The NOT slothlike sloth

I finally remember the animal that I had gone batty for (no, it's not a bat you disgusting pun seekers). All it took was a little trip to the Central Park zoo and there it was hanging right there in front of me in the rainforest exhibit, A SLOTH!!!
Sloths are also hysterical because they look like such stoners. I want to say that FHQAR is not here to make fun of animals but seriously, look at these pictures of these sloths:

"Oh dude, I'm so high right now..."

"Yeah bro, seriously. I can like hardly hang on to this tree...but I feel like I AM this tree."

"Dude, these leaves are so good. Even though they're going to take me a month to digest, I don't even care. They're just so good, man."

Ok, onto the real stuff. Lemme tell you about the sloth, because it's an amazing creature and has a bad rap (it was named "sloth" for chrissake).

Once, there were tree sloths and ground sloths. Now there are only tree sloths. Why? Well scientists aren't exactly sure but they have found that the ground sloths of South and parts of North America went extinct around the same time humans arrived on the continent so it probably had to do with over-hunting. So now the world is left with 6 different species of tree sloth that live throughout Central and South America.

The remaining tree sloths are omnivores but primarily stick to eating leaves, buds, and "tender shoots" (this is not my wording. This would never be my wording). Because leaves have very little nutrition and do not digest easily sloths have incredible tummies whose contents take up two-thirds of the sloths body weight. These stomaches take a month or more to digest the leaves and the sloth only defecates once a week, this is the only time it will leave the tree and come to the ground.

Unlike most animals, sloth's hair does not grow towards their extremities. Instead the hair grows away from the extremities in order to provide protection from the elements while the sloth hangs upside down. In addition, algae grows in the sloth's hair and turns them green. This provides camoflauge and also creates a small ecosystem in the sloth's fur.

While sloths mainly stay in trees, they somehow (lord knows how) are competent swimmers. Also, they're claws are so strong that even if a hunter shoots them from below they do not fall from the tree. They just continue to hang on which deters hunters even though they are still one of their biggest predators besides jaguars and eagles.

What is most important about the sloth to me, right now, at this moment is the fact that people think sloths are slothlike. It's not true at all! SURE, they're the slowest moving mammal and SURE, they're muscle mass is half that of animals that are similar to them in size, but they do not sleep NEARLY as much as what was originally suspected. Instead it has been found that sloths sleep far more when living in captivity because they are bored. So there. That's what I really want you to know about the sloth. YOU are probably more slothlike than our little sloth friend, checking your Email during work, going out to dinner instead of cooking, watching TV when you get home from work! You know who you are!!!! The sloth doesn't have those kinds of luxuries!! He just cools out in the jungle and gets by with what he's got!!!!!!

Here is my favorite sloth video. Anderson Cooper and Jeff Corwin are in it. Enjoy.

The surreptitious Snow Leopard

I want you to know that I realize I should be shot for how little I've been updating. Mainly this is because I thought of THE BEST animal to do sometime in May, but now I've forgotten and have been kind of hung up on it and haven't been able to move on. I've moved on though and so without further ado, I present you with the snow leopard, one of my favorite animals in the world.

The snow leopard covers a lot of territory throughout the mountains in Central Asia. It's like span is 15-18 years but it has been known to live up to 20 years. Unlike most big cats the snow leopard is unable to roar and has a proportionately longer tail than any other cat species. For some time it was believed to belong to a genus separate from other large cats but after recent molecular studies it was placed back in the panthera genus.

Leopards tend to leave solitary lives and hunt whenever meat is available. They like to attack their prey from above and can jump as far as 14 meters in pursuit of a ibex, boar, deer, or small mammal. They have a very well defined home range but will not aggressively defend the range if another animals wanders into it.

There are guessed to be between 4,000 and 7,500 snow leopards left although it is hard to say since they are so solitary and hard to track. I once heard of a group of conservationists trying to track snow leopards and going out for 5 hours every day and never seeing a trace of the leopard until they turned around and headed back to camp , only to discover snow leopard tracks on top of their own along their entire path.

The snow leopard can also be found on various countries' currency and city flags particularly in Kazakhstan.