SciCafe: The Search for Slow Lorises

Mary Blair (Director, Biodiversity Informatics Research, AMNH):

Before I get into slow lorises, which is what we're going to talk about at length, I want to tell you a little bit about the research center that I work in here at the museum. It's called the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation, and we work to leverage museum science, technologies and collections to forward and advance research to conserve biodiversity around the globe. And we do that by transforming diverse knowledge from different sources and perspectives into action for biodiversity conservation.

This is one of the places we work. This is a shot from Vietnam. This is Crocodile Lake in Southern Vietnam in Cat Tien National Park. I've only been working in Vietnam since 2011 when I first came to the museum, but museum scientists have been working there for more than 20 years, describing more than 50 new species and helping to support establishment of protected areas to conserve biodiversity.

In addition to lovely landscapes like these, there are a lot of amazing species that are unique to Vietnam because of its special geography, and we call these endemic species. I'm going to show you a slide show of some of the favorite things that I've seen over the years in Vietnam.

This is a Calotes lizard, or a changeable lizard. It will change colors before your eyes. I just almost stepped on this guy just walking around in the same national park, in Cat Tien National Park.

This is a Malayan pit viper. Gorgeous pink snake. I'm a huge snake fan, and this is one of the most beautiful ones, in my opinion.

This is a sunbird, an olive sunbird. These are the hummingbirds of Asia. They also drink flower nectar, and they're gorgeous and very small.

And this, this is a douc langur, or a douc monkey, we would say. As a primatologist, I love working in Vietnam. There are 27 different species of primate. That's a lot for one country to have. And a lot of those primates are unique, they're endemic, to Vietnam.

This is a juvenile male red-shanked douc, and even though he's still a juvenile, he's got a big gut, as you can see there. He uses a multi-chambered stomach to ferment mature leaves, so that's why he has such a big gut.

Before I show you more of my favorite primates in Vietnam, let's just get on the same page about what a primate is.

This is another primate, another endemic-to-Vietnam primate, the Con Dao macaque.

And here are some other primates you might be familiar with. This is a gorilla, right? A primate. Everybody's cool with that, right? This is a howler monkey. And this is my Uncle Ernie.

[laughter] Hi, Uncle Ernie. I love you.

So, I'm a primate. Uncle Ernie's a primate. All of you are primates. And what do we have in common? We have forward-facing eyes. We have relatively short noses. We have toenails and fingernails instead of claws. We have opposable thumbs, which are great for grasping. And we have long, slow lives for our body size compared to most other mammals, so we live a long time. And we have only one or two babies at a time. Primates are also highly intelligent, have highly social behaviors, often live in groups and like to take care of each other.

So, those are primates.

And primates are very important to their forest communities, and this is one reason why. I'm wondering if you guys have any idea what this is a photo of. This is feces, various feces that I have collected with my own hands over the years from various monkeys. And I think you can see that it's full of seeds. Primates like to eat fruit—I love to eat fruit—and as the seeds pass through our guts, they're actually more able to germinate and turn into plants.

So, primates do an amazing service for their forest community, and they're really important to overall biodiversity.

Let's talk about biodiversity for a minute, too. By "biodiversity," I mean the variety of life on earth at all of its levels from genes to ecosystems and the processes and cycles that maintain that diversity. And biodiversity is important to us. It's important to people. Why is that? It provides us with food, shelter, fuel, medicines. It allows for pollination and seed disbursal, so primates would be an example of that service. Other services it provides: climate regulation, water purification, nutrient cycling, agricultural pest control. Bats, for example, are really great at pest control for a lot of agricultural products.

And in addition, there are cultural reasons why we might value biodiversity. We might have spiritual or religious reasons to value a certain place or area, and biodiversity might actually shape who we think we are and our relationships to one another.

So, there are a lot of reasons why biodiversity is important to us. It's important to our health and our wellbeing.

Now that we're on the same page about that, back to awesome primates that I like.

Okay, this is an amazing, amazing animal. This is the Tonkin snub-nosed monkey. It is one of the most endangered animals in the world. There are only 250 animals left, and they're all in isolated groups in northern Vietnam.

And finally, we come to the slow loris. This is a pygmy loris, and you can already see there's some things that are different about it compared to the other primates we've been looking at. It's smaller. This picture is taken at night. Lorises are the only nocturnal primates in Vietnam, "nocturnal" meaning they're more active at night than during the day. The rest of the primates are diurnal, or active during the day.

And lorises are also different in that they're a little more solitary than the other primates. They're at low densities. They're very few and far between. They prefer to forage alone, although they do still have some social behaviors. And that makes them difficult for researchers to find. In fact, we have a lot less information, there's been less research done, on this group compared to the other primates in Vietnam.

So, we need to learn more, but what we do know is that they're strongly threatened by illegal wildlife trade.

These are the two different species of loris that are in Vietnam. There are eight or nine or probably more species across South and Southeast Asia, but these are the two in Vietnam. On the left, we have the pygmy, which is a smaller loris and it's more orangey, and on the right is the Bengal loris, which is fuzzier. You can see that she, this one, has fuzzier ears, and it's about twice the size actually. It's hard to tell from the photo.

These are both endangered with extinction because of illegal wildlife trade. That's the major threat to these animals.

What is the wildlife trade? By "wildlife trade," I mean use of wildlife or wildlife products by humans for human consumption. This trade, it's the third-largest black market in the world behind the arms and drugs trades. It's extremely profitable, and it threatens biodiversity. It's also a threat to global development, human health and security.

Here, I'm showing you, in case you're curious, a photo of snake wine from Vietnam. These are snakes in alcoholic rice wine, and this is sold as a medicinal alcohol.

Vietnam is a particularly important place to be asking questions about the wildlife trade. It's somewhere where trade continues to be rampant at very high levels, even though there's a lot of recent efforts by the local government and by international governments to try and control the trade better. It just keeps going, and going strong.

Vietnam is also a thoroughfare country from other parts of Southeast Asia for trade to East Asia and beyond, so because of its geographic location, it's also a really important place to think about wildlife trade.

And wildlife trade is a major problem for lorises. They're traded for different kinds of medicines, as food, but as you probably noticed, they're very cute and actually one of the biggest demands for them in trade is as exotic pets. You may have seen them on YouTube eating rice balls, being tickled. It is very likely that those animals were obtained illegally. Most of those videos come out of Russia and Japan, which is well outside of their known range, and it is illegal to trade in lorises across borders.

Unfortunately these animals can be sold for as much as $6,000 or $8,000 in Japan. The demand is very high.

But they don't make very good pets. Number one, they're poisonous, and I don't have time to talk about that in the talk, but I really hope that one of you asks me about it in the question-and-answer session. So, not a good idea to have a poisonous pet in general.

In addition, they eat a very diverse and difficult diet for someone to maintain in captivity. They eat a lot of tree gum and sap, and they also eat a lot of insects and small vertebrates. They don't eat bananas and rice.

Okay. Now, in addition to a threat to lorises, wildlife trade also poses a threat to us, to humans, and I'm going to give you three reasons why. The first is the threat of zoonotic disease transmission. A zoonotic disease is a disease that is passed between animals and humans, and these types of diseases are responsible for 75 percent of current emerging diseases of threat to humans today. So, think about Ebola, Zika, West Nile; these are all zoonotic diseases. All of the scary ones are zoonotic.

And here, I'm showing you a map put together by the USAID Predict Project. This is a map of predicted hot spots of zoonotic disease transmission produced by a global sampling of particular species that are most at risk to transmit diseases to humans. That includes a lot of mammals like bats and primates and also birds, and those groups are also highly traded in the wildlife trade. And here, the red is showing the biggest hot spots where transmission is most likely. The arrow is showing you Vietnam, so it's clearly a hot spot.

And here, I'm showing you alerts for confiscations in wildlife trade at major ports just in the last year, and a bigger, redder circle means more confiscations. And again, Southeast Asia and Vietnam is a hot spot for wildlife trade.

So, predicted zoonotic disease transmission overlaps with hot spots of wildlife trade, and it's likely that it makes the hot spots even hotter.

The second reason why wildlife trade is a threat to humans is that it poses economic and security risks. Unfortunately huge transnational criminal networks are a part of wildlife trade because there's higher payoff and lower risks than arms and drugs trades. And unfortunately that means they're willing to take risking human lives as a result of this trade. Over a thousand protected-area rangers have been killed in the last ten years due to these criminal syndicates.

In addition, communities that depend on wildlife, for example, for tourism revenue, they have economic risks and losses because of wildlife trade problems.

And lastly, as I mentioned before, biodiversity is important to us as humans. It's important to our health and our wellbeing, and wildlife trade is a threat to species and ecosystems and biodiversity at a systematic scale. So, it's also a problem for us because of that.

All right. On to what I have been doing in response to these issues.

A few years ago, with our long-time partners in Vietnam we came together to recognize that there are major knowledge gaps about slow lorises and their biology and that wildlife trade is a major threat to them and many other species in Vietnam. So, we set out to understand what the drivers and patterns of trade in lorises are in Vietnam.

We've done field work all across the country, and in June I'm going to go back to some new sites in northern Central Vietnam to fill in some of those gaps there. I'm very excited. And what we do is we visit a site. We sit down with the director of the national park and the scientific staff. We talk about where the best places are to camp, where it's safe, where have people seen lorises. We go set up camp, and we go out in the daylight to decide where we're going to walk that night. So, we'll either physically mark the trail or we'll use a GPS unit that I'm holding there. That's because the forest looks completely different at night. It's very easy to get lost and not find where you had intended to go.

So, then, we wait for the sun to set, and we put on a huge headlamp, and I brought one here to show you. This is a red-filter LED headlamp, and it can go really far. Can you see that over there? Yeah, it's a major spotlight, and it shines super—it's called a Super Spot. It shines very far away, and it will pick up just the slightest shiny thing. It will pick up a raindrop at the top of a tree. I can see that shining back at me.

So, everything will shine back at you in the dark. I'm just going to test you and see what you think. Here, this shined back at me one day. What do you guys think it is? What do you think? A bat? It was a sac of beetle larvae. [laughter] It was this. I know, I was surprised, too.

Sometimes we'll just see one really tiny, shiny spot, and it will be the compound eye of a spider from really high in a tree.

So, everything will shine back at you, and it's a little overwhelming at first, but when you see a loris, it is unmistakable. They have huge eyes, and the color of the red filter perfectly highlights the natural reflectants at the back of their retina. And so, it's really bright. And they're curious about us, so they'll keep staring at you, so it's very easy to tell them.

This is just a quick video to show you what it looks like if we're lucky enough that we can get a spotlight on them. When we do see one, we try to take a photo first, actually, because we're really interested in the coloration patterns on the face, which might help us tell species apart.

We take notes on what kind of tree they're in, what species, how high are they in the tree, how far is it off the trail, what are they doing, are they looking for food, are they just kind of hanging out. We write all of this information down.

And sometimes we see other really cool stuff, too. On the left here is a common palm civet, and this is an oriental bay owl. I was really excited to see that one. And this is a huge flying squirrel. It's, like, this big. It was awesome.

And sometimes we wake up things that are trying to sleep. [laughter] These are two macaques, and the male here is a little displeased that we woke him up, but the female seems to be sleeping, still. [laughter] So, I think it was okay in the end. Fifty-fifty.

All right. So, we watch the loris for a while, and if we're really lucky, it poops. This is gold for us. [laughter] We collect the poop, and we use it for genetic analysis, and we combine the samples that we collect in the field with samples from museums. We're able to get DNA from 100-plus-year-old historical museum specimens, from museums all over the US and also all over Vietnam, and we've combined all these sequences together to get a reference database from which we can pinpoint differences between loris populations. And when a confiscation happens, we can figure out where it came from.

I just want to highlight that most of the lab work has been done by students. On the left is graduate and undergraduate students at Hanoi University of Sciences in Vietnam, and they've done all the lab work on the field-collected samples and the museum samples in Vietnam, and on the right is one of the many undergraduate students—this is Alora from Columbia University, who did the lab work here upstairs on the Eighth Floor on our specimens here from the museum. It wouldn't have been possible without them.

Our reference database allows us, as I mentioned, to figure out where a confiscated loris came from. As an example, the US Fish and Wildlife Service sent us a bunch of samples that were confiscated here at US airports, and we were able to match the nucleotides—those are the different letters there along in a line, our DNA sequence—and we could match them exactly with a pygmy loris from Laos.

And this is really helpful because it can help us understand where are hot spots of trade, where should enforcement be targeted, where are a lot of lorises coming from. And if there's a healthy individual confiscated that might be reintroduced back into the wild, we can make sure that it's reintroduced somewhere where it's likely to survive.

Within Vietnam, we found something really interesting. We found that most of the confiscations in Northern Vietnam are coming from the south, so there's a clear northward pattern of trade for lorises. This is consistent with what other researchers have found with some other species as well.

In addition to the research that we've been doing, we're also working to build capacity, build the skills for other researchers and Vietnamese students to continue and expand on this work and grow our database for all threatened vertebrates in the entire region. This is a shot from a workshop that I co-led in Hanoi at the university there on using genetics to develop this kind of database.

We're also bringing our research to the level of government officials and scientists. Over the last three years, we've had a series of workshops where we communicate our results at this level to help inform management. And that's really what we're trying to do here is use rigorous science to inform forward-thinking management that will help to reduce this really complex problem of wildlife trade.

Thank you so much.

[End of audio]