As the world teeters on ecological collapse, it’s occasionally nice to hear that an animal that was once thought to have gone extinct was just really good at hiding. Take the Bangka slow loris, an extremely slow primate that lives in trees and is also venomous.
For years, it had been considered critically endangered, maybe even fully extinct, as the last time any scientific team saw one was back in the 1930s. But it’s back, and according to new research published in Spixiana, there are at least 90 of them hanging out on the island of Bangka, off the southern coast of Sumatra.
Scientists thought this nocturnal tree-dweller was gone, but local residents and Indonesia’s Alobi Wildlife Rescue Center knew better. They’d been looking into the loris’ gigantic glassy eyes for about a decade, as Alobi workers had been spotting the loris since about 2015. As researchers assumed these slow-footed creatures had been lost to time, they’d actually been hanging out in backyards and getting nearly hit by cars. What the neighborhood cats and raccoons are to your neck of the woods, the slow loris was to Bangka.
Toxic Armpits and Secondary Tongues
“Slow” isn’t just a nickname. It’s a pretty good description of the creature’s whole demeanor. You’d think it would make them a great snack for predators, but that’s where its venomous qualities come into play. It secretes a toxin from armpit glands that it licks to mix it with its saliva and then delivers a venomous bite capable of putting a grown human into anaphylactic shock. It’s also got a specialized “toothcomb” for gouging bark and a secondary tongue underneath its main tongue that it uses to clean the toothcomb.
The species evaded scientific detection for nearly a century even though it’s only about an hour away from Jakarta. As for why researchers assumed it had gone extinct, it’s the usual explanation: the man-made horrors of obliterating its habitat to mine tin and to plant palm oil plantations so your chocolate bar is smooth and creamy.
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