Speaking of sloth , everyone should be very familiar with it. It can be seen in many animations now, such as " Zootopia " and " Ice Age ". In the movie, sloths move slowly, which shows that in real life, they only move slower than in animation movies. If you don’t believe it, let’s take a look.
It takes half a month to eat a leaf. Yes, it is our cute sloth. An indigenous resident who lived in the Amazon said that they fed a sloth leaves. Half a month later, they went to check on the sloth and opened its mouth and found that the same leaf was still in its mouth. Inside, it was only slightly rotten. It had not finished eating the food for half a month. It was too lazy to chew the food in its mouth, and just relied on its saliva to slowly digest the leaves. Why are sloths so inactive even when eating? Because the food of sloths is mainly leaves, but the nutrients of a few leaves are pitiful, so they will try to reduce exercise as much as possible, and their body metabolism will be extremely low.
Their metabolic rate in the wild is 162 kilojoules/day/kg, which means that any other mammal that is not hibernating has higher energy requirements than it, including the notoriously lazy koala (410 kilojoules/kg). day/kg) and the giant panda (185 kJ/day/kg).
In addition, the sloth's mobility is also very slow. Researchers have observed that sloths are slower than snails. A snail can move 48 meters per hour, which is equivalent to 2,800 times its own length, while a sloth measuring 53 centimeters moves an average of 3-6 meters per second. Centimeters, converted into speed is 0.109-0.158 kilometers per hour, which is equivalent to 200-400 times its own length.
Because it runs slowly, sloths are too lazy to run when they encounter danger. Once discovered by their natural enemies, harpy eagles, jaguars or ocelots, they are basically in trouble. "Anyone in the forest can eat them," said Sam Trull, co-founder of the Sloth Research Institute in Costa Rica.
Although sloths have poor athletic ability, they have to make an arduous journey every seven days or so. They have to climb from high trees to the ground to defecate. This behavior is difficult and dangerous for sloths. Because their leg muscles are too weak, their hind limbs cannot support their bodies at all. They can only lay their belly on the ground and crawl forward with the help of their belly and forelimbs. After each defecation, they will dig holes under trees and bury their feces. , and then slowly climbed up the same tree. There is currently no unified explanation for why sloths do not defecate in trees. Some people believe that if sloths defecate directly under trees, they may expose their habitat and bring disaster to themselves. Some people believe that sloths use the smell of their feces to declare to others that this is their territory, or to invite the opposite sex.
There is also a view that this is the tree where sloths use their own feces to nourish themselves. Do you think this is a view?
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