Why nature’s laziest animal is an evolutionary success story
The sloth is a candidate for nature’s most misunderstood animal. Saddled with a name that speaks of sin, the world’s slowest-moving mammal has been eternally damned for its lethargic lifestyle. “These sloths are the lowest forms of existence,” proclaimed the great French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon. “One more defect would have made their lives impossible.”
He couldn’t have been more wrong. The sloth is a supreme survivor that has graced our planet for some 64 million years. A survey of a Panama rainforest in the 1970s found that an incredible one-third of the total mammalian biomass was made up of sloths. The secret to the sloth’s success is its lackadaisical nature. They are energy-saving icons, performing about 10% of the physiological work of a mammal of similar size, and boasting a suite of ingenious adaptations that allow them to exist on as few as 160 calories a day.
1. CLAWS
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