Endangered
Pygmy slow loris
Xanthonycticebus pygmaeus
Pygmy slow loris is a loris in the family Lorisidae (order Primates) — Xanthonycticebus pygmaeus, recorded as Endangered.
Appearance
It occurs in a variety of forest habitats, among them tropical dry forests, semi-evergreen, and evergreen forests.
An adult can grow to around 19 to 23 cm (7.5 to 9.1 in) long and has a very short tail.
Range and habitat
The pygmy slow loris is nocturnal and arboreal, and is most commonly found in semi-evergreen, secondary, and mixed deciduous forests. It is distributed east of the Mekong River in Vietnam, eastern Cambodia, Laos, and Yunnan province in southern China. In Cambodia, this value ranged from 0 in Mondulkiri Protected Forest to 0.10 in Phnom Prich Wildlife Sanctuary.
In China, Daweishan, Fenshuiling, and Huanglianshan Reserve maintained approximately 80% of that country's population of the species in 2007.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
The pygmy slow loris is nocturnal, although it is least active on cold, moonlit nights and is generally active on dark nights, regardless of temperature. Females prefer to mate with males whose scent is familiar.
As a result, opportunities for mating are rare, and females rely heavily on scent to assess mate quality. The animal is nocturnal and arboreal, crawling along branches using slow movements in search of prey.
In crisis
Extensive hunting for traditional medicines is currently putting severe pressure on Cambodian populations. As of 2003, the forest cover had been reduced to 30% of its original area, with only 10% of the remaining forest consisting of the closed-canopy forests preferred by the pygmy slow loris. The population in China has been estimated at less than 500 individuals.
In the 1980s, one estimate placed the population at roughly 72,000 individuals, while another estimate from the same period placed the number around 600–700 individuals. The population in southern China has been reduced to a few hundred individuals, and by another report, may be locally extinct.
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 Pygmy slow loris, Wikidata item Q111446938. 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.
