Original photo by Danny Ye/ Shutterstock
Sloths are masters of living life in the slow lane. These tree-hugging mammals, split into two-toed and three-toed varieties, travel only about 125 feet a day — so slowly that moss and algae grow on their fur. This lethargic lifestyle is actually a survival strategy suitable for their slow metabolisms and low-calorie diets, which are mostly based on tree leaves. In fact, three-toed sloths have the slowest metabolism of any mammal (followed closely by pandas and two-toed sloths).
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It's a fibThe world record for the longest breath-hold clocks in at 24 minutes and 37 seconds (aided by pre-breathing pure oxygen). The human body accomplishes this process with the mammalian dive reflex, which activates physiological changes in an effort to preserve your life.
Their sluggish metabolism, as well as their ability to slow their heart to one-third its normal rate, give sloths an unexpected superpower — they can hold their breath for an impressively long time. With estimates suggesting that some two-toed sloths can hold their breath for upwards of 40 minutes, this makes sloths better at conserving oxygen than even some marine mammals such as dolphins, who can only hold their breath for 15 minutes, max. The sloth breathing technique, aided by the design of their lungs, helps make sloths excellent swimmers. So while their leisurely lifestyle may seem a bit lazy to the untrained eye, don’t blame the sloths — they’re just built that way.
Numbers Don't Lie
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The first known animal to breathe on land may have been an arthropod called ______.
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The first known animal to breathe on land may have been an arthropod called Parioscorpio venator.
Some sloths used to be the size of elephants.
Megatherium americanum, which in Latin means “great beast of America,” is a fearsome name for a fearsome animal — a giant ground sloth that weighed around 8,000 pounds. This gargantuan creature appears in the fossil record in the Middle Pleistocene around 400,000 years ago, and for hundreds of thousands of years, roamed the lightly wooded areas of South America. The beast fueled its massive bulk mostly by scavenging for meat left behind by top predators, but eventually died out at the beginning of the Holocene Epoch, around the same time as the arrival of Homo sapiens on the continent. Because it could stand and walk on its hind legs (though it was usually a quadruped), this ground sloth is considered the largest bipedal mammal that’s ever existed on Earth.
Darren Orf lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes about all things science and climate. You can find his previous work at Popular Mechanics, Inverse, Gizmodo, and Paste, among others.
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