Sunda slow loris

Slow lorises lick sweet sap and nectar.

They also eat fruit and catch bugs with their hands.

Slow lorises have a sweet tooth. About a third of what they eat is sap and gum from trees, and about another third is nectar from flowers. Fruit makes up about a quarter.

To get sap, a loris bites through the bark with its sharp teeth and licks what oozes out. It grabs insects, spiders and flowers with its hands, and sometimes eats snails and bird eggs. It often sniffs its food before eating it.

The diet is dominated by exudates and nectar: sap and gum about 35 percent, nectar about 31 percent and fruit about 22 percent, with arthropods, snails, bird eggs and occasionally small vertebrates (New England Primate Conservancy; Animal Diversity Web). In Thailand lorises have eaten the giant African land snail.

Lorises gouge bark with their canines to start exudate flow, catch insects by hand, and pull food toward the mouth with one hand. Feeding peaks just after waking, between about 6 and 7 in the evening. Infants feed mostly on floral nectar.

Slow lorises have a special oil on their arms.

They use it to keep enemies away. Never touch a wild loris.

Slow lorises are among the very few venomous mammals. A gland on the inside of each elbow makes a strong-smelling oil. When a loris licks the gland, the oil mixes with its spit and becomes venom.

If a predator attacks, the loris tries to bite, and the bite can make even people very sick. Lorises also spread the oil on their fur, and mothers put it on their babies, to keep predators away. They use the oil's smell to leave messages, too.

Lorises are the only venomous primates. A brachial gland inside each elbow secretes an oily toxin; mixed with saliva, it produces a venomous bite that can kill small animals and cause festering wounds or anaphylactic shock in larger ones, including humans (New England Primate Conservancy). Animal Diversity Web notes it can be dangerous to people if untreated.

Grooming spreads the oil over the fur, and mothers coat infants before leaving them. The same secretion, often mixed with urine, is used for scent marking. Lorises do not give alarm calls to warn one another.

Slow lorises sleep all day.

At night they wake up and climb slowly to find food. They click to say hello.

Slow lorises are nocturnal: they are busy from sunset to sunrise. Before setting off, they clean their fur, then click as they climb to their feeding trees. They are less active on bright, moonlit nights.

They spend a lot of time alone, but a male, a female and their young share an area and may sleep near each other. In Thailand people call the slow loris "wind monkey", because it moves so quietly through the trees.

Activity runs from sunset to sunrise, with roughly 30 percent of time traveling, 25 percent feeding, about 25 percent foraging and 13 percent grooming; moonlight reduces activity. Lorises are largely solitary but form spatial groups of one adult female, one adult male and young; they scent mark but are not aggressively territorial, and they rarely reuse a sleeping site more than two nights running (New England Primate Conservancy).

Calls include whistles and short keckers in friendly contexts, alternating click calls, and snarls, grunts and screams in conflict; infants also make ultrasonic calls. Local names include kukang and, in Thailand, ling lom (wind monkey).

Slow lorises are in danger.

Forests are cut down, and people catch lorises to sell as pets. Lorises are wild animals, not toys.

The Sunda slow loris is Endangered. Forests are cleared for timber and palm oil plantations, and lorises are caught and sold as pets or used for photos with tourists. Videos of people tickling or holding lorises make the problem worse, because they make lorises look like pets.

Rescue centers care for lorises taken from traders, and teams like the Little Fireface Project study wild lorises and teach children about them. The best way to help is never to share or like videos of pet lorises.

The IUCN lists Nycticebus coucang as Endangered, with a decreasing and severely fragmented population (Nekaris, Poindexter and Streicher, assessed 2015, published 2020). Deforestation for timber and oil palm has fragmented habitat, and the population is reported to have halved over about 25 years (New England Primate Conservancy). Lorises are also shot as crop pests and hit by vehicles.

The illegal pet trade is a major threat: traders often pull lorises' teeth, causing infection and death, and toothless lorises cannot be released. Releases of other loris species into this species' range cause hybridization. It has been in CITES Appendix I since 2007; viral videos of handled lorises drive demand.