What is the slowest animal on the planet? If you think about it, there may be several options: a snail, a sloth, a turtle. It turns out that scientists conducted a comparative analysis. As a result, it became clear that the slowest animal on earth is a three-fingered sloth (and his brother is two-fingered).
It was not difficult to win
He won in many ways. Moreover, they analyzed not only the speed of movement, in which the sloth, by the way, is not the slowest. Close attention was given to such life processes as the duration of sleep, the attitude to bearing and raising offspring, and the way of feeding. The winner of the competition sleeps a lot, about 15 hours a day. The infant period, when the baby only hangs on the mother and feeds on her milk, lasts four months. Food for the sloth are leaves, fruits, and also the flowers of the tree on which he lives. Long legs allow animals to freely reach for food, so they do not need to often move around.
They will be in one place until all the foliage around which they can reach ends. Moreover, the digestion of food is the only occupation in which the animal spends its life. Therefore, it has a huge stomach and a small brain without gyrus. In order to drink, you must go down from the tree. And the sloth has no desire to do this. There are dangers below, and he is not a master at walking on the ground. Although observations have shown that sloths love water, they can also swim well. But most often they have to be content with dew from the leaves in order to quench their thirst.
The basics of being
The animal is the slowest and reacts to changes in the world around it with the same leisurelyness as it moves. Their wool is a great place for the reproduction of insects and algae, which in the rainy season turns the sloth green. Animals are in no hurry to protect their young . They remain calm even when the baby falls, unable to hold on to the mother’s coat. Laziness comes to the point that they even descend from a tree in an unusual way, crawling from branch to branch, but fall curled up in a ball. But this is not their own desire. Low-calorie foods contribute to slowness. It does not give a sloth a large amount of energy, makes you save its reserves, reducing the number of movements. The blood of this animal has a low temperature, because all processes in the body are in "sleep" mode.
Why does not die
Sloths are in no hurry to run away from the enemy. Yes, they can’t do it. On the ground, they move so slowly that their speed can not even be called a turtle, because the turtle moves almost five times faster. Such slowness is only in the hands of hunters who catch the slowest animal to cook a delicious dish from its meat, reminiscent of lamb. If a sloth dies of his own death, he simply falls from the tree. A finder can use claws to make a necklace. The slowest animal in captivity, where nothing threatens him, can live 32 years, and in the wild only about 10-20 years. At the same time, it is characterized by amazing endurance, the ability to heal such wounds that would become fatal for other species. Sloth is immune to poisons.
What does the slowest animal in the world look like?
The photo makes it possible to understand that a sloth looks like a small monkey with bulging eyes. He has a large head and long fingers with strong claws, with which he clings to branches when moving. Its coat is very thick and grows in the direction from the abdomen to the back. This is necessary so that rainwater can not wet the coat. Nature herself took care to protect the slowest animal. The color of his coat allows him to merge with the branches of trees and hide in foliage. This makes the sloth invisible, especially since he eats at night, and only sleeps in the daytime.
Despite the fact that these animals do nothing interesting, watching them is curious. If you wait until the sloth decides to make a body movement, you can see how he does it so slowly that you feel like watching a slow motion film. And their appearance is funny. They are not monkeys at all, although they are similar to them. In our strip, they can be seen only in zoos. The natural habitat of the sloth is the forests of South and Central America. Do not think that in captivity they live poorly. In the zoo, they are devoid of enemies and live almost three times longer than in the wild.