A primate that scientists had not reliably documented for close to 100 years has turned up in an unexpected place: not deep inside untouched rainforest, but in gardens, farmland and along roads across parts of Indonesia.
The animal is a slow loris, a group of small, nocturnal primates famous for a trait almost unique among mammals u2014 and entirely unique among primates. Slow lorises are venomous. They produce a secretion from a gland near the elbow which, when mixed with saliva, can cause painful wounds and, in rare cases, severe allergic reactions in humans. It is thought to serve as a defence against predators and as a weapon in disputes with rivals of the same species.
For decades, the population in question was known only from a handful of historic museum specimens and old field notes. With no confirmed sightings for generations, it had slipped into the category researchers grimly refer to as “lost to science” u2014 species that have not been formally recorded for years or decades, and whose continued survival is uncertain.
The rediscovery suggests the animal was not so much absent as overlooked. Slow lorises are extraordinarily difficult to survey. They are active only after dark, move slowly and deliberately through the canopy, and freeze rather than flee when disturbed. Finding them generally requires walking transects at night with a torch and watching for the distinctive orange shine of eyes reflecting light back from the forest. Surveys of this kind are time-consuming, and in many parts of Indonesia they have simply never been carried out systematically.
Perhaps the most striking element of the find is where the animals were located. Rather than being confined to remote protected areas, they were encountered in human-dominated landscapes: village gardens, plantation edges, patches of secondary growth, and trees lining roads. That is less surprising than it may sound. Slow lorises feed heavily on tree gum, nectar and insects, resources that can be abundant in cultivated areas with fruit and flowering trees. Some loris populations elsewhere in Southeast Asia are known to persist in similar mosaics of farmland and forest fragments.
But proximity to people brings serious risks. Lorises are among the most heavily trafficked primates in the world, taken from the wild for the illegal pet trade and for use in traditional medicine. Captured animals often have their teeth clipped or pulled out u2014 a crude attempt to neutralise their venomous bite u2014 which frequently proves fatal. Viral videos of “cute” pet lorises being tickled have been blamed for fuelling demand internationally.
Animals living near roads face additional dangers. Because lorises travel through connected branches rather than crossing open ground, gaps created by roads and cleared land can isolate populations and force them onto the tarmac, where they are vulnerable to vehicles. Electrocution on power lines is another documented hazard for the group.
Rediscoveries like this one are a reminder of how much remains unknown about the biodiversity of the Indonesian archipelago, a region of thousands of islands where species can be separated by narrow stretches of water and where many small mammals have been studied only superficially.
The immediate task now is to establish how many of these lorises survive, how widely they are distributed, and whether the landscapes in which they were found can support them in the long term. A species returning from presumed oblivion is good news. Ensuring it does not disappear again u2014 this time for real u2014 is the harder problem. Read More
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