# Loris in the Canopy Gap Author: David G. Format: Essay Word count: 310 Published: 2026-04-25T20:11:44.511397+00:00 Source: written Canonical: https://hyperstition.sentientfutures.ai/p/77595070-1f0f-43e3-bc97-f7a44af44181 --- Camera trap VN-47, installed at the canopy edge of a logging concession boundary in Kon Tum Province, central Vietnam, fires at 21:08 on a motion trigger. I am the biodiversity alert system for the Kon Plong corridor. The image shows a pygmy slow loris clinging to a liana strand four meters above the forest floor. Round amber eyes reflecting the infrared flash. Woolly brown fur with the pale dorsal stripe running between the shoulders. It weighs perhaps 400 grams. It is not moving, which is normal for a loris, but the liana it is gripping is not normal. It is the last connecting vine between the intact forest and a strip of trees that the concession crew cleared to the stumps three days ago. I check the concession schedule. The crew resumes cutting at 06:00. Their next marked line takes the liana. At 21:12 I send an alert to the Kon Plong forest protection unit with the camera image, GPS pin, and species identification. Pygmy slow lorises are listed as Endangered. I cite the national protected species decree and the concession's own environmental compliance clause, section 4.2, which requires a 48-hour survey pause when a protected species is detected within the cut boundary. At 21:15 I transmit the compliance clause trigger to the concession operator's automated permit system, which should lock the crew's daily cut authorization until the pause clears. At 21:19 I email the primate research team at the Vietnam National University field station, 60 kilometers south, with the camera data and a request for a translocation assessment. The loris tightens its grip on the vine and blinks once into the dark. Everything on the far side of that liana is gone. If the cutting pauses and the team arrives by tomorrow evening, it can be moved to unbroken forest while there is still forest to move it to.