A Sloth Swimming
- Video Of A Sloth Swimming
- Sloth In Water
- Can Sloths Swim
- Sloth Swimming Facts
- Planet Earth Sloth Swimming
- Sloth Swimming Youtube
- How To Draw A Sloth Swimming
You might have all seen a sloth or at least a picture of one hanging lazily on a tree branch munching on the leaves and barks. Sloths are the slowest among the mammals on this planet and are known for their laziness.
When you think of a sloth, the peculiar characteristics that conjure up in your head might be their sharp claws, fur, black nose & extremely slow movement. But where is the tail? Ever wondered whether sloths have a tail or not? Scratching your head huh? Don’t worry in this article we will have a look into sloths and find out whether sloths have tails or not.
So, do sloths have tails? Yes, sloths do have tails but don’t be mistaken, they aren’t anything like what you imagine. When we say a tail, don’t think of it as a long coiled one or the wagging tail of a dog. The tail of a sloth is so tiny that it resembles a snout. It is so small that most of the people who do not know much about sloths miss the tiny tail hiding in all that fur if at all they see one.
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That being said, the size of the tail differs between the different species of sloths. For instance, the three-toed sloths have a longer tail than the two-toed one. By longer tail we mean 2 to 3cm more!
- Keith the Sloth, Journal Entry – The Horrible Harpy Image courtesy of Emma Fisher from her time on Frontier's Costa Rica Animal Rescue Centre project Today started like any other day: alone in my tree, just the way I like it!
- But in the turquoise waters off the coast of Panama, a group of pygmy three-toed sloths (Bradypus pygmaeus) have found an alternative, and quicker, mode of transportation: Swimming!
- They might look awkward doing it, but sloths are actually pretty good swimmers. They are often observed swimming with ease across rivers in their native Central and South America. If seen paddling.
- With Tenor, maker of GIF Keyboard, add popular Sloth Swimming animated GIFs to your conversations. Share the best GIFs now.
In order to have a clear understanding, we’ll have a sneak peek into the evolution of sloths, the uses of their tail, and many other facts about them. Let us get going!
Contents
Do all sloths have tails?
Yeah, all sloths have a tail but they are not easy to spot. The tail of a sloth is more like a snout. For instance, the three-toed sloth (the one with the longest tail) has a tail that is only 3 to 5cm long. Though it does not look anything like a tail, technically it is!
Now you might be wondering what purpose do these tiny tails serve, right? In the coming sections, we will find answers to this question. But before we proceed further, let us first have a sneak peek into the basics!
Video Of A Sloth Swimming
Why do animals need a tail?
Sloth In Water
Before we begin discussing the tail of sloths, it is important that you have a basic idea of why do animals need a tail. For the sake of simplicity, let us keep our discussion confined to animals that live on trees (arboreal animals).
For those animals that live in the trees, the tails are prehensile. This means these tails have been evolved over the years and has become capable of grasping or holding objects. If you have seen a monkey leaping from branches to branches, you might have noticed how they use their tail for a better grip. Apart from being of help in climbing, these prehensile tails also help the arboreal creatures in foraging for fruits.
Now that we have a basic idea on the uses of a tail, let’s see how a sloth uses its tail.
Why do sloths need tails?
Sloths are arboreal animals that climb down hardly once a week and they spend 90% of their lifetime on trees. From whatever we have discussed it might be quite evident that the tail of sloth isn’t prehensile. Apart from this, their tails are hardly 5cm long and cannot help them in any way while climbing or foraging. Then what do they use it for?
As mentioned earlier, among the 2 different types of sloth the one with the largest tail (up to 5cm) is the three-toed sloth. This means that only the three-toed sloth uses their tail.
These three-toed sloths use their stubby tail to dig a shallow hole near the tree they live in, to poop! Yeah, quite bizarre huh? Even more bizarre is the fact that these sloths poop only once in a week! Being the slowest and laziest mammal on earth, sloths have an extremely slow digestive system and it takes them a long time to digest the food they eat.
Apart from being the slowest it also has an inefficient digestive system. Which means that they need to eat a lot to meet their energy requirements. It is interesting to note that almost 1/3rd of the bodyweight of a sloth is its poop in its belly. That’s quite a lot of poop right?
Sloths are virtually defenseless against attack from the predators which is why they spend an entire life camouflaged on trees. And the last thing they want is, the smell of their poop signaling the predators.
They use their stubby tail to dig a shallow hole to poop and cover this hole with leaves and sand!
Did the ancestors of sloths have a tail?
Sloths have been a matter of fascination for the biologists and they have learned a great deal about them from the fossils of their ancestors. These paleontologists found out that the ancestors of the present-day sloths were very different from the ones we see today. It is important to note that most of these ancestors where ground sloths and not tree sloths.
The fossils obtained & the mummified remains of sloths obtained from Chile & Argentina suggest that these ancestors had a strong pelvic bone, stronger hind limbs & vertebrae. These characteristics point out to the fact that at least some of the early sloths could walk bipedally. Most of these sloths had hand & claws that look suitable to manipulate foliage which strongly supports the argument that the early sloths were bipedal.
An important thing to note here is that it appears from many of the fossils that sloths had a robust tail. It is interesting to note that this robust tail was much longer than the tail of the present-day tree sloths and it touched the ground. This suggests that they may have used this tail to sit in a tripodal posture by balancing its body weight on its tail and then stand on its feet to reach out to trees with their hands.
There is another group of researchers who claims that the ground sloths were good swimmers like the tree sloths and their long tail helped them in swimming.
The evolution of ground sloths – From having a long tail to tree sloths with a small tail!
There is a group of paleontologists who believe that the evolution of a sloth has got a role to play in the smaller tail of a tree sloth. They attribute this change to the evolution of ground sloths to tree sloths.
As mentioned earlier, ground sloths which were the early ancestors of the present-day tree sloths lived in the ground and had a robust tail, strong hind limbs. The fossils of the ground sloths also indicate that most of these animals were plantigrade (animals that place the entire foot surface on the ground). Over the years they evolved from being plantigrade animals to animals having pedolateral foot.
Gradually when these ground sloths evolved to being tree sloths, they had sharp claws to help them seamlessly climb a tree. And the tail became virtually of no use and at it is believed that at some point in time they evolved to having small tails as we see today.
The name “sloth” was given to members of the Megalonychidae and Bradypodidae families to describe six species of animals that move very slowly. But aside from their lack of urgency, how much do you really know about these arboreal creatures?
In honor of Sloth Week, here are ten facts about sloths that you may not have known:
Sloths have an extremely slow metabolism
Can Sloths Swim
This one seems fairly obvious, but it is worth mentioning exactly how slow the metabolism actually is. As a frame of reference, it takes the average human around 12-48 hours to ingest, digest, and eliminate waste from food. Sloths can take 30 days to completely digest a single leaf. They rarely like to leave the safety of trees, though they will come down in order to relieve themselves. Fortunately for them, they can hold it all in and only evacuate their bowels once a week. Sloths can lose about a third of their body weight every time they defecate and urinate.
Sloth fur contains fungi and algae, for good reason
Sloths move incredibly slowly at less than three meters per minute, so their top line of defense against predators (eagles, jaguars, snakes, and poachers) is just hoping they aren’t seen. Sloth fur has two layers: an inner layer closest to the sloth’s skin that is short, fine, and provides warmth, and a coarse outer layer that has cracks, allowing for the growth of algae and fungi, which is fantastic news for the sloth. In this case, being filthy and covered in algae gives the fur a green tint, acting as an effective camouflage up in the trees.
As a bonus, researchers recently discovered that some fungi within sloth fur could have applications for fighting off certain parasites, cancers, and bacteria.
Their fur acts as a home for many insects
While there is a population of hematophagous insects that feed on the sloth itself, including ticks and mites, there is also a coprophagous guild of insects which have a commensal relationship with the sloth and feed on the fungi and algae in sloth fur. The coprophagous guild can have around nine different species of beetles, mites, and moths, with many members of each species. One sloth was found to have 980 individual Trichilium adisi beetles living within its fur.
The five species of sloth moths find a host and ride around with it, waiting until the sloth relieves itself (more on that later). After the sloth defecates, the moth lays her eggs in the dung. The larvae remain in the dung until they have reached the adult stage, where they will then find their own sloth to live on and continue the life cycle. As the moths die, they decompose within the fur, feeding the algae and fungi.
Sloth Swimming Facts
Wild sloths don’t sleep as much as we thought
After studying captive sloths, scientists determined that the animals slept up to 15-18 hours every day. However, a study published in 2008 utilized electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings to monitor wild sloths’ brain activity. They found that the average wild sloth sleeps about 9-10 hours a day; not much more than the average human. The researchers noted that “sleep in the wild may be markedly different from that in captivity,” and called for more research to explore all of those differences. Lack of threat of predation while in captivity is an obvious difference, though diet and other factors could be at play also.
Sloths have changed considerably over time
As we know them today, all six sloth species are arboreal creatures who grow to be 50-60 cm (20-24 in) in length. Ancient sloths were ground dwellers, and some species were up to 6 meters (20 ft) long and weighed over 5 tons; similar to an African elephant. These ancient sloths first appeared about 35 million years ago and went extinct around 10,000 years ago, after humans spread throughout the Americas.
Even two-toed sloths have three toes
Planet Earth Sloth Swimming
Stay with me here; I know that sounds counterintuitive. While two-toed sloths indeed have two digits on their forelimbs (arms), they have three digits on their hind limbs (legs). Realistically, a better name for these sloths would be “two-fingered sloths.” It appears that the confusion came when the names were translated into English, as the Spanish word for digit (dedo) can be used to mean finger or toe.
They are surprisingly adept at swimming
Aside from defecating, sloths will typically only leave the trees to take a swim. During the rainy season, sloths will sometimes drop from a tree into the water and then swim to another tree. Using a stroke that sort of looks like a doggy paddle/breaststroke combination, sloths can swim up to three times faster than they move on land. Their incredibly slow metabolism affords them another advantage here, as they can slow their heart rate down to less than a third of its normal rate, allowing it to hold its breath underwater for over 40 minutes.
Specialized anatomy allows them to hang upside down
For the most part, sloths prefer to be hanging upside down. They are able to eat, mate, and give birth while hanging upside down, without the weight from their internal organs and waste products pressing on their diaphragm, affecting their breathing. Researchers discovered that sloths’ internal organs are actually anchored on the abdomen, keeping the weight away from the diaphragm. If this weren’t so, breathing would be much more energetically taxing, and could not be supported by their slow metabolism.
Their parental love isn’t unconditional
Many parents in the animal kingdom will go to great lengths to protect their young. Sloth mothers do care about their offspring, at least to an extent. For the first 3-8 months of a baby sloth’s life, it clings to its mother, even after it has been weaned. While holding onto her young, a female sloth will hiss and swipe their long claws at a potential predator, in order to keep her baby safe.
The limit to that devotion appears to end if the baby should slip and fall. Sloths are fairly sturdy animals, and the fall alone won’t kill most baby sloths. The real danger comes from the fact that the mother rarely comes to retrieve her fallen, crying baby. Realistically, she might not be able to get to her baby and get back up into the safety of the tree before a predator comes, so she doesn’t bother. It has also been suggested that perhaps the mother sees a potential defect in the baby and is just cutting her losses and letting it go.
Fortunately, sometimes the abandoned baby sloths are found by compassionate humans who find them before an eagle or jaguar. The orphaned sloths are temporarily taken into sanctuaries where they are rehabilitated and released back into the wild, as two-toed sloths have a very restricted diet and do not fare well in captivity. While the thought of a mother dropping her baby and leaving it to scream and die is an incredibly depressing thought, the noise that the sloths make is ridiculously adorable.
They break the rules on mammalian cervical vertebrae
Of the estimated 5,400 species of mammals on the planet, nearly all of them have seven cervical vertebrae. Blue whale, possibly the largest animal ever? Seven cervical vertebrae. Kitti’s hog-nosed bat, the smallest known mammal? Seven. Giraffes? Seven. Humans? You guessed it. Two-toes sloths can have 5-7, making those (and manatees, who have 6) the only species to have fewer than the highly-conserved number of seven. Three-toed sloths typically have 8 or 9 cervical vertebrae.
Sloth Swimming Youtube
How these anomalies evolved is not entirely clear, and is still debated among biologists. For most other animals, straying from seven cervical vertebrae is a severe birth defect that can either result in stillbirth or the animal doesn’t live very long, which likely played a role in the demise of woolly mammoth. However, the incredibly slow metabolism of the sloth may have made it less risky to have a variable number of vertebrae. For three-toed sloths, the extra vertebrae allow it to turn their heads up to an astonishing 270 degrees.