Survival of the slacker! Being lazy could help beat extinction

IF you’re always being criticised for being lazy, it seems you could have a good excuse.

A study suggests idleness is an excellent survival strategy – and the sloths among us may represent the next stage in human evolution.

Scientists believe they have uncovered a previously overlooked law of natural selection based on ‘survival of the slacker’.

This suggests that laziness can be a good strategy for ensuring the survival of individuals, species and even whole groups of species.

Although the research was based on lowly molluscs living on the floor of the Atlantic, the authors believe they may have stumbled on a general principle that could apply to higher animals – including land- dwelling vertebrates. The scientists carried out an extensive study of the energy needs of 299 species of extinct and living bivalves and gastropods – including slugs and oysters – spanning a period of five million years.

Those that had managed to escape extinction and survived to the present day tended to be ‘low maintenance’ species with minimal energy requirements.

Molluscs that had gone the way of the dinosaurs and disappeared had higher metabolic rates than their still flourishing cousins. US ecologist Professor Bruce Lieberman, who co-led the University of Kansas team, said: ‘Maybe in the long term the best evolutionary strategy for animals is to be lassitudinous and sluggish. The lower the metabolic rate, the more likely the species you belong to will survive. Instead of “survival of the fittest”, maybe a better metaphor for the history of life is “survival of the laziest” or at least “survival of the sluggish”.’

The findings, reported in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, could have important implications for forecasting the fate of species affected by climate change, said the scientists. Dr Luke Strotz, also from the University of Kansas, said: ‘In a sense, we’re looking at a potential predictor of extinction probability.

‘At the species level, metabolic rate isn’t the be-all, end-all of extinction – there are a lot of factors at play. But these results say that the metabolic rate of an organism is a component of extinction likelihood.

‘With a higher metabolic rate, a species is more likely to go extinct.’