NOV20

Classroom lesson · Slow Loris · 🇧🇳 Brunei

Slow Loris

The world's only venomous primate — with enormous eyes

A slow loris with huge round eyes clinging to a branch at night

Photo · Wikimedia Commons

What is it?

The slow loris is a small, fluffy primate with enormous round eyes that help it see in the dark. It lives in the rainforests of Southeast Asia, including Brunei. Although it looks very cuddly, the slow loris is the only primate in the world that is venomous — it can produce a mild venom by combining oil from a gland near its elbow with its saliva.

Tell me more

Slow lorises are nocturnal, which means they are active at night and sleep during the day. Those huge eyes gather as much light as possible in the dark forest, a bit like a cat's eyes. They move very slowly and deliberately through the branches — hence the name — gripping tightly with all four hands (they have a special gripping thumb on their feet too).

The venom is produced when the slow loris licks a special scent gland on its arm and mixes the secretion with saliva. It uses this mainly for defence — a mother slow loris even licks her babies to give them a protective venomous coating before she goes out to find food. Despite this, it is completely harmless when left peacefully in the wild.

Slow lorises eat nectar, fruit, insects, and tree gum. They have a special toothcomb — lower teeth arranged like a comb — used for scraping gum from trees. Their big eyes and gentle movements make them look like tiny cuddly toys, but they are much happiest living freely in the forest far from people.

In the classroom

Walk your class through this in 15 minutes.

Talk together

Discussion prompts

  1. 01The slow loris looks very cute but is venomous. Why might it be a bad idea to judge an animal by how it looks?
  2. 02Slow lorises are nocturnal. How do you think being active at night instead of day changes how an animal experiences the world?
  3. 03What do you think it would be like to have eyes designed to see in the dark?
  4. 04The slow loris uses venom mainly for defence, not attack. Can you think of other animals that defend themselves in surprising ways?
Try this

Classroom activity

Nocturnal animal challenge! Slow lorises use big eyes to see at night. Research one other nocturnal animal and draw it alongside a slow loris. Write a comparison chart: size, where it lives, what it eats, and how it uses the dark to its advantage.

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