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Nocturnal Animals

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Nocturnal Animals

Nocturnal animals are amazing and wonderful creatures that come in many shapes and sizes and from all parts of the animal kingdom. What is a nocturnal animal? Nocturnality is described as an animal behavior in which the animal is particularly active during the night and twilight hours. Everyone thinks of bats or owls when they think of nocturnal animals but there are many animals that you would not normally consider like hermit crabs, catfish, hamsters, and the koala. There are even some animals you may have never heard of such as Tarsiers, the binturong (or asain bear cat), numbats, or octodons. Join us as we introduce some amazing and wonderful nocturnal animals.

Tarsier

All tarsier species are nocturnal in their habits, but like many nocturnal organisms some individuals may show more or less activity during the daytime. Unlike many nocturnal vertebrates, however, tarsiers lack a light-reflecting area (tapetum lucidum) of the eye and have a fovea.

The tarsier's brain is different from other primates in terms of the arrangement of the connections between the two eyes and the lateral geniculate nucleus, which is the main region of the thalamus that receives visual information. The sequence of cellular layers receiving information from the ipsilateral (same side of the head) and contralateral (opposite side of the head) eyes in the lateral geniculate nucleus distinguishes tarsiers from lemurs, lorises, and monkeys, which are all similar in this respect. Some neuroscientists suggested that "this apparent difference distinguishes tarsiers from all other primates, reinforcing the view that they arose in an early, independent line of primate evolution