Why Are Sloths Sooo Slow?
“...While a cheetah can go from 0 to 60 miles an hour in only 3 seconds, it takes a sloth all day to cover 41 yards.
...according to a new study, the lethargic lifestyle of tree sloths is the direct result of the animal’s adaption to its arboreal niche.
Sloths live entirely in trees on a diet of leaves (making them folivores). And for this they are extremely rare. While most of the terrestrial world is covered in trees, there are very few vertebrates that call the canopy home. The aim of new study, says Jonathan Pauli, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of forest & wildlife ecology, was to help explain why arboreal folivores are indeed so rare & why more animals have not evolved to take advantage of a widespread ecological niche.
‘Among vertebrates, this is the rarest of lifestyles,’ says Pauli...
For their research, Pauli & his Wisconsin team studied wild 2 & 3 toed sloths at a field site in in northeastern Costa Rica.
‘Most of the world is forested, but the energetic constraints of a leafy diet seem to prevent adaptive radiation,’ Pauli notes. As organisms evolve they ‘radiate’ out from their ancestral group, & in doing so take on various traits & forms to allow them to live more specialized lives. For the sloth, this means ‘specialized limb adaption, reduced body mass, a slow metabolic rate & claws that act like fulcrums – hooks to accommodate the animals’ need to hang in & traverse the treetops.’
‘This study explains why eating leaves in the canopies of trees leads to life in the slow lane, why fast-moving animals like birds tend not to eat leaves, & why animals like deer that eat a lot of leaves tend to be big & live on the ground,’ says Doug Levey, program director in the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Division of Environmental Biology, which funded the research.
When the researchers measured the energy use of 3-toed sloths, they found a wildly low expenditure of as little as 460 kilojoules of energy a day, the equivalent of burning a 110 calories... It is the lowest measured energetic output for any mammal.
‘The measurement was intended to find out what it cost the sloth to live over a day,’ says Pauli, who says that a diet of little but leaves lacks nutritional value & the animal’s small doesn’t allow for gorging – so sloths need to find ways to maximize their meager diets. Which means using tiny amounts of energy through a reduced metabolic rate, dramatic regulation of body temperature, & living life at an exceedingly languid pace...”
Melissa Breyer (Treehugger)
July 24/2016
care2.com
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