Slow Loris Outreach Week 2026

Theme: Responsible Ecotourism

Slow Loris Outreach Week (SLOW) is dedicated to the world’s only venomous primate — the slow loris. Each year SLOW brings together researchers, guides, photographers, and the wider public around a single theme. For SLOW 2026, that theme is responsible ecotourism: how people who want to see or photograph wild lorises can do so without harming the animals or the habitats they depend on.

Why Ecotourism Matters for Slow Lorises

Wild slow loris encounters are becoming a more common feature of night walks and ecotourism trips across Southeast and South Asia. That’s a genuine opportunity for conservation: tourism revenue can fund habitat protection and give local communities and guides a direct incentive to keep forest and agroforest standing, and to value lorises as living animals rather than as commodities for the illegal pet trade.

But that opportunity only holds if encounters are managed well. Handled badly, ecotourism can stress animals, push them away from good habitat, and disrupt the feeding and social behaviour they depend on — undoing the very thing it claims to support. The difference between “good” and “bad” ecotourism usually comes down to a small number of practical choices: how close people get, how long an encounter lasts, how many people are present, and — above all — how light is used.

Reading Loris Behaviour Isn’t Straightforward

A common assumption is that a distressed animal will make it obvious — freezing, fleeing, or otherwise reacting visibly — and that a calm-looking animal is therefore unaffected. With slow lorises, that assumption cuts both ways, and it misleads people in two opposite directions.

“It didn’t seem bothered” (white light). A loris can go on foraging, moving, and behaving normally under white light while two separate kinds of harm are happening: a stress response, and physical damage to the retina from the light itself. Neither is something behaviour reliably tells you about — interpreting loris behaviour correctly takes training, and normal-looking activity shouldn’t be assumed to mean nothing is wrong. “It carried on doing its own thing” is not evidence that white light is safe.

“It ran away” (red light). Conversely, people often interpret a loris moving off purposefully under red light as the animal fleeing in alarm. This usually isn’t what’s happening. The “slow” in slow loris describes a characteristic hand-over-hand locomotion style, not a fixed speed limit — lorises are capable of moving quickly and directly through the canopy, and often do, including as completely normal, undisturbed behaviour. An animal briskly relocating along a branch is very often just going about its night, not bolting from a threat. Reading normal movement as panic, and reading continued activity as calm, are both misinterpretations of the same underlying assumption: that lorises are slow, and that a distressed loris would obviously look distressed.

Because behaviour is genuinely hard to interpret without training, our guidance defaults to caution regardless of how an animal appears to be behaving — brief light exposure, real distance, minimal noise — rather than waiting for a visible reaction (or its absence) to decide whether an encounter is going well.

Using Light Responsibly

Light is the single biggest factor in how disruptive a loris encounter is, and it comes up in two different ways: how you find and watch a loris, and how you photograph one.

Spotting and viewing: use red light, not white. Many nocturnal mammals, lorises included, are far less sensitive to red wavelengths than to white light. A red-filtered torch lets guides and visitors locate and watch an animal with much less disturbance than a standard white torch, which is direct, sustained, and stressful for as long as it’s pointed at the animal. Red light should be the default for searching for and observing lorises — white light should not be used on nightwalks at all.

Photography: flash is not the enemy — sustained white light is. Flash photography of nocturnal wildlife isn’t going away, so our guidance focuses on doing it properly rather than banning it outright. A well-used camera flash is a brief, diffused burst of light — around 1/100th of a second. A white torch held on an animal, by contrast, is sustained and direct for as long as someone is looking through it. Judged on that basis, a continuously-shone white torch can disturb a loris more than a single, well-timed flash — yet many guiding codes ban the flash while still permitting the torch. That’s backwards.

Good practice for photography, drawing on published wildlife photography guidance (including Nature TTL, Australian Photography, and Audubon):

  • Use an off-camera flash rather than an on-camera flash where possible — it’s less direct, and one off-camera flash can be shared between several photographers rather than each person firing their own.
  • Locate and focus on the animal using red light, then switch the red light off so the flash is the only light at the moment the photo is taken.
  • Avoid multiple photographers firing flashes at the same animal simultaneously.
  • Keep your distance — light intensity on the animal increases sharply the closer you are, so back off rather than turning up the light.

Much of the caution built into standard guide training comes from research on nocturnal birds, not mammals — so part of our work is building an evidence base specific to lorises and other nocturnal primates.

For Visitors

Before you go:

  • Book with a guide or operator who has a clear wildlife-viewing code of conduct, and ask about it directly if it isn’t published.
  • Be wary of any operator who guarantees a sighting, baits animals to appear, or allows handling — these are signs of poor practice, not good guiding.

During the encounter:

  • Keep your distance — a loris that freezes, changes its behaviour, or moves away is telling you it’s too close.
  • Stay quiet. Loud talking, sudden movement, and excited exclamations are as disruptive as bright light.
  • Limit the time spent with any one animal. A brief, well-managed sighting is better for the loris than a prolonged one.
  • Never touch, feed, or attempt to reposition a loris for a better view or photograph.
  • Let your guide control all lighting — don’t use your own torch or phone light on the animal.

After the encounter:

  • Leave the area as you found it and move on rather than lingering.
  • Think twice before geotagging or sharing the exact location of a sighting publicly — it can lead to overcrowding or repeated targeting of that individual.

For Guides and Tour Operators

If you run night walks or wildlife tours in areas where slow lorises are found, a few simple standards make a real difference to animal welfare and to the long-term sustainability of your business:

  • Use red-filtered torches as standard for searching and viewing; reserve white light and flash for the brief moment of taking a photograph, under the conditions above.
  • Cap group sizes around any wild loris sighting, and enforce a minimum viewing distance.
  • Brief guests on etiquette before the walk begins, not in the moment — cover light, noise, distance, and handling in advance.
  • Agree on a single point of light control for photography (one off-camera flash, one operator) rather than allowing every guest to shoot independently.
  • Rotate viewing sites where possible rather than repeatedly visiting the same individual or family group.
  • Report sightings where possible — data from responsible ecotourism can directly support loris research and conservation planning.

SLOW 2026 is about making the case — to visitors, guides, and operators — for getting this balance right.

References