Book Review: Slow Days, Fast Friends

Erik Brooks wrote a great sloth book!  In this story, you will meet Howard the Cheetah, who spends his days zooming around at top speed.  But one day, a leg injury slows him down so much he can't even keep up with a turtle!  Howard meets Quince, the slowest around:  a sloth.  Not only does Howard make a new friend, he learns to see things differently and appreciate moving slow.

Check out the book to see all of the beautiful pictures and find out what Howard learned about going slow -- and what Quince learns about going fast!

Being a Sloth Has Its Perks, If You Like to Hang Upside-Down

According to National Geographic and the American Red Cross, the average human has around 2 gallons of blood in their body. Can you imagine what happens internally when you go upside down? Lucky for us, humans are not made to spend a lot of time hanging around from trees. Bats and sloths on the other hand are made for the upside-down lifestyle. 

Bats both large and small do not have enough blood in their bodies for gravity to affect them while hanging upside-down. In fact, it’s actually easier for them to hang from a tree than it would be for a bat to sit upright. If you think about it, have you ever seen a bat sitting upright? 

For sloths, it seems that a favorite way to photograph them is when they are hanging from the limbs of a tree but in reality, they are not upside-down as often as perceived. Also, when they are traveling through the rainforest by clinging from branch to branch it is at an incredibly slow rate. So slow, that their bodies are not fazed by being upside-down. Don Moore, the Associate Director at the Smithsonian National Zoo in Washington D.C, has said that the two-toed sloth does not move their head and keeps their nose level with the with the branch while traveling the forest. Doing so, ensures they do not get dizzy. The three-toed variety does the opposite and flips their head 180 degrees to watch where they are traveling. 

Nature has made it possible for animals to do exactly what they were built for, whether it’s walking upright as a human, or hanging from a branch like a bat or sloth. 

Resources:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/08/150829-animals-science-sloths-bats-health-biology/
http://www.redcrossblood.org/learn-about-blood/blood-facts-and-statistics

A Night With A Sloth

What do you do when you receive a mysterious email inviting you have a cocktail with a sloth? You go of course! The California Academy of Sciences holds a NightLife event every Thursday from 6pm to 10pm. On March 16th, 2017 that event was dedicated to nocturnal animals and thanks to Classroom Safari and founder Bonnie Cromwell, a Two-Toed Linneaus Sloth named Willow was present. 

Willow was rescued from a pet store in Florida after she was bred in captivity. Classroom Safari was able to rescue her from an unideal situation and provide her a new “forever home.” Now Willow is being properly cared for and enjoying her time with Bonnie and the other educators, when she is not busy helping out with educational outreach programs. Those programs and private events are geared toward conservation and animal information. Classroom Safari was founded by Bonnie 38 years ago, so her love of animals reaches both children and adults and assists in teaching about how important it is to conserve the lives of animals that most people never see. 

Now back to sloths. Willow is currently around one year old and only weighs 6 lbs. She will eventually reach around 20 lbs when she is full grown. An interesting fact about Thursday night at NightLife was that it was “poop” night for Willow. Sloths only relieve themselves every 4 days and Thursday lined up as the lucky day. When sloths finally relieve themselves, they can lose one third of their body weight, resulting in a fairly large clean up. Leading up to bathroom time, sloths are very lethargic and once the business is done, they are ready to play all night. 

Bonnie spoke about her discussions with researchers who studied sloths in the Costa Rican rainforest and told a story about a pretty sly male sloth. The male sloth was always in the same spot, on the same tree, every single day. So naturally, the researchers assumed the sloth didn’t move very much and stayed in the tree. One night they set up cameras to catch any night time activities between the sloths in the forest and got quite a surprise when reviewing the footage the following day. The male sloth had numerous hot dates that night. Researchers counted 11 dates, each with a different female sloth. At the end of his night, he returned to his favorite spot, on his favorite tree, proving not only is not there not enough research on these amazing creatures, but that they might not be so “sloth like.”

Resources:
https://www.classroomsafari.org/
https://www.calacademy.org/nightlife/nocturnal-nightlife

Quiet But Noisy

Sloths use their abilities with ultrasound to stealthily make their way through the forest canopy. Many other animals also use frequencies that are outside of the range of average human hearing.

A lot of animal acoustics are not understood very well by humans, because the humans don’t perceive the sounds and therefore are limited by their own capacities.  New technologies often help open up more information, but since the technologies are invented by humans who are starting with a certain perception set, it will always be an incomplete set of information.

Scientists have listened to whale songs for many years, but they were only listening to the surface part of the song:  the audible melody.  What they didn’t realize was the effect of all of the vibrations in the spectrum of the whale song that were flooding through the water other than what was audible.

Part of the whale’s communication involves vibrations that are not audible, but that can be felt by other sea creatures.  Other whales can feel the vibrations (like when you feel the large bass booming from a stereo system) and pick that up as part of the message.  Sound travels farther in water than in air, so whales can send these tactile communications through sound vibrations much farther.

Many animals “feel” sound as part of their communication beyond what is audible.  Humans also “feel” sound, and can become aware of more subtleties of communication by becoming aware of sound at the tactile vibrational level.  A thoughtful sloth has much to explore!

Read more about the whale research at: Whales Can Really Rock With Their Mellow Songs

Silence in Motion

If you were to go to the jungle and tromp through the undergrowth, you would make a lot of noise.  And many things would react to the sound and motion that you were making:  birds might fly up and around, small creatures would scurry, monkeys would scream and scamper across the trees.

But a sloth would stay still and motionless, high up in the canopy, unconcerned with your irrelevant ramblings.  The sloth is so good at blending in and moving in stillness, that it took researchers years to discover that up to 700 sloths might live in one square kilometer of forest.  To compare, the same amount of space would only contain about 70 howler monkeys — and you would for sure know they were there!

Can you move slowly and silently like a sloth?  Try it and see!  Or are you more like a howler monkey?  Can you do both things?  It actually takes some skill and concentration to move so slowly and silently, what a fun game to play!