SLOW AND EASY WINS THE RACE
Try our super 60million-year sloth diet...
SLOTHS may be sharper than previously thought, as we reported yesterday.
Boffins say the famously sleepy critters have developed different ways of adapting to
Notorious for slow movement,
1 sloths spend most of their lives hanging upside down from trees in the tropical rainforests of South and Central America.
They evolved more than
2 60million years ago and there are two types – two-toed and three-toed – and six species within those two categories.
An early ancestor was the
3 elephant-sized ground sloth Megatherium. It became extinct about 12,000 years ago, probably due to being hunted by humans.
These animals gave us
4 avocados – they were one of the few mammals that had a digestive system to process the huge seeds whole. They then dispersed them far and wide.
The word “sloth” is related to
5 “slow” and means laziness – that’s also true in languages other than English. For example it’s “perezoso” in Spanish, which also means lazy.
Sloths have the
6 lowest metabolic rate of any mammal. It takes them six days to digest food and their large and permanently full stomach can account for up to 30% of their body mass.
They sleep 15 hours a day but
7 they do get up once a week to their surroundings, improving chances of survival in the face of climate change.
Here, reveals 15 facts about the animals... have a poo. And they can lose up to a third of their body weight in one go when they do.
They are three times
8 stronger than humans and can lift their entire body weight with one arm from birth. They have the strength to withstand a jaguar trying to rip them from a tree. Special tendons in
9 sloths’ hands and feet lock into place and allow them to hang upside down for long periods of time. It’s how they sleep while hanging from a branch, and they’ve been known to remain suspended upside down after death.
But they will fall out of trees
10 about once a week for their entire lives. It’s safe, though – sloths can plummet more than 100ft without injury.
Despite spending most of
11 their time hanging, sloths are surprisingly good in the water and can swim three times faster than they move on land.
Three-toed sloths also have
12 two more neck vertebrae than any other mammal. This lets them turn their heads 270 degrees and acts as a defence mechanism. All sloths are
13 colour blind, can only see poorly in dim light and are completely blind in bright daylight. But they compensate with a strong sense of smell and memory.
Cracks in their hair allow algae
14 and fungi to grow, which makes them appear green and provides camouflage. They also host moths and beetles in their fur – up to 950 at any one time.
Queen Elizabeth II was given
15 two sloths on a visit to Brazil in 1968 and they were then cared for by London Zoo. The Ice Age films feature slovenly sloth Sid.