The loris family: Jogja and Mimi’s family probably have the most mystery surrounding them out of all the slow loris families the LFP team are currently following. It is hard to even put the facts together coherently to tell a story without jumping back and forth through time and referencing long gone individuals. Until recently we were not even sure that we could refer to them as Jogja and Mimi or “husband and wife”. As is the case with many of the individuals that we observe, important details often do not come together until long after the fact, and it can take one random event or realisation for us to be able to join the dots and see the big picture. After 10 years dedicated to studying the slow lorises of Cipaganti we have watched individual lives play out, learned their personalities, their secrets, watched their relationships develop and witnessed their fights. But while it can feel like we know so much about these individuals, some truths will always evade us, and it is this fact that drives us to continue our research and share the stories of these lorises with the world.

This story starts with Jogja, the elusive patriarch whose past is shrouded in mystery. Jogja was first caught in 2017 when the team was attempting to microchip all the lorises within the study area. Estimated to be a young adult at the time (approximately two years old), the team decided to give him a collar in addition to a microchip and thus “Jogja” joined the study group. In his first year of being followed, Jogja proved to be a classic young male, a bachelor establishing a large home range and searching for a mate. Unfortunately, Jogja sustained an injury around his neck, meaning that keeping a collar on him would have been detrimental to his health, and so his collar was removed at the beginning of 2018 with the intention of recollaring him once the wound had healed.

It was not until six months later in late 2018 when Mimi came onto the scene. Mimi was caught singlehandedly by one of our head trackers Yiyi, within Jogja’s range. Finding an adult female in an adult male’s home range is a strong indication that the two might be a couple, and this theory was supported by Mimi’s bodily condition; she appeared to be pregnant. However, at this point Jogja was “lost” in his range, without a collar it was impossible to know if he was even still in the area. The team decided to collar Mimi, with the hope that perhaps she would lead them back to Jogja, but no one could have guessed how long the team would have to wait.

The team’s suspicions about Mimi’s pregnancy proved correct, as in early 2019 we found that she not only had an infant offspring but also an older juvenile offspring! The team named these individuals Indomi and Jaimi respectively. By the end of 2019, Mimi was a mother of three as her youngest offspring Doremi had joined the family; surely this meant she must be Jogja’s mate, right? The team continued to speculate and search fruitless for our missing loris, and in the meantime, they got to know Mimi and her offspring. Jaimi has proved to be a mama’s boy and a doting older brother, he can often be found sharing a sleeping site with his mother Mimi even now as a young adult male. Some of our volunteer’s favourite memories have been watching Jaimi teach Indomi and Doremi how to gouge tree trunks to find gum and taking them to the calliandra trees close to their sleep site so they can drink nectar from the flowers.

Indomi matured much faster in comparison, she started her dispersal away from the family at just over a year old which is considered fairly young in slow loris developmental terms. The start of her dispersal was turbulent, however, as she had altercations with a few lorises as she crossed their home ranges looking for her own place, and even had a run-in with a power cable, leaving her with nasty burns across her feet. Luckily, she recovered well and decided to take a new path in her dispersal, leading her out of the study area and towards the north side of Mt Papandayan. Although we had to remove her collar after her dispersal, she is reported to be safe and well in her new home range and she also has some company in the form of another loris!

Mimi and Jogja’s youngest offspring Doremi has proved to be as elusive as their father, we often go months without seeing them at all, before they suddenly appear with Mimi, Jaimi or Jogja. At this stage we don’t know if Doremi is male or female, though we estimate their age to be just over a year old. Capture attempts over the past six months have been unsuccessful so far and there is every chance that Doremi will disperse before we are able to meet them officially, however we are also hoping that the opportunity to meet them will present itself. In August 2020 we captured a loris in Mimi’s sleep site that we thought would be Doremi, and we definitely did not expect to find that the loris already had a microchip. That microchip solved the years-long mystery, we had found Jogja and Mimi’s husband all in one go! Of course, we immediately gave him a new collar and since then we have been observing Jogja with Mimi and their family. Slowly but surely the secrets of this family are unravelling, and we are hooked on finding them out!