Why do sloths still exist?

Question

The things move so slow, they seem like they should be extinct by this point. If something tried to attack them, would they move fast enough to strike them with those huge claws they have?

lol i like how someone took enough offense from this question to take a personal jab at me.

I exist because I'm not put in any danger, being at the top of the chain and all. Put me with a bear, and well I probably won't exist much longer

Answer 1

Actually sloths do have natural enemies. One of their main enemy is the harpy eagle, which can snatch one of them from a branch. Sloths are like any creature. That's how nature created them slow moving. Regardless whether a creature is fast or slow, the point is there here and they seem to be doing pretty well. The only thing that is hurting their survival is humans destroying their homes.

Answer 2

Sloths Enemies

Answer 3

The fact that they do exist proves they are fit enough through natural selection to survive. You need to look at its adaptations and its ecology to see how it does this. For example, due to sloths low nutritional diet of leaves they have a reduced metabolic rate to compensate. As far as adaptations to predation goes, sloths may lack speed but make up for this through camouflage and being lighter than some predators (jaguars) preventing thin branches breaking.

Answer 4

Snails still exist. They have found their niche. Sloths have an incredibly slow metabolism, so they do not need to nourish themselves as often, therefore, can remain in a 'frozen' state for hours. When hanging from tree limbs, they are nearly invisible to major predators.

Answer 5

Sloths spend most of their time in trees and that might be a reason why they haven't gone extinct. Harpy eagles on the other hand are endangered.

Answer 6

A century on and the adventure continues in hunt for the giant sloth
Now, a century later, Prichard's great-grandson Charlie Jacoby is planning to retrace his ancestor's journey


A hundred years ago Cyril Arthur Pearson decided to launch a new national newspaper - that paper was the Daily Express. At the same time, reports were reaching Britain of a huge red-haired creature roaming the forests of Patagonia in South America. Scientists believed the creature could be the giant ground sloth, thought to be extinct. Pearson commissioned Hesketh Prichard to track down the sloth. Readers were gripped as he sent back a diary of his epic 3,000-mile trek.

Now, a century later, Prichard's great-grandson Charlie Jacoby is planning to retrace his ancestor's journey and the Daily Express will once more be first with the news

At some stage in his early years, every young boy dreams of being an intrepid explorer. Whether it's tales of Shackleton battling to reach the Pole, or simply the fascination of watching Harrison Ford's Indiana Jones. For me, my hero was much closer to home - my great-grandfather.

Hesketh Prichard was just 20 when he was approached by Cyril Pearson in 1897 and asked to write ghost stories for Pearson's Magazine. He had already lived an extraordinary life. In a Victorian tradition which went into overdrive during the Edwardian days before the First World War, he went from writing stories to being an explorer, cricketer, naturalist, journalist, author and big-game hunter.

So when Pearson needed someone to travel to Patagonia in search of the giant ground sloth or "mylodon" for the Daily Express, it was Prichard he summoned.

Patagonia is a vast area of land spanning parts of Argentina and Chile. Nearly 1,500 miles long and 500 miles at its widest point, it ranges from the Atlantic coast, where killer whales breed, up to the forests of the high Andes where condors fly.

By 1900, stories were coming back from the region that the giant sloth was not extinct at all. In the 1890s an Argentinian geographer, Ramon Lista, was hunting there when a large, unknown creature covered with long red hair trotted past the party.

To Lista the creature looked like a gigantic armadillo. Members of the party shot at the beast but the bullets seemed to have no effect.

Professor Florentino Ameghino, a paleontologist in Argentina, heard the Lista story and began to wonder if the strange beast was a giant sloth which had survived from the Pleistocene era - a time which included the ice age and the appearance of humans. The largest of the ground sloths was megatherium - on its hind legs it stood 20ft tall and weighed up to four tons. It had a short flat head, powerful jaws and blunt teeth, its fur was thick and it used its sturdy tail to balance itself when standing upright.

Lista's tale reminded Ameghino of legends he'd collected from Indians in Patagonia about hunting the "iemisch" or "mapinguari", a creature which lived in the mountains and so terrified them they refused to go there. The animal in the Indian stories was big, about the size of an ox, with short legs. It had reddish fur, a soul-wrenching scream and it stank. It was nocturnal and slept during the day in burrows. The Indians found it difficult to penetrate the animal's skin with their arrows.

Professor Ameghino also had a piece of physical evidence. A small section of apparently fresh hide found by a rancher named Eberhardt in a cave in 1895. It was discovered near human remains, suggesting that it had been hunted by man. The hide was studded with bony nodules and would have been impervious to the teeth of Pleistocene predators. It seemed likely that it would have also resisted Indian arrows and Lista's bullets.

Prichard was sceptical about these stories but the adventure of the trip appealed to him. He agreed to do it and spent a year there, starting in 1900, leading a 3,000-mile expedition into the interior and the Andes to Lake Buenos Aires and Lake Argentino.

To my family, Prichard was both a family hero and a hard act to follow. His trip to South America required eight men, 60 horses, a wagon and a leaky boat.

Prichard described his journey across Lake Argentina, between icebergs, on his way to discover Lake Pearson as "perhaps the most heartbreaking moments we experienced throughout the whole trip". A storm stranded him and another man for two nights with only berries and the remains of a Rhea (a large flightless bird) to eat. But he survived his ordeal to observe: "Things rarely fulfil their promise of disagreeableness - things of this kind anyway."

Prichard set out to find the giant sloth with the hope that there must be some grains of truth behind the local legends. Disappointingly for Pearson, my great-grandfather could find no trace of such a mammal.

"I wanted to find a substratum of fact below these fancies," he wrote. "After thorough examination, however, I am obliged to say that I found none. The Indians not only never enter the Cordillera but avoid the very neighbourhood of the mountains. The rumours of the Iemisch and the stories concerning it, which, in print, had assumed a fairly definite form, I found nebulous in the extreme when investigated on the spot. Finally, after much investigation I came to the conclusion that the Indian legends in all probability refer to some large species of otter."

The otter theory is widely believed as the Brazilian river otter grows to nearly six-feet long.

Answer 7

I think predators find it tough to believe that anything so slow and boring could be tasty.

Little do they know that, sauteed with a little soy sauce....

Answer 8

I remember from middle school that they're kick *** swimmers...maybe they just like being lazy, and since they don't really do anything, whats the point in bothering them?

Answer 9

lol, haha, but theyre soooo cute. theyre like really furry monkeys that got influenced by turtles

Answer 10

Yes,but they have no natural enemies except humans.Even jaguars don't eat them.