How Viral Videos May Harm Cute, Threatened Species

A slow loris on a tree. Slow lorises are small, threatened primates found in a number of South and Southeast Asian countries, including Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand.

(Image credit: Slow loris image via Shutterstock)

In early 2009, a man in St. Petersburg, Russia, uploaded a video onto YouTube in which his pet pygmy slow loris — a small, threatened Asian primate — gets tickled. The video quickly went viral, garnering millions of views and thousands of comments. But such videos of "cute" exotic species may be fueling the illegal pet trade of the animals, pushing them nearer to extinction, new research suggests.

Researchers analyzed the public's perception of slow lorises (Nycticebus) by perusing more than 12,000 YouTube comments posted over a three-year period in response to the tickling slow loris video. Viewers most frequently commented on how cute they thought the slow loris in the video was, but comments expressing a desire to own one of the animals — or even asking where to get one — came in a close second.

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Slow lorises are nocturnal primates that live in the rainforests of a number of South and Southeast Asian countries, including Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand. Once considered common, all eight species of slow lorises are now recognized as "threatened" — their numbers have dwindled significantly because of habitat loss and collection and hunting for the wildlife trade, traditional medicine and bushmeat. Though there are national laws in place to protect the slow loris in all of its native countries, those laws are rarely ever enforced, Nekaris told LiveScience.

For their study, published last month in the open-access journal, PLOS ONE, Nekaris and her colleagues downloaded and analyzed all 12,411 comments from the tickling slow loris video on Wired's YouTube page. They categorized the comments based on content — which ranged from comments asking what the animal in the video was to posts stating that the slow loris was stolen from the wild — and looked at how the remarks changed over time. They also tracked celebrity shares of the video and noted what impact those endorsements had on the YouTube comments.

The team also found two spikes in the number of comments, which corresponded to slow loris-related events. The first spike occurred in March 2011, when Nekaris and a colleague created a Wikipedia page on slow loris conservation in response to another slow loris video becoming a hit. The second spike occurred in January 2012, when the BBC aired a documentary on the slow loris trade, called “The Jungle Gremlins of Java”. (Wired took down the viral video shortly after the BBC program aired.)

Interestingly, as people became more aware of the conservation issues surrounding the slow loris, the comments section of the video turned into a kind of forum for that information. After the Wikipedia page went up, people increasingly posted comments mentioning facts about the slow loris's biology or conservation, such as how the animal is the only venomous primate in the world and how traders gruesomely remove the teeth of slow lorises after capturing them. "But the number of comments of people who want slow lorises always far outweighed the conservation comments," Nekaris said. [In Images: 100 Most Threatened Species]

In 2011, Ross and his colleagues showed that people were more likely to think chimpanzees would make great pets if they saw images of the primates in anthropogenic contexts, such as standing next to a person. He is interested in seeing if the same is true for slow lorises — for example, what type of reactions would result from a viral video of a loris "acting cute" in its natural habitat? Whatever the case, Ross is alarmed by the number of YouTube commenters who said they want a pet slow loris. [Image Gallery: 25 Primates in Peril]

Though it's difficult to directly link viral videos to increased pet trade, one thing is certain: The illegal business appears to be getting worse. In recent years, there's been in increase in the number of international confiscations, domestic market sightings and YouTube home videos of slow lorises. And while slow lorises were a rare sight on the streets of Thailand in 2009, you now see up to 12 of the primates being paraded around each night, Nekaris said.

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Joseph Bennington-Castro is a Hawaii-based contributing writer for Live Science and Space.com. He holds a master's degree in science journalism from New York University, and a bachelor's degree in physics from the University of Hawaii. His work covers all areas of science, from the quirky mating behaviors of different animals, to the drug and alcohol habits of ancient cultures, to new advances in solar cell technology. On a more personal note, Joseph has had a near-obsession with video games for as long as he can remember, and is probably playing a game at this very moment.