13 - Nutrition of Lorisiformes

Summary

For many wild animals under human care, detailed nutritional requirements are not yet established. In these cases, we must use the existing knowledge of domestic species as models. The nearest model to lorisiforms is the common marmoset Callithrix jacchus, which is not a domestic species but has been used in laboratories since the 1970s and its nutritional requirements have been well described (NRC, 2003). Unfortunately, the marmoset is not a perfect model because of its differing basal metabolic rates (Ross, 1992), high vitamin D requirements (Abbott et al., 2003) and differing proportions of food items within its natural diets (Cabana et al., 2018b). Therefore, many parameters must be estimated based on the wild loris’ feeding ecology and feeding trials under human care (Baer et al., 2010). The stakes are much higher today, since we know that diets are not only responsible for supplying optimal concentrations of nutritional components, but also for supporting the animal’s welfare through appropriate food presentation methods (Scott et al., 1999). Providing more natural diets may help in doing the latter, but it does not guarantee a balanced diet. Even a diet consisting entirely of insects is not necessarily nutritionally appropriate for insectivorous animals as the insects commonly fed in captivity such as mealworms and crickets lack many micronutrients (Finke, 2013).