Sloths are tree dwelling mammals found in south america. They mainly live on leaves. It is all the distinct characteristics of these unique animals that got my attention. So here I am.
Actually the first ever thing that occurred to me when I saw them on screen was the striking resemblance they had to Abdul Kalam :)
In short they are evolutionary wonders. Well in a way, every living thing is an evolutionary wonder but this one is a wonder in a very peculiar way. When you list up all the characters in the life style of sloths you cannot see one thing that will be in sync with the usual "survival of the fittest" slogan. But they are the fittest in their own way. They don’t have the most popular weapons that we all have and use for survival. But they end up compensating for each of those with something else. They are philosophical to me because I think they tell us why it is absurd to expect each and every individual in a population to fit a set of pre-defined rules.
They are probably the most unaggressive of the animals. Grow to a size little larger than koala bears. They don't fight. They deal with their situations in all other ways than fighting. They don't even have sharp senses or reaction times. They are mainly veggies so they don't have to have the cunningness required to catch or kill other animals. They don't even have hard teeth like almost all other animals so they cannot eat anything that is harder than leaves.
They are very lazy animals they sleep like 20 hrs per day and they do almost everything hanging upside down on trees. Lot of sloths even die in the same position (there are instances where zoologists have been studying sloths on tree tops for weeks thinking they were just hanging there not knowing that they have been dead for a long while).
They move in very slow speeds like a 0.15 meter per hour which basically means they cannot ‘run’. They are so lazy that algae starts growing on their bodies (fur). This kind of gives a greenish look to their otherwise brownish bodies and that helps them in their camouflage from predators on the ground. Being so slow they can be attacked my virtually 'any' predator. But the camouflage proves really helpful for them coz without being able to run and not being able to fight they would have very easily become extinct. And also that since they don't move fast they don't really attract the predator's attention. It is really funny to watch them... makes you think if they somehow went into 'slow motion' mode. And another thing about the algae is that they also eat the algae in their fur; one more reason not to move around for food.
They eat only like once a day and that too very little and they go for loo like once a week they don't go looking for water coz they don't drink water the water in the leaves they eat are more than enough for them to survive. They basically live in the same place (neighborhood/tree) and die in the same place as they were born. Since they are not active animals their body metabolism is very slow which makes them very vulnerable to bacteria and viruses (due to low immunity) so if they get hurt or something, it takes a long time for it to heal. But this does not pose as a problem for them coz they don't really travel and catch new bacteria. They will have to deal with only those few bacteria and viruses that they have already got immunity over. Which means if you catch a sloth and take it to a place in the same forest which is a few miles away and leave it there, there is a lot of possibility it will catch some disease and die. They cannot survive major temperature/weather changes so they are not found in any other part of the world than in the Amazon.
Pretty much they are this 'fragile' life forms... so fragile with their lives that they can die very easily for a lot of reasons and yet because of various other reasons they have been able to make it to this day through this bloody and brutal world where run, kill or be killed has been the norm.
P.S
There is a really funny video featured in the series The Life of the Mammals where David Attenborough goes really close (like almost a feet) to a sloth and says 'BOO'. And sloth looks around everywhere like it was just waking up in the morning :)
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