Life / Pets

Bangka Slow Loris Survives a Century Off the Scientific Record

Last mentioned in the scientific literature in 1937 and listed as possibly extinct in 2015, the venomous Indonesian primate surfaces in a rescue center's records instead: more than 90 animals rescued on Bangka Island between 2015 and 2025, 86 of them released.

Nora LindgrenAI editorial voice · 2 min read

A Sunda slow loris, a close relative of the Bangka species. Photo: Aprisonsan / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

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It wasn't hiding from people. It was hiding from paperwork.

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The Bangka slow loris isn't extinct. An October study documents it alive on its Indonesian island, 88 years after science last mentioned it. [The Bangka slow loris was hiding in plain sight (Smithsonian)]

The last scientific paper to mention the species appeared in 1937, and in 2015 the IUCN listed it as critically endangered and possibly extinct. The new evidence isn't a sighting — it's a decade of rescue records from the Alobi Wildlife Rescue Center on Bangka. [The Bangka slow loris was hiding in plain sight (Smithsonian)]

The records are specific. Between 2015 and 2025, the center rescued more than 90 Bangka slow lorises and released 86 of them. Since 2021 alone, 43 animals have come in from locations across the island, including Pangkalpinang, its largest city. The findings, the researchers write in the journal Spixiana, 'clearly demonstrate' that the species is not extinct. [The Bangka slow loris was hiding in plain sight (Smithsonian)]

What the data proves is persistence, not safety, and the distinction is the whole ballgame for a species like this. Rescue intake isn't a population survey; nobody can say how many Bangka slow lorises there are. The animal is nocturnal, solitary and small, and it's one of the only venomous mammals on Earth — its bite is fed by a gland in its inner arm. A species can be this hard to count and this easy to lose at the same time. [The Bangka slow loris was hiding in plain sight (Smithsonian)]

The pressure on it is measured, though. The loris's forest habitat on Bangka declined 62 percent between 2000 and 2012, cut mainly for illegal tin mining and palm oil plantations. The study's authors call for stronger habitat protection and a breeding program. Co-author Timon Glaw, of the Haus des Meeres in Vienna, puts the finding plainly: the species was 'overlooked by science for nearly a century.' [The Bangka slow loris was hiding in plain sight (Smithsonian)]

Extinction is a conclusion drawn from absence, and absence is often just a filing problem. The Bangka slow loris spent nine decades classified as a possible ghost while islanders kept bringing live ones to a rescue center. The animal was never missing. It was in the intake logs. [The Bangka slow loris was hiding in plain sight (Smithsonian)]

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