WEIRD FACTS ABOUT
SLOTH
The sloth can swim twice as fast as it can run - a mile in four hours.
The maximum ground speed of a sloth is about two metres a minute, which works out at a mile in about nine hours.
Each week it is thought to spend on average 10 hours awake motionless, 11 hours eating, 18 hours climbing and 129 hours asleep, though one recent study on sloths in the wild reported that they sleep for only ten hours a day.
The main diet of a sloth is leaves, from which its extracts very little energy, very slowly. A sloth takes a month to digest a meal, and only defecates and urinates once a week.
It does this by leaving its usual place hanging upside down on the branch of a tree and makes its way down to the gorund, where it deposits its waste products, always in the same place. Up to two-thirds of the body weight of a fully fed sloth may consist of the food in its stomach.
Whereas almost all other mammals have seven cervical vertebrae (neck bones), the two-toed sloth has six and the three-toed sloth has nine.
The greenish appearance of a sloth's coat is created by algae living in its fur. Moths may also live in a sloth's fur, and 120 moths were once counted in the fur of a single sloth
The world's only sloth orphanage is in Costa Rica. Its sick quarters are called the 'slothpital'.
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