Video Zone: Saying boo to a sloth! – transcript
Transcript for Saying boo to a sloth!
David
In this tree there is one of the most extraordinary plant predators. It’s one animal that I
Attenborough: don’t need to sneak up on … Boo! This extraordinary creature is half blind, half deaf and
this is just about as fast as it can move. That’s what’s going to happen to you if you live
on nothing but leaves!
It’s a sloth. It’s not exactly an enthusiastic leaf eater – a couple of half-hearted chews
and the leaves go straight down to its stomach. Leaves however are not easily digested.
The sloth’s technique is to give them time. Then eventually this mobile compost heap
pulls itself together and starts on a long and dangerous journey. This is a very unusual
sight, a sloth in a hurry! It wants to defecate. And the only place it’s happy doing that,
oddly enough, is down on the ground. It only does it about once a week but why does it
come down to the ground to do it? And why does it nearly always choose to do so in
exactly the same place? Whatever the reason it must be very important, for a sloth on
the ground is almost helpless. Any predator can attack it and it doesn’t have the speed
to escape. Why it comes down in this way is a mystery … nobody knows! Now he’s
finished and back he goes, up to the safety of the canopy.
Leaves are not very nutritious. The sloth’s way of compensating for all that is not to eat
more but to do less. Its claws hook over the branches so that the sloth can hang without
any effort of its muscles which have been reduced to thin ribbons, and to save energy it
spends most of its time hanging around half asleep in the treetops. So with very little
muscle and a reaction time only a quarter as fast as ours, how does a sloth’s day
compare with our day?
In the time it takes me to write a few letters, the sloth just about manages to groom itself.
While we have our lunch, the sloth nibbles a few leaves and then as we film a sequence
for the series ... it’s time for another nap.