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Sloths have been taking a bum rap for the myth of their lazy persona of sleeping most the day, as scientists reveal that their slothfulness has been wildly exaggerated. Contrary to popular belief, the sleepy-eyed creature with seemingly laid back approach to life spends far less time asleep and inactive than had been claimed, sleeping 9.6 hours per day verses the 16 hours as previously claimed.

Come to be a byword for laziness, researchers now contend that the sloth has been unfairly smeared as a lazy creature making slow motion replays look like fast-forward.

Sleeping time had previously been measured using captive sloths, which gave inaccurate information of their wakefulness in the wild.

“Our results suggest that sleep in the wild may be markedly different from that in captivity.” the researchers reported in the journal Biology Letters.

Photo BBC

Photo Times Online

Photo BBC

The findings may help shed light into the importance of sleep for a variety of animals and human sleep disorders.

“We are fascinated that some species sleep far longer than others. If we can determine the reasons for variations in sleep patterns, we will gain insight into the function of sleep in mammals, including human.” said Niels Rattenborg, of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany.

“If animals behave differently in captivity — where all previous comparative studies were performed — than they do in the wild, measuring their brain activity in captivity can lead to the wrong conclusions.”

Photo Times Online

Orphaned sloths are looked after in a nursery at the world’s only sloth rescue centre at Avarios in Costa Rica. Photo Times Online

Orphaned sloths sometimes drop from the canopies they live in, lose their grip or simply fall. Photo Times Online

Three female brown-throated 3-toed sloths were caught near the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute living in the rainforest on Barro Colorado Island, Panama, fitted with a data recorder and then released.

The scientists, from Germany, Switzerland and the US, developed a small machine capable of monitoring brain patterns associated with sleep — miniaturized electroencephalogram (EEG) tags — which were fitted to the wild sloths. They revealed that instead of sleeping for almost 16 hours a day they actually dozed off for only 9.63 hours per day.

They still moved around the forest extremely slowly, but they were active for at least 6 more hours than expected.

Baby sloths looked after at the privately-owned wildlife sanctuary cannot be returned to the wild because they lack the survival knowledge taught to them by their mothers. Photo Times Online

At the nursery the baby sloths lie in cots and often hold on tight while they cuddle teddy bears. Photo Times Online

Baby sloths are given the teddy bears to reduce the risk of human imprinting.
Photo Times Online

This development enabled researchers to monitor the sleep patterns of wild sloths in their natural environment for the first time.

“The real exciting finding was that they only slept 9.6 hours a day, which is much less than what people popularly believed and less than had been observed in a previous study of sloths in captivity.” lead researcher Niels Rattenborg said.

“So they still may be sloth-like in terms of their speed of movement but in terms of their sleep they don’t seem to sleep an inordinate amount of time.”

Sometimes playtime with the teddy bear gets a bit much for the baby sloths. Photo Times Online

The three-toed sloth is generally more docile and even tempered than those
with two toes. Photo Times Online

Normally found sleeping in tree-tops during the day, sloths are most active
from dusk till dawn. Photo Times Online

One of the researchers, Roland Keys, of the New York State Museum in the US, said wild sloths were likely to sleep less because they had a harder life in which they had to find food and avoid predators. Captive animals, however, are guaranteed food and security.

“Sloths in captivity don’t really have anything to do so we weren’t surprised that they sleep more.” he said. “However, the 6 hour difference was surprising.”

“This was more than an extra little siesta in the middle of the day, and has real implications for our understanding of sleep in all animals.”

The work attempts to find traits that predict whether an animal sleeps more or less than another species. Animals vary in the amount of sleep they need — pythons sleep for 18 hours a day, for example, while giraffes survive on merely 2 hours.

Sometimes sloths spend the day hanging around, then often go back to sleep.
Photo Times Online

Tai Strike, a veterinary officer for the Zoological Society of London, said that recent observations of sloths at London Zoo had led keepers to come to a similar conclusion, and the extra hours the sloths spent asleep in captivity could be a result of boredom.

It had been thought that sloths were so inactive that all they needed in captivity was somewhere to hang. Since opening an open-plan rainforest facility at the zoo where the animals can roam more extensively, the sloths’ activity levels have sharply increased.

“It’s been amazing how active they are.” said Tai. “People used to think that all sloths needed was a tree to hang from to keep them happy — you didn’t need to make space for them to use like you would for a gibbon. We’ve found the opposite to be true. By giving them more space and an interesting environment they are incredibly active compared to what they were.”

Photo Wild Discovery

Dr Neil Stanley, an expert in sleep disorders at the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, UK, said animals tended to sleep much more in captivity since they have all their needs met.

“It’s intuitive that animals would sleep less in the wild than in captivity — this technology gives us the opportunity to prove that’s true” he said.

Despite years of research into the function of sleep, there are still many unresolved questions. It’s known that sleep plays an important role in maintaining normal mental functions, but the precise mechanisms remain unclear.

Facts About Sloths
• Sloths maintain a low body temperature of 30 to 34 C (86 to 93 F) and lower when resting
• Their stomach contents are two-thirds of their weight
• The sloth is descended from a family of mammals that appeared on earth about 60 million years ago
• There are 6 species of sloths alive today
• The 3-toed sloth is the slowest mammal in the world
• All living sloths have in fact 3 toes
• The 2-toed sloths, however, have only 2 fingers
• The Maned Three-toed Sloth is classified as endangered
• They’re currently found in the rainforests of Central and South America
• Sloths became extinct from parts of North and Central America immediately after the arrival of humans on the continents
• Now extinct giant ground sloths, could rear up as high as giraffes and weighed as much as a mammoth
• Sloths’ claws serve as their only natural defense
• In the wild they can live for 12 years but have exceeded 30 years in captivity
• Sloths mate while suspended from branches
• They give birth hanging upside down so the baby does not fall to the ground
• Females normally bear 1 baby at a time
• Gestation is typically 11 months and 1 week
• They spend most of their lives in the forest canopy, but descend from the trees to defecate about once per week
• The 3-toed sloth can take a minute to travel 6.5 feet (2 meters)
• Altogether, sloths’ bodies are usually between 20 to 24 inches (50 to 60 cm) long
• They turn green because algae grows on them and the bacteria provide nutrients when licked during grooming
• Despite their adaptation to living in trees, sloths make competent swimmers
• Meals may take a month and more to digest
• Leaves and tender shoots form the bulk of their diet although they may eat insects, small lizards and carrion

Oviedo y Valdes, a Spaniard who saw sloths during the 16th-century, described them as the ugliest and most useless animals that he had ever encountered. We beg to differ, and believe you will agree after seeing these images and watching the videos.

Visit the Buttercup Foundation website whose mission is to teach the world to love the rain forest and understand why we must protect it for the generations to come.

Photo Connor Lee

Photo Christian Mehlführer

Photo Thorsten Bachner

Photo Stefan Laube

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Sources: BBC, Times Online and Wikipedia

Tags:animal animals bizarre odd research sleep sloth sloths unusual

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