Three-Toed Sloth: You'll Be Surprised by How Much Life Crawls Inside Its Fur (9 photos)

He who understands life is in no hurry? Well, then it's clear why the three-toed sloth is so slow. It doesn't just understand life—it's its creator. After all, every sloth is an entire ecosystem in miniature! And a creator has no need to rush.





The most noticeable and important inhabitant of the sloth's ecosystem is the algae that colors its fur green. And this isn't just a random collection of algae species, whose spores land on the sloth's fur from the air. The animals cultivate Trichophilus welkerii, a unique species that grows only in sloth fur—and nowhere else. They're truly domesticated plants, it turns out.



The very same domesticated sloth algae. You can see how it's arranged on the animal's hair under the letter D.





However, it's worth acknowledging that most sloths have a relatively low algae count in their fur, so they don't appear green.

For a long time, people believed that sloths used their green algae solely for camouflage. And there's some logic to that—Mother Nature has deprived mammals of green pigments, so none of us are capable of camouflaging ourselves as leaves. No one, that is, except sloths and their little friends.



I hid.

But in 2018, researchers discovered that sloths have another compelling reason for their symbiosis with algae. Houseplants are an important food source for them. While algae can't replace a sloth's leafy diet, they are essential. After all, algae contains five times more fat than tasteless greens! And they also contain beneficial vitamins!



He ate the algae from his fur, and now he's sitting there happy. And that's all he needs!

But you can't feed algae with just water and sunlight; they also need nitrogen, and lots of it. But the sloths have found a solution here too—they've acquired tame moths! The moths also live in the sloths' fur: they communicate, reproduce, and, of course, excrete waste.



In English-language literature, the butterfly is called the sloth moth, because although it is capable of flight, it uses the sloth as a mobile home, to which it can always return for rest and reproduction.

This waste not only imparts the sloths' unique aroma but also provides food for their tame bacterial-fungal ecosystem. This ecosystem, in turn, decomposes the experiments and remains of the butterflies, producing simple nitrogen compounds that the algae use for their growth.



Your face, when you've grown an entire ecosystem on yourself just to do nothing.

A pleasant side effect of such a complex system is sloths' extremely high resistance to skin inflammation. The bacteria living on sloths not only process waste but also secrete antibiotics into the environment, protecting their host. Thanks to this ability, they are immune to dermatitis, and any wounds they injure themselves are disinfected and, in most cases, require no additional treatment.



Running as fast as they can... The average speed of a sloth is 2 meters per minute :DD

But for all the perks of their ecosystem, sloths pay a high price – they are forced to go to the toilet. Instead of simply defecating from the trees, sloths must spend precious time and energy descending to the ground and doing their dirty business at the tree roots. At this point, these already vulnerable animals become completely defenseless: any passing predator can snatch them, and they will be unable to offer even a token resistance.



The butterfly cycle in nature.

However, while they sit in the bushes, the moths hanging on their fur are doing the most important thing in their lives: laying eggs nearby. When the larvae hatch, they find a slightly processed and very nutritious (by butterfly standards, of course) mass nearby, on which they can grow into large and strong insects. And as soon as the butterflies grow up, they take flight and go looking for sloths to continue supplying their algae with nitrogen. Such are the jokes of complex ecosystems. If you want to eat well, you have to poop properly!