The Primate Tracker
Mary Blair combs the forests of Vietnam looking for endangered slow lorises
By Stephanie Warren | for ScienceWorld
Mary Blair waits for nightfall before she begins her work. She puts on her headlamp and trudges into the dark forest with her team. Blair is a primatologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. She studies primates like monkeys, apes, and the elusive creature she’s looking for in the Vietnamese forest—the slow loris.
Slow lorises are furry tree dwellers known for their large eyes and slow movements, which help them sneak up on the insects they eat. Vietnam is home to two known species of slow loris, the Bengal and the pygmy. Though both species are in danger of extinction, little is known about how many lorises are in the wild and how well those populations are surviving. That’s what Blair wants to find out.
What was it like looking for lorises in Vietnam?
Slow lorises are nocturnal, usually live by themselves, and are extremely quiet because they’re trying to avoid being eaten. So here I was, going out in the dark, trying to find animals that don’t want to be found—I was scared that I would never see one.
Did you have any luck?
Yes! The first time I saw one was the most amazing feeling. I was in the forest at night, walking very quietly with just three other people. We were wearing huge headlamps with red filters on them to preserve our night vision. I was scanning to the right, scanning to the left, and then all of a sudden I saw these two huge red eyes staring back at me. I thought, “Oh my gosh, that’s a loris!”
Lorises freeze when they’re frightened to avoid detection, so it just kept staring at me. My team took pictures and wrote down lots of data about the animal—like exactly where it was, what kind of tree it was in, and how high up it was.
How many lorises did you see?
We saw only one Bengal slow loris, which is really disheartening. We saw nine pygmy lorises. That’s similar to what scientists have recorded in the past. I’m planning to go back to Vietnam every year to continue collecting population data.
Why are lorises threatened?
Lorises are really cute animals with huge eyes, so people want to have them as pets. But what most people don’t realize is that the lorises are taken out of the wild and sold illegally at markets or smuggled into other countries.
And lorises aren’t good pets. It’s hard to feed them correctly—they need a diverse diet, including insects and tree sap. They also get diseases easily. On top of that, they have a toxic bite and mark their territory with a nasty scent.
If people knew that lorises don’t make good pets, and that the pet trade is putting them in danger, then demand would drop and wild loris populations might recover. If we can educate people, that would make a big difference.
This article originally appeared in the March 24, 2014 issue of ScienceWorld magazine. To find out more about ScienceWorld's great resources, click here.