Los Perezosos

It's been a while since my last post because my personal computer is dead, and I'll have to wait a few weeks for someone to revive it (*fingers crossed*). However, because most of you probably thought I was just being a lazy blogger, here is some information about an animal who knows how to do lazy right- the Sloth.
There are 6 living species that make up the sloths, which belong to the suborder Folivora, meaning leaf-eaters. While there used to be more species that lived on the ground in North America and South America, these disappeared with the introduction of humans to these continents. Now we are left with only the tree-dwellers, two-toed and three-toed, who spend almost their entire lives up in the air. In fact, as David Attenborough explains in this video,

the sloth only comes down from it's tree to defaecate. They breed, sleep, eat and do almost every other activity in the trees, which gives them some protection from much faster land predators (but does not make them much safer to some birds of prey known to hunt them). However, when they do come down from their trees, they have been known to swim aptly.

But, why are they so slow? Due to their diet of mostly leaves (which is sometimes supplemented by the occasional small reptile or bird) they must have an extremely slow metabolism, because leaves are not rich in usable energy. It has been estimated that it normally takes a sloth about a month to digest the leaves it eats.
It used to be thought that the sloth was one of the longest-sleeping animals, sleeping for nearly 18 hours a day, but due to a recent study of sloths in the wild it was determined that sloths sleep just under 10 hours... quite similar to that of the elusive american teenager.