The most famously slow animal on the planet needs little introduction. Native to the tropical rainforests of Latin America, where sloths apparently spend most of their life happily sleeping and cradled by the luscious canopy of the Amazon Rainforest, the sloth is nowadays a synonym for lazy couch-potatoes the world over.
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Irresistibly cute couch-potatoes, that is! Along with fluffy kittens and orangutans building their own hammocks, sloths have become a bonafide internet sensation in recent years. With their permanently contented smiles, beady little sleepy eyes and adorably fluffy babies – sloth videos and photos have the ability to make grown men swoon with delight. Really! Did you know, that once upon a time, sloths were the size of elephants and incredibly aggressive?
The mind boggles. We know!
Here are 10 other fun facts about sloths that may just put a smile on your face:
1. Next time you catch yourself doing or saying something rather silly, take heart. Some sloths have been known to grab their own arms – mistaking them for tree branches – and end up falling to their death. *Sigh*
2. Sloths only enjoy, on average, one bowel movement a week. When they do finally do a #2, they can expel up to a third of their entire body weight.
3. Sloths are 3 times faster in water than they are on land. Their preferred swimming style is the backstroke.
4. As a means of self-preservation, sloths don't stink (they don't sweat at all) thus avoiding being detected by predators. However, just because they don't smell, it certainly doesn't mean they aren't dirty! Sloths' hairy coats are cosy habitats for innumerable colonies of insects, algae and bugs.
Megatherium (Paris Natural History Museum) Photocredit: About Education
5. Ancient giant sloths – known as Megatherium – were believed to be up to 7 metres tall, weighed about 7 tonnes and had quite the aggressive disposition. Nowadays, you can see a full-scale skeleton of a Megatherium at London's Natural History Museum.
6. The three-toed sloth can turn his head almost 360 degrees!
7. Sloths give birth whilst hanging upside down.
8. Sloth are actually built upside down! Well, sort of! Sloths spend an inordinate amount of time hanging upside down, something they can only do because their main organs are attached to their rib cage, so they don't compress their lungs.
9. The sloths' love of a long siesta is actually a misconception – recent research undertaken in the forests of Panama has shown that sloths only sleep between 8 and 10 hours a day, much like us.
10. At his fastest, a sloth will race you down the jungle floor at a blindingly fast speed of about 4 metres a minute! Oh…hang on….
Itching to enjoy a close and personal experience with this impossibly adorable creature? Then join us on an tour to Central America, or ask us how we can help you plan an unforgettable wildlife tour, including an adventure tour of Costa Rica with a visit to its world-renowned Sloth Sanctuary, one of the country's most popular highlights.
Visit our South America homepage for further inspiration.
Author: Laura Pattara
'Laura Pattara is a modern nomad who's been vagabonding around the world, non-stop, for the past 15 years. She's tour-guided overland trips through South America and Africa, travelled independently through the Middle East and has completed a 6-year motorbike trip from Europe to Australia. What ticks her fancy most? Animal encounters in remote wilderness, authentic experiences off the beaten trail and spectacular Autumn colours in Patagonia.'
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Comments
If you ask someone what sloth or slothfulness is, they'll probably talk about idleness or laziness. They might think about the animal called a sloth and of its slow ponderous walk or the animated cartoon sloth in the film Zootopia. They probably would not be thinking about sin.
I don't normally think about sin at all, at least, not in the theoretical or ecclesiastical sense. Recently, though, I have been doing exactly that because my niece, who is taking a photography course, was assigned the task of picturing three of the seven deadly sins. She asked her friends for some ideas on how this might be accomplished, and I realized that I couldn't remember them all, so I looked them up in Wikipedia.
These sins are 'deadly' because, according to Catholic doctrine, they are fatal to spiritual progress. They impede progress because each of them is thought to give birth to other immoralities. This idea has been around for several hundred years, but was written down in Greek, in the form of eight sins, by a fourth-century monk and subsequently translated into Latin, which is why we know about them.
The seven deadlies, as you may remember, are lust, greed, sloth, envy, pride, wrath, and gluttony. The ones I had forgotten were wrath (fierce anger) and envy. In finding this out I discovered that a long time ago there used to be nine, not seven. The two they cut out or rolled in were acedia (dejection) and vainglory (unjustified boasting). In AD 590, Pope Gregory added the sin of envy and rolled vainglory into pride. He also rolled acedia into tristitia (despondency) and called them sloth. That's where I think we began to have a problem.
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The sloth they were thinking about back then was a spiritual sloth, not a physical laziness. Spiritual sloth was evident in believing spiritual tasks to be too difficult. This could lead to despair, which caused a kind of spiritual detachment. Sloth was about apathetic listlessness or depression. The sinful part of that depression was the failure to take joy in the goodness of God. Now we know differently.
Depression, according to the American Psychiatric Association, is a medical illness that 'causes feelings of sadness and/or a loss of interest in activities once enjoyed. It can lead to a variety of emotional and physical problems and can decrease a person's ability to function at work and at home.' Overcoming depression was once thought to be an act of the will, but today we know that depression is not something you can talk or pray yourself out of.
If Catholics want to keep physical laziness, such as not wanting to do the dishes or clean up your room, as a deadly sin, that's one thing. But they need to accept that it isn't the same thing as spiritual sloth, and neither is the same as depression. So, I would suggest, if I were Catholic and if I had some influence over these things, that they either change the name of sloth to something else or add another deadly sin to cover the failure to take joy in the goodness of God.
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But, since I'm not a Catholic or any kind of Christian, I really think they should do away with the deadly sins altogether. It seems to me that all of them are manifested in people who would benefit from more love and acceptance. That is what Christianity is supposed to be all about, so that should be a fairly straightforward fix, right?
