Sloths, the world's slowest mammal, have been around for 64 million years. Sharyn Alfonsi traveled to Costa Rica to learn more about how they've survived.
The stopwatch has long been the symbol of 60 Minutes. But any measure of time is pointless for the subject of our next story: the slow-moving sloth. You might think these distant relatives of the armadillo would make the perfect meal for just about anything faster. And yet, somehow sloths have been hanging on in one form or another foryears. To understand this quirky animal...we hung out with a quirky zoologist. Lucy Cooke has been documenting the strange lives of sloths for 15 years.
But on the ground, Cooke says gravity removes any shred of dignity. Even with a hurricane strength tailwind, a sloth will top out at a half mile per hour. Sloths spend about 90% of their lives hanging upside down and typically only climb to the ground for bathroom breaks…once a week. With habits like that and nails like this… you can understand why they are solitary creatures…and prefer to be alone…until they don't.
Lucy Cooke : We humans are obsessed with speed. We idolize animals like the cheetah capable of doing naught to 60 in three seconds flat, well so what? Lucy Cooke: Oh no. They're cute surely. But then, I mean, I think a naked mole rat's cute, so you're asking the wrong person. Lucy Cooke: Yeah bats, hyenas. I mean, is the-- there's a whole list of-- of animals that I think, you know, just have extraordinar-- arily strange and wonderful lives.
In it, Cooke challenges the narrative that in the animal kingdom, males are usually dominant and promiscuous while females are submissive and monogamous. She traveled the world to collaborate with scientists and studied dozens of animals. reporting how killer whale pods are led by post menopausal orcas and how tyrannical matriarchs control meerkat society. Her re-examination flips parts of Charles Darwin's theories upside down.
Lesley Howle was an occupational therapist who started the ranch 19 years ago. Now she has a team of six veterinarians to treat the electrical burns. Millions of years of evolution could not prepare the sloths for human sprawl. But the vets told us they believe the sloths slow metabolismallows them to recover from injuries that might kill other creatures. The Toucan Rescue Ranch also takes in orphans.Lesley Howle: And then we have Landon here.Lesley Howle: And this is our tiniest, little Benji.
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