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 the three-toed sloth (and its two-toed counterpart).
Winning was easy
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. Scientists paid close attention to such life processes as the duration of sleep, the attitude to bearing and raising offspring, and the way of eating. The winner of the competition sleeps a lot, about 15 hours a day. The infantile period, when the baby only hangs on the mother and feeds on her milk, lasts four months. The sloth eats leaves, fruits, and flowers of the tree on which it lives. Long legs allow animals to freely reach for food, so they do not need to move often.
They will be in one place until all the foliage around is over,to which they can reach. Moreover, digestion of food is the only occupation on which the animal spends its life. Therefore, it has a huge stomach and a small brain without convolutions. In order to drink, you have to climb down from the tree. And the sloth has no desire to do this. Dangers await below, and he is not a master of moving on the ground. Although observations have shown that sloths love water, including can swim well. But most often they have to be content with dew from the leaves in order to quench their thirst.
Bases of life
The slowest animal and reacts to changes in the world around him with the same slowness as he moves. Their fur is an excellent breeding ground for insects and algae, which turn the sloth green during the rainy season. Animals are also in no hurry to protect their cubs. They remain calm even when the baby falls, not holding on to the mother's fur. Laziness comes to the point that they even descend from a tree not in the usual way, crawling from branch to branch, but fall, curled up in a ball. But this is not their own desire. Slowness is promoted by low-calorie foods. It does not give the sloth a lot of energy, it makes it save its reserves by 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 theymove so slowly that their speed cannot even be called a tortoise, because the tortoise moves almost five times faster. Such slowness only plays into the hands of hunters who catch the slowest animal in order to cook a delicious dish out of its lamb-like meat. If a sloth dies of its own accord, it simply falls out of the tree. The finder of the corpse can use the claws to make a necklace. The slowest animal in captivity, where nothing threatens it, can live 32 years, and in the wild only about 10-20 years. At the same time, it is distinguished by amazing endurance, the ability to heal such wounds that would be fatal to other species. Sloth is immune to poison.
What the slowest animal in the world looks like
The photo makes it possible to understand that the sloth looks like a small monkey with bulging eyes. It has a large head and long fingers with strong claws, with which it clings to branches when moving. Its coat is very thick and grows in the direction from the belly to the back. This is necessary so that rainwater cannot wet the fur coat. Nature herself took care of protecting the slowest animal. The color of its coat allows it to blend in with tree branches and hide in foliage. This makes the sloth invisible, especially since it eats at night and only sleeps during daylight hours.
Despite the fact that these animals do not do anything interesting, it is interesting to watch them. If you wait until the sloth decides to commitbody movement, you can see how he does it so slowly that there is a feeling of watching a slow motion film. Yes, and they have a funny face. These are not monkeys at all, although they look like them. In our strip, they can only be seen in zoos. The sloth's natural habitat 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.
