Name: 【TED】Lucy Cooke: Sloths! The strange life of the world's slowest mammal (Sloths! The strange life of the world's slowest mammal | Lucy Cooke)
Uploaded: 2019-06-18T13:22:17.000Z
Duration: 14 min 12 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Well, I'm here to talk to you about my animal muse:

I've been documenting the strange lives of the world's slowest mammal

I still remember the first time I saw one.

I was fascinated by their freaky biology.

I mean, what's not to love about an animal that's born

They've been saddled with a name that speaks of sin

and damned for their languorous lifestyle,

which people seem to think has no place amongst the fittest

Well, I'm here to tell you that we've got this animal all wrong --

and how understanding the truth about the sloth

may help save us and this planet we both call home.

back to a Spanish conquistador called Valdés,

who gave the first description of a sloth in his encyclopedia of the New World.

"the stupidest animal that can be found in the world ...

I have never seen such an ugly animal or one that is more useless."

I'd like to have a word about Valdés's drawing skills.

I've never seen an illustration of a sloth that's more useless.

he has given the sloth a remarkably humanlike face,

and sloths do have remarkably humanlike faces.

This sloth I photographed in Costa Rica, I think looks a lot like Ringo Starr.

But then, sloths do bear an uncanny resemblance to the The Beatles.

Particularly pleased with Paul, actually, on there.

But like The Beatles, sloths are also extremely successful.

They come from an ancient line of mammals, and there were once dozens of species

including the giant ground sloth, which was the size of a small elephant

and one of the only animals big enough to eat avocado pits whole

there might be no avocado on toast today,

leaving hipsters everywhere totally bereft at breakfast.

Today, there are six surviving species, and they fall into two groups.

You've got your Bradypus three-toed sloths,

they're the ones with the Beatles haircuts and the Mona Lisa smiles.

They look a little bit more like a cross between a Wookiee and a pig.

They live in the jungles of Central and South America,

There was a survey that was done in the 1970s

that found that sloths were the most numerically abundant large animal.

They took up one quarter of the mammalian biomass.

and suggests they're doing something very right indeed.

So what if, rather than deriding the sloth for being different,

and convenience trumps quality in our quest for quick.

Our addiction to the express life is choking us and the planet.

We idolize animals like the cheetah, the "Ferrari of the animal kingdom,"

capable of doing naught to 60 in three seconds flat.

The cheetah is speedy, but at the expense of strength.

so they lose one in nine kills to tougher predators like hyenas.

has taken a more stealthy approach to dinner.

But you see, leaves don't want to be eaten any more than antelope do,

so they're loaded full of toxins and very hard to digest.

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【TED】Lucy Cooke: Sloths! The strange life of the world's slowest mammal (Sloths! The strange life of the world's slowest mammal | Lucy Cooke)

process

extremely

metabolism

plenty