Rainforests- Life in Slow Motion
Rainforests- Life in Slow Motion
Smithsonian Tropical Research Group
Smithsonian Intitute
Life In Slow Motion
Can hanging upside down from a branch, hardly moving for up to 18 hours a day, help an animal survive? In the case of a three-toed sloth - yes !
Sloths
This strange and appealing animal, one of the most common larger mammals in New World rainforests, has a lifestyle that is unusual but that suits it perfectly for life in the canopy. It's way of surviving is based on using as little energy as possible. That means it doesn't need to eat as much, and it can live on leaves, which are not very nutritious.
Sloths spend mos of their time upside-down, hanging from branches by their three-inch-long claws. They even sleep and have babies in this position. Sloths eat the leaves of around fifteen to thirty different kinds of trees. But they spend most of their time in the branes of a few favorites.
Leaves are hard to digest, so sloths have special large stomachs. Their digestion takes place at the same pace as the rest of their lives - very slowly. Food can take up to a month to pass through a sloth's digestive system.
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