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Subject: The Sloth..........Lessons to be learnt!
Time: 11:27:00 o'clock BST
Author: acoward15
Mood: Sad
Music: The Alarm
I've taken a few swings at marine mammals in previous entries. So I thought I would move my attention to a land mammal, although it spends little time on the ground.
Costa Rica is home to two of the five species of sloth, the two-toed sloth (Chollepus hoffmanni) and the three-toed sloth (Bradypus variegatus). The sloth is supposed to be the slowest moving mammal on earth. It takes them a month to move one kilometer. I dispute this. I would give that title to road maintenance workers. There are some by me that move at half that pace!
Anyway, back to the sloth. The sloth spends much of it's life hanging upside-down in a tree. They eat, sleep, mate and give birth upside-down in trees. However, one thing a sloth doesn't do whilst hanging upside-down, is take a dump. For this, it climbs down the tree, curls one down, then proceeds to climb back up the tree.
Now there is a certain logic to this. Firstly, its hardly hygenic to lay a log in close proximity to where you eat, sleep and raise your young. Secondly, the sloth in able to provide nutrients to assist the growth and development of the tree in which it lives. However, there is one major drawback. It is whilst performing this essential function that the sloth makes itself vulnerable to one of its main predators, the jaguar. I'm sure it's a major inconvenience for the sloth, that has just got itself into a comfortable position, opened up its copy of Rain Forest Weekly, and started to take the strain, only to find it is lept upon and devoured by a jaguar. Although I have no idea what would be going through the jaguars mind that would inspire it to consume an animal that was in the actual process of defecating.
This is clearly a slap in the face of evolution theorists. Surely by now the sloth should have evolved to the point where it has gained sufficient understanding of its predicament to know to hang its backside over the edge of a branch to curl one down, whilst performing an inflammatory gesture towards a jaguar hidden in the bushes below.
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CUTE, CUTE THAT SLOTH...REMINDS ME OF MY SELF WITH MY OLD BOYFRIENDS..LOL.....ROBERTA
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The creatures look like they have a perpetual smile, maybe they know something we don't? Wonder how their blood pressure is? Maybe being sloth=like is the answer lol....be well, Sandi
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As always, I leave your journal today with a better understanding of the sloth and a strange desire to read "The Rain Forest Weekly."
Jimmy
25/06/08 14:38
xoxo