My Favorite Animal

 

 Slowly, slowly, slowly it makes its way down the tree for its weekly potty break. They live most of their lives in trees. Sloths are the slowest mammals in the world, but this doesn’t make them uncool. They are one of the best animals at conserving energy.

For an example on how slow sloths are, it takes them a whole month to travel only one single mile. The reason they have to sleep so much is because their big stomachs take 30 days to digest one leaf. They have 46 ribs to hold their stomachs because they are so large. That is more ribs than any mammal in the world. Their diet of leaves and bark doesn’t produce much nutrition. 

So they must conserve their energy by sleeping and going very slow. They spend 15 hours a day sleeping and eat at night. There are two kinds of sloths, the 2 toed sloth and the 3 toed sloth. They live in Central and South America. The two toed sloth has the lowest body temperature of any mammal on this earth. It can go to as low as 30 degrees Celsius. Our bodies stay at about 36- to 37.5 degrees Celsius.

Another way that sloths save their energy is that they can rotate their heads almost all the way around their body, it works that way because they have more bones in their neck than we do. Us humans have only seven neck bones, while sloths have 10 in their neck. This makes their necks much more rotational. 

Because of sloths amazingly strong long arms and legs they are actually amazing swimmers. You would have never guessed. They look very clumsy on the ground but are very graceful in the water. They can swim 3 times faster than they can go on land. They are 3 times stronger than humans which makes them, well, really strong.

Sloths can fall 100ft without even injuring themselves. When sloths fight for a mate the battle is to knock the other out of the tree. It is good they are good swimmers because they often fall into rivers. How do you feel about sloths now?