of Myron Shekelle.

What is a tarsier, you ask? Tarsiers are small nocturnal primates with huge eyes. Most of us have never seen a tarsier in person because they do exceptionally badly in captivity. Some of us have seen them on "The Wild Kratts" episode, "Googly-Eye: The Night Guru." And tarsiers have such enormous popular appeal that they appear regularly in nature documentaries. I have worked with BBC, NatGeo, Animal Planet, and others to film tarsiers as their scientific consultant.

Sadly, tarsiers are considered little more than stupid freaks by many of my colleagues in primatology and biological anthropology. They are strange. Tarsiers have the largest relative eye size of any mammal, and the smallest relative brain size for any haplorrhine primate. Each eye is bigger than its brain. Their diet is unique among primates in that they only eat animals that they catch and kill, mostly insects, but also lizards, snakes, and even birds and bats. And they can turn their head around 180º in either direction, like an owl. Freaks? Yes. Stupid? Probably, compared to much brainier monkeys and apes. But because scientists treat them as just stupid freaks, we overlook what they really tell us.

That’s where I come in. I have been studying tarsiers for more than 30 years, in the wild, the lab, and at museums around the world. I have lived and worked in Indonesia for about half of my adult professional life. Like the Johnny Appleseed of tarsiers, I have taken my program of tarsier science, conservation, and education to every country that has tarsiers: Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Brunei. I have even taken a student from Western Washington University to Indonesia and have involved several others in my research in various ways.

Myron Shekelle, right, studying wild tarsiers at Gunung Tumpa, North Sulawesi, Indonesia, with Laura C. Matthews, who has a Ph.D in biological anthropology and was then a doctoral student at New York University. Courtesy of Myron Shekelle.

So, what is my message? It is this: tarsiers tell us about our human past, about our first evolutionary step away from the very first primate species, which lived more than 60 million years ago. And what was that first step? Ironically, it was a step into the light, diurnality.

Why are tarsiers nocturnal then? For some reason, a short time after our shared ancestor with tarsiers evolved a diurnally-adapted eye, tarsiers returned to their old nocturnal ways. But lacking structural adaptations for nocturnality, their eye had to become huge. Now you know the missing chapter from Rudyard Kipling’s book: how the tarsier got its eyes. 

But what does this have to do with May 4? Well, some people think that Yoda bears an uncanny resemblance to tarsiers and even speculate that tarsiers might have been the inspiration for how Yoda looks. You can examine the Photoshop mashup below and judge for yourself. In an effort to promote tarsiers, tarsier conservation, and tarsiers’ role as mascots, flagships, and umbrella species for conservation, we designate May 4 as International Tarsier Day/Night*.

So, May the Fourth be with you, and the TARSIERS!

*that’s not a typo. I’ll share with you the inner workings of our group. After we decided on May 4, some said, “you know, it really should be International Tarsier Night.”

— Dr. Myron Shekelle, Anthropology Department