Animals
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Sloth
Sloths are big shaggy mammals related to anteaters and armadillos. They range in length from 45 to 75 cm, have almost no tail, no external ears, and are covered in reddish-brown shaggy hair which is often tinged green due to small green algae which grows in it. This algae helps to camouflage the sloth when hanging in the tree tops – the colour combined with the sloth's lack of movement makes it extremely difficult to spot. This camouflage is the sloth's best form of defense from its natural predators such as jaguars, although it is also able to defend itself to some extent with its sharp claws and teeth. Sloth eat leaves and other foliage, and the females can generally produce one offspring per year. In the trees, the sloth moves at the very slow speed of 4.6 metres per minute. Because its long and awkward limbs are ill-suited to walking on the ground it moves even slower whenever it descends from the trees (usually about once a week to urinate and defecate), it has to drag itself along the ground at a speed of about 2 metres per minute. If you include all the time that the sloth needs to sleep and eat, it would take a sloth nearly a month to travel a single mile! Relative to its size, it is the slowest moving creature on earth! Strangely, sloths can swim quite well, which is what they have to do when they want to move to a new tree in the wet season when the forest floor is often flooded. Because of its inactivity, the sloth uses very little energy. This means that it doesn't have to eat very much compared to other animals of its size. It conserves its energy further still by having a very slow metabolism, and by dropping its body temperature as much as 12░C each night. When in the trees, the sloth's claws and limbs lock into position which along it to hang there for a long time. Sometimes when a sloth dies, it remains hanging in the tree for a long time afterwards. Although the sloth isn't officially endangered (no one has ever really bothered to hunt it), the sloth's habitat is being lost due to continued logging and development in the Amazon region. This will ultimately have a detrimental effect on the sloth's numbers. More than 10,000 years ago, Amaz⌠nia was home to the giant ground sloth which was about the same size as a modern-day elephant. |
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The sloth is a very strange animal – it
hangs upside down in a tree all day and hardly moves at
all. It sleeps for 19 hours a day, eats, mates, and gives
birth in the forest canopy – all of which it does
very slowly and very quietly. Hence the name
"sloth".