It is one letter less, but then you immediately have a completely different beast. Last week I wrote about the leopard, and then shortly after that the sloth made the news. Three were found frozen to death in the hold of a plane at Liège airport.
Due to bad winter weather, the aircraft could not immediately fly to its final destination in Indonesia after a stopover from Peru, so it was parked in the freezing cold for a day. The tropical animals could not stand that.
What are three sloths doing in an airplane hold? They didn’t sit there like stowaways looking for a better life, because they had just left that behind. The poor animals were commodities. How abject do we want it? In addition to the drug and arms trade, the wildlife trade, whether legal or illegal, is a billion-dollar business.
Many people become very rich and that this is at the expense of animals, biodiversity and nature in general, she will be a sausage. From rhinoceroses to aquarium fish and orchids, nothing is safe from the power of fast money. The question of what three sloths do in an airplane hold is therefore a rhetorical question.
What species are we talking about here? There are two-toed and three-toed sloths. The photo accompanying a news item showed animals with three long nails on the front legs, so it was a three-toed species. The plane came from Peru and that’s where the capuchin sloth lives, Bradypus variegatus.
Sloths, as the name suggests, are not speed demons. They spend by far most of their time in trees, hanging upside down from their long nails. They are living clothes hangers. They feed on leaves; there the suborder in which the sloths are placed is also named after: Folivore (‘the leaves’).
Strange joints
This Folivore together with the anteaters form the order of the Pilosa (‘hairy ones’) and which together with the scaly armadillos form the group that used to be edentulous (‘toothless’) was called, but because they do have teeth, that name has been replaced by Xenarthranamed for strange joints in their spine.
All these animals are found exclusively in America, they originated there about seventy million years ago when North and South America were island continents. Most Folivore are now extinct; four species of three-toed and two species of two-toed sloths are still alive.
Sloths are well adapted to their upside down lifestyle, not only do they have those huge hook nails, some of the intestines are also suspended from the skeleton with connective tissue against prolapse. The capuchin sloth sleeps most of the day. Only once a week does he undertake the arduous journey to the ground to deposit his faeces. Leaves are extremely low in calories, so there isn’t much energy for other activities.
So they live up to their name; not only in Dutch, because in French the words for sloth and lazy are exactly the same: lazy. A lazy sloth: a lazy sloth, it is the ultimate pleonasm. However, that was of little use to those poor animals in that cold plane.
Jelle Reumer is a paleontologist. Every week he discusses an animal that makes the news for Trouw.