Pygmy slow loris

Appearance

Slow lorises have a round head, a narrow snout, large eyes, and a variety of distinctive coloration patterns that are species-dependent.

Their arms and legs are nearly equal in length, and their torso is long and flexible, allowing them to twist and extend to nearby branches.

Range and habitat

Slow lorises are found in South and Southeast Asia. Their collective range stretches from Northeast India through Indochina, east to the Sulu Archipelago (the small, southern islands of the Philippines), and south to the island of Java (among them Borneo, Sumatra, and many small nearby islands). The Bornean slow loris (N. Menagensis), found on Borneo and nearby islands, among them the Sulu Archipelago, and in 2012 was split into four distinct species (adding N. Bancanus, N. Borneanus, and N. Kayan).

Found in Southeast Asia and nearby areas, they range from Bangladesh and Northeast India in the west to the Sulu Archipelago in the Philippines in the east, and from Yunnan province in China in the north to the island of Java in the south.

GBIF currently lists 91 occurrence points. Those points follow where people logged the taxon — museum drawers and surveys included — not a closed range boundary.

Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.

Diet

Little is known about the social structure of slow lorises, but they generally spend most of the night foraging alone. In the absence of direct studies of the genus, primatologist Simon Bearder speculated that slow loris social behavior is similar to that of the potto, another nocturnal primate.

Slow lorises are slow and deliberate climbers, and often hold on to branches with three of their four limbs. The secretion from the arm contains a chemical related to cat allergen, but may be augmented by secondary toxins from the diet in wild individuals.

In crisis

Their toxic bite, once thought to be primarily a deterrent to predators, has been discovered to be primarily used in disputes within the species. Slow lorises move slowly and deliberately, making little or no noise, and when threatened, they stop moving and remain motionless. The two greatest threats to slow lorises are deforestation and the wildlife trade.

Slow lorises have lost a significant amount of habitat, with habitat fragmentation isolating small populations and obstructing biological dispersal. Even so, despite the lost habitat, their decline is most closely associated with unsustainable trade, either as exotic pets or for traditional medicine.

CITES lists this taxon on Appendix I. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.

Pygmy slow loris is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.

Sources

Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Slow loris, Wikidata item Q244239 and GBIF occurrence geography. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.