60 Minutes - 12/24/2023: 60 Minutes Presents: The Sperm Whales of Dominica, Monkey Island, Hanging On

Episode Date: December 25, 2023

With brains six times larger than humans and most of their lives spent in the darkest depths of the ocean, sperm whales are largely misunderstood. Cecilia Vega searches the Caribbean Sea to find these massive mammals. Lesley Stahl travels to an island completely inhabited by monkeys. It’s not open to the public. Researchers have been studying the monkeys for decades. Learn about the behavioral scientific discoveries that may apply to humans. Sharyn Alfonsi reports from Costa Rica on sloths and their superpower of slowing down. Alfonsi examines how these mammals have mastered the art of survival for more than 60 million years and the new threats of climate change to the species.  To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi there, I'm Ryan Reynolds, and I have a list of things I like to have on set. It's just little things like two freshly cracked eggs, scrambled, with crispy hash brown, sausage, crumble, and creamy chipotle sauce from Tim Hortons. From my rider to Tim's menu, try my new scrambled eggs loaded breakfast box. Tonight, on this special edition of 60 Minutes Presents, animal magnetism. What's it like to be in the water with them? Magical. 60 Minutes is eye-to-eye with the whale of Moby Dick legend. But Melville's novel was fiction.

Sperm whales are especially maternal. Generations live together while taking care of their calves, and they have the biggest brain in the animal kingdom. And they sleep like this. There are roughly 1,800 monkeys on Cayo Santiago. They live in isolation in what is a natural laboratory. Today, scientists are studying how the stress of a devastating hurricane affected their overall health and relationships, and what that might teach us about ourselves, since

we share 94% of our DNA with them. So the two toads, I always say, look like a cross between a Wookie and a pig, because they've got that sort of beepable nose. And then these ones have the sort of, you know, Beatles haircuts and Mona Lisa smiles. Behind that ringer for Ringo, Cook says, is a secret. Being nature's couch potato is the reason sloths have survived for more than 60 million years in spite of, well, themselves.

There are very few things that you can be certain of in life. But you can always be sure the sun will rise each morning. You can bet your bottom dollar that you'll always need air to breathe and water to drink. And, of course, you can rest assured that with Public Mobile's 5G subscription phone plans, you'll pay the same thing every month. With all of the mysteries that life has to offer, a few certainties can really go a long way. Subscribe today for the peace of mind you've been searching for. Public Mobile, different is calling. Why do fintechs like Float choose Visa? As a more trusted, more secure payments network, Visa provides scale, expertise, and innovative payment solutions. Learn more at Visa.ca slash fintech. Good evening. I'm Cecilia Vega. Welcome to 60 Minutes Presents. three stories of animal magnetism attract us. Leslie Stahl pays a visit to Monkey Island off the coast of Puerto Rico, where the inhabitants roam free and have much to teach the scientists

who study them. Sharon Alfonsi moves ever so slowly among the Central American treetops with sloths. But we begin in the depths of the Caribbean Sea. In 2022, nearly every member country of the United Nations pledged to protect at least 30% of the world's land and sea by 2030 to reverse the damage done by humans and protect vulnerable species. One of the animals at risk is also one of the largest in the ocean and among the least understood. Sperm whales are not the predators of Moby Dick legend. They have brains six times larger than ours and spend most of their lives in the darkest depths of the ocean. It is difficult to describe their size without comparing them to a school bus. Last spring, we traveled with National Geographic explorer Enrique Sala to the Caribbean island of

Dominica, where he proposed protections for the hundreds of sperm whales living there. You guys ready? Go, go, go! Go, go! Go, guys, go! Look in the water, coming straight to you, yeah! Most of Enrique Sala's dives don't start like a fire drill, even though he has spent thousands of hours underwater as an explorer. Look down, out the back of you, look, this way, this way. We came face to face with a pod of whales, but these are not the whales we traveled all this

way to see. They are pygmy killer whales, known to threaten sperm whales. And because they are here, the sperm whales are not. These killer whales can grow up to eight and a half feet in size. Sala told us seeing them up close almost never happens. You've never been able to get into the water with one of these. They're that elusive. They are very elusive. Why is that? Why do you not see them? They are very smart. They hunt like wolves. They hunt in groups. You don't care about interacting with humans. They are after the prey. We were off the coast of Dominica, a country in the eastern Caribbean. Residents call it Nature Island. Those rainforest-covered volcanic peaks drop thousands of feet down to the seafloor below, which is why hundreds of sperm whales live in these waters. They are one of the deepest diving mammals on the planet.

They are mostly females here, families made up of grandmothers, mothers, and daughters who stay together for life, nursing and raising their young. When Enrique Sala was here, his National Geographic team filmed this. It is a pod of sleeping female sperm whales, vertical giants up to 40 feet long, suspended near the surface. Their nap lasts only about 15 minutes until the whales are ready to dive again in what can be an hour-long journey for squid thousands of feet down. Even to researchers, why they sleep like this is one of the great mysteries. What's it like to be in the water with them?

Magical. We have in our minds the legend of Moby Dick, these nasty, aggressive animals. But you jump in the water, and they are so docile and gentle. They have never attacked humans, and they are so curious, especially the babies. So it's one of the most amazing wildlife encounters that one can have on the planet. Your official title is explorer in residence. Not bad. It's an oxymoron.

Explorers are not supposed to be in residence. True, you're not supposed to be sitting in one place. What does that mean to be an explorer in the year 2023? Very different from what an explorer of the 19th century was. I can dedicate my life and work with an amazing team of scientists, policy experts, filmmakers, storytellers, to work with local communities, governments, indigenous peoples, to assess the health of ocean places and help to protect them. He grew up north of Barcelona, Spain, near the coast.

His first dive was in a marine reserve. It drove everything that I have done afterwards. If we give the ocean space, it can heal itself. Sala moved to California, where he was a professor of marine ecology for seven years at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. You have had a long career in academia at a top university, and you try that and decided, not for me, you walked away. I walked away because my job was to study the impacts of humans in the ocean,

the impacts of fishing and global warming. And one day I realized that all I was doing was writing the obituary of the ocean. Writing the obituary of the ocean. I felt like the doctor who's telling you how you're going to die, that all I was doing was writing the obituary of the ocean. Writing the obituary of the ocean? Yeah, I felt like the doctor who's telling you how you're going to die with excruciating veto, but not offering a cure. Have you found that cure? There is one solution that is proven. It's a success story everywhere in the world,

which is marine reserves or marine protected areas, areas where damaging activities are banned, and marine life can come back. He founded the Pristine Seas Project in 2008. It combines sea exploration, scientific research and public policy and has worked with 17 countries to turn these large swaths of the ocean into marine protected areas. In Dominica, scientists estimate the sperm whale population declines by 3% each year. Sala says a preserve would protect them

from their greatest threats. Not those pygmy killer whales we saw, or whaling, which has been banned for decades, but plastic trash, ocean noise pollution, and ship strikes. If they continue with the status quo here, what happens? If nothing is done, the population will probably continue declining. So reducing those threats, hopefully, will allow the sperm whale population to rebound. And the more whales there are, the more benefits Dominica and the local communities will obtain.

Hurricane Maria devastated those communities in 2017. Today, the island is continuing to rebuild and prepare for the future. Francine Barron heads the agency in charge of that effort. What was it about Hurricane Maria that made the leaders of this country say, we have to do something, we really have to act? We suffered the equivalent of 226% loss of GDP. So we could see the trend, and we realized that we needed to become much more resilient.

When Enrique Sala came to you with this idea of creating a sanctuary for these whales, what was his pitch to you? We see whale watching as an important part of our tourism product, and it's something that needs to be protected. And the idea of creating greater protection for the whales is something that Dominica is very open to, and we were very pleased with the suggestion that Enric made to create a recognized sanctuary for the whales.

Enric Sala compares it to a model that has worked in Rwanda, where protecting mountain gorillas helped bring tourism dollars to the local economy. You going to find us some whales? Sure. All right. Captain Kurt Benoit was born and raised in Dominica and has been in the whale tourism business for more than two decades. We set out on his 38-foot Lady Rose from a small fishing village on the West Coast.

Our government permit to swim with the whales was good for six days. Captain Benoit uses a homemade device that picks up the distinct clicking of sperm whales as far as 11 miles away. We got whales in the south. Every three miles, we check to see if we were getting closer. It's come to papa. Daddy's here. Tell me about this really high-tech device you've got here. You have an underwater microphone, which picks up sound from 360.

So what I did, I take a salad bowl with neoprene. So the hydrophone is kind of hidden. So as it goes out, it actually brings you straight to wherever you hear the sound. So this is a salad bowl from your house? Yes. What do the whales sound like? It's like a horse is galloping on a hot surface.

So if we hear several of them, that means there's a lot of whales there. Let's keep on going, man. I'm going to find these guys. All right. On the second day, a water spout. See it? It's right here. Look, guys. See him? You can see its top. Look at him. Oh, my gosh. Go! Swimmers in the water.

Males here live with their families until their teen years. Then they roam mostly alone, swimming thousands of miles away. Caribbean male sperm whales have been found as far away as Norway, returning here only to mate. Our cameraman got lucky enough or unlucky enough to have the whale poop on him. So the whales go down, they hunt squid, they come back to the surface, they breathe, they rest, and they poop. And that poop is full of nutrients, which fertilizes the shallow waters.

So a good thing, I guess. It's a good thing. Come on, people. We're looking for spouts. But our luck didn't last. Okay, guys, nothing is here. We spent the next day searching for sperm whales, and the next. Nothing at all? Nothing at all.

And the next. Not a single click. Okay, guys, it's pretty quiet. And then, in the last hour of the last day of our trip... Yeah, lots of animals in the area, guys. Whoo! They're coming back. But I'm getting songs 360. So that means the whales, we are above them. We're right there.

Yes, it blows! Yes, it blows! Yes, right there. Yes, it blows! Yes, it blows! Yes, it blows! Yes, it blows! Go! Go! And stay there, it's coming to you! It's coming to you! We jumped in the water, and a young female swam right to us. She came within feet. At first, her size was terrifying.

She made a sound like a creaking door hinge. It's one of the ways whales communicate and socialize. With eyes on the side of her head, she stared right at us. She had squid in her mouth, leftover from lunch thousands of feet below. She stayed and rolled around, and her jaw was wide open.

She was using echolocation, bouncing those clicks off of us, trying to figure out what we were. You could hear the clicking. You could hear her. Once you were really close to her, you could hear that so loudly. Very loud. I could feel it in my bones. You grabbed my hand. You could tell I was nervous. I was excited, too.

You were? They are huge. You have to respect them. You have to respect them. There is a sense of awe that comes with being in there. She was looking right at us. And she left us a souvenir. Piece of squid. Sperm whales live in... Shane Guiro is another National Geographic explorer. He started the Dominica Sperm Whale Project, and over the past 18 years, he's identified more than 35 families.

Did you recognize the whale that we saw? The animal you met belongs to the EC2 clan, the other clan of whales that we've known exists in the Caribbean, but we haven't seen all that much. And those groups identify themselves by making specific patterns of cliques called codas. It's a part of who they are, where their grandmother grew up, and so it really ties the animals and the place together. What does the coda of the EC2 sound like? They make the 5R3 coda, and it sounds like this.

Five slow clicks. And she came up to you and made this 5R3 coda, saying, I am from the EC2 clan, are you? She was rolling around and she kept coming back. But is that me assigning human characteristics to a whale? Or is she actually a playful animal? These are the animals that are holding the largest brain to ever exist, maybe in the universe. And they use that for complicated thinking and behavior. Absolutely, this was an animal that was playful. And that curiosity of the animal actively

coming towards you just shows that this is an animal that's investigating something in its world. Back on the dock, Enrique Sala says it's that world he's trying to protect. Being in the water with sperm whales is a magical experience. There's something spiritual there. This is more than science and data. Sense of awe and wonder that is unavoidable when you are in the water with these gentle giants. In November, the Prime Minister of Dominica announced that the island nation will create the first sperm whale reserve in the world. The sanctuary will be 300 square miles

and have a new senior whale officer assigned to ensure the whale's safety. What's better than a well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue? to ensure the whale's safety. for. Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. Sometimes historic events suck, but what shouldn't suck is learning about history. I do that through storytelling. History That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping history-telling podcast chronicling the epic story of America, decade by decade. Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more.

The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck. Available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. With extreme weather events on the rise across the globe, like the rare Category 5 hurricane that hit Mexico in October, we were interested in a study that's taking place on a remote island very few people are allowed to visit, where scientists are studying how the stress of these environmental crises affect longevity and overall health.

As Leslie Stahl first reported in November, the subjects are not what you'd expect. They're monkeys, rhesus macaque monkeys, who've been studied there for over 80 years because 94% of their DNA is the same as humans. They survived with relative environmental stability until six years ago, when the island was hit with a devastating storm. After taking tests for tuberculosis, measles, and COVID, Leslie and her team were allowed to visit the island, called Cayo Santiago, or Monkey Island, off the coast of Puerto Rico. There are roughly 1,800 monkeys on Cayo. They live in isolation in what is a natural laboratory, halfway between captivity and the way they would live in the wild. Are they fighting? Yeah. Yeah. She's looking around and screaming for help, trying to get others to come to her aid. Wow. Biologists James Haim of NYU

and Noah Snyder-Mackler of Arizona State University are part of a team of investigators in this long-term research project. What's the lifespan usually? The lifespan here on the island for the females, the median lifespan, is about 18 years, and then in males, about 15 years, right? Do they have, is there a predator? No predators here. Another way life here is unlike the wild

is that these guys serve their meals every morning. Researchers tell us there's a hierarchy. The highest-ranking monkeys get to eat first. I've even seen high-ranking individuals go up to a lower-ranking individual who is eating food in their mouth and hold their mouth open and take the food out of their mouth and then... What did they get? Purina monkey chow.

There's monkey chow? Made by Purina. Yep. Oh my goodness. Rhesus monkeys are commonly used for medical research because there are close relatives, genetically and physiologically similar to humans. They have systems that are quite like us, eyes that are like us, lungs and hearts that are like us.

These rhesus macaque monkeys, their ancestors, came here from India in 1938. The macaque is used in larger numbers for medical and zoological research than any other kind of primate. American primatologist Clarence Carpenter took 500 of them on a grueling 14,000-mile sea voyage that lasted 51 days. He wanted to create a naturalistic research facility to study the monkeys' social and sexual behaviors. Their early years here were tough. Many died from disease, but enough of them lived on so that by the 1950s, scientists began tattooing them and taking a daily census. That meticulous record-keeping has continued with today's monkeys,

all of whom descended from the original group, giving scientists rare access to more than six decades of their biological and behavioral data. One of the things they learned is that they're highly adaptable, acclimating quickly to the island. They also learned that they can be quite aggressive, especially around food and during the mating season. Are these monkeys intelligent?

Sure, they're pretty intelligent. You know, they're socially intelligent. How similar to us are they in how they live? They form really strong social relationships with their best friends and their family members. They have best friends? Some close friends, some best friends, right. Rhesus monkeys live in female-led societies.

Mothers, daughters, aunts, and grandmothers stick together in groups while the males leave when they reach maturity and join other troops for breeding. Few people know the troop tensions and allegiances better than research assistants Daniel Phillips and Josue Negron, who've worked on Cayo for years. They arrive every morning by boat at 7 a.m. and for the next seven hours, they document things like aggression, grooming, vigilance, and feeding. Do you ever get to know individuals? In other words, vigilance, and feeding. Do you ever get to know individuals? In other words, you know that monkey versus that one?

Yeah. Yeah, we need to recognize them right away because I need to know, like, who is interacting with who, how they, like, groom each other or attack each other. And how can you tell the difference? What are the characteristics that you see? You can see the differences on even how they walk, how they move. Their even faces have differences. In other words, their faces become as ordinary,

in a way, to your eyes as human faces. Yes. You'll recognize even faces. Yes. You'll recognize even families. Exactly. Your face is familiar, you should be the son of this female. Everything changed for the research and the monkeys when Hurricane Maria slammed into Puerto Rico in September 2017.

155 mile-an-hour winds smashed into homes and office buildings, destroying everything in sight, including the power grid and communication systems. Nearly 3,000 people died. There was no way for the team to get to Monkey Island. Angelina Ruiz-Lambides, the then-scientific director of CAIO, seven months pregnant at the time, sheltered in her home outside of San Juan with her husband and two young children.

You thought the monkeys were all going to die. Yeah, we thought that the monkeys were going to die. James Higham and Noah Snyder-Mackler couldn't get any news about their colleagues or the monkeys. So two days after the storm, the team came up with an idea. And you hired a helicopter? We hired a helicopter. They enlisted the pilot to fly over Cayo and do a survey. And they had a list of questions.

Can he see any monkeys? Are they alive? What is the status of the vegetation? Are there standing pools of water that they might be able to drink? Angelina, who had decided to go up with the pilot, was horrified. This is footage she shot from the helicopter. I see this destruction, like 80 plus years of work completely flattened. This is Cayo before the hurricane, with a dense canopy of trees and lush foliage. This is after. A green oasis turned brown, buried in dead branches, the island lost two-thirds of its vegetation. Heartbroken by what she was seeing from the air, Angelina wanted a closer look.

But even on the ground, she didn't see any monkeys. So then I get on the helicopter again. Back up again. And I need to look up there. And that's when I see a social group running from the helicopter. And it's like, oh, there's monkeys. They're still coyote. I think I estimated, okay, that must be around like 300, 400 monkeys or so. Out of 1,700?

Yes. But once the staff was able to return and do a complete census on the ground, they found, to their utter astonishment, that most had lived. They estimated just about 50 had died. And you're thinking, how could they survive this? How could they? How could they survive this? It's still a mystery. What did the monkeys do to ride out the storm? Where did they shelter from the wind? And what did they eat? So one of the big questions is, without being fed, how were they nourished?

Yeah, so although the hurricane did dramatically de-vegetate the island, one thing it also did was deposited a great amount of seaweed and algae onto the island. And so one possibility is that the monkeys were eating more of this kind of vegetation. Which they still seem to enjoy. After the hurricane, the monkeys had to adjust to a new, far more hostile environment. Their innate adaptability certainly helped. So they bob up and down to try and stop themselves from falling forward. Six years after the storm, the adjusting continues.

Attempts to replant the trees have been stymied because the monkeys, ever curious about anything new in their environment, uproot them before they have a chance to grow. So now there's very little shade. This used to be almost forested, right? Lots of space and shade. Now they're forced to sit in a few shaded areas, and so they've been clumped by the changing distribution in shade. Now they're forced to sit in a few shaded areas,

and so they've been clumped by the changing distribution of shade. So an interesting thing that we saw is that individuals became more social. Not just more social. The researchers have noticed that the monkeys are more tolerant of each other, which at first seemed counterintuitive. I'm thinking of humans in a situation where there's fewer resources. And I see in my mind's eye competition. I see them saying, get off my property or whatever. But you're saying that it was the opposite here.

Perhaps, but there's also famous examples of people pulling together. So I think it can go both ways. We're capable of great greed and competition and cruelty, but humans are also capable of great kindness and compassion and friendship and generosity. And that kind of duality exists in racist, macabre societies too. And I think anyone you talk to here in Puerto Rico would bring up the fact that they, you know, the people of Puerto Rico sort of gelled and increased their support of one another

in the face of this event. Beyond observing their social interactions, they were also able to track biological changes since they had access to blood tests done on the monkeys for 13 years. So what we found is that individuals who had lived through the hurricane had immune systems that looked like they had aged an extra two years. What is that in human years? Is it six to eight human years?

They aged six to eight years? They aged six to eight human years. Oh my gosh. Through the trauma. That was on average. Six to eight years? They age six to eight human years. Oh my gosh. Through the trauma. That was on average. That's the work that we're trying to do right now is what makes some of these individuals more resilient to the hurricane, right?

Is the hypothesis that it has something to do with friendships? We think that those individuals who are able to have stronger bonds, stronger friendships, might have been protected from this really stressful event. The hurricane opened all new avenues of their research, with questions such as what predicts who survives a catastrophe like an earthquake or a hurricane, and how quickly they recover.

So when you step back and look at your study in terms of climate-related trauma or any kind of trauma, are you expecting to find answers for survivability in these situations for human beings? Given the strong similarity between these primates, these monkeys, and us, we know that a lot of the work that we're doing and the things that they might do to be more resilient to this might be translatable to humans, to us, and might provide ways for us

to intervene and help buffer against the negative effects of these traumatic events. New four-piece French toast sticks, bacon or sausage wrap, biscuit or English muffin sandwiches, small hot coffee, and more. Limited time only at participating Wendy's Taxes Extra. 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 for 64 million years. To understand

this quirky animal, 60 Minutes hung out with a quirky zoologist. Lucy Cook has been documenting the strange lives of sloths for 15 years. Cook was Sharon Alfonsi's guide on a trip to Costa Rica, where as we first reported in September, scientists are making new discoveries about a creature that's turned survival of the fittest upside down. This is an area where there are lots of sloths, so we have that on our side. The first thing we learned about sloths is that it's hard to spot them in the wild. We were warned to keep our eyes on the ground for poisonous snakes as Lucy Cook scanned the treetops. The sloth is a master of disguise. It blends into the canopy and can easily be mistaken for a tuft of leaves.

They tend to hunker down when it rains, so making it even harder to see them. Our luck improved on the beach. Oh, there's one up there. She's in the nook of the tree looking a bit like a termite hump. And she's hunched over. So what we're looking at is her back. That is not the side of the sloth we went all the way to Central America to see. So Lucy Cook took us to an animal sanctuary to get a better view of the two species of sloth that live here, the bradipus and the two-toed.

So the two-toed, I always say, look like a cross between a wookie and a pig because they've got that sort of beepable nose. And then these ones have the sort of, you know, Beatles haircuts and Mona Lisa smiles. Behind that ringer for Ringo, Cook says, is a secret. Being nature's couch potato is the reason sloths have survived for more than 60 million years in spite of, well, themselves. Their eyesight is lousy, their hearing not much better. In a tree, they can move like a Tai Chi master to avoid the eyes of hungry birds of prey. But on the ground, Cook says gravity removes any shred of dignity. Even with a hurricane-strength tailwind, a sloth will top out at a half mile per hour.

The first people that described the sloths, the conquistadors that first observed them, they said terrible things. One said it was the stupidest animal that he'd ever seen, and another said one more defect would make its life impossible. And they just didn't understand them, you know. Cook says what those early explorers didn't understand and what is frankly hard to believe when you watch the effort it takes for a sloth just to blink is that this hairy ninja is uniquely built to survive. Why so slow? Why do they move so slow? Because they're saving energy. They're vegetarians and leaves don't want to be eaten any more than antelope do, right? So

they create a lot of toxins. So the sloth can digest those toxins, but only very, very slowly. They don't want to process them fast. And so they're all about burning as little energy as possible. 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. What they do is the females will climb to the top of a tree when they're in heat and scream for sex. Okay. So really low key. Really low key. But they scream in D sharp.

Like that's the, they make this, I mean I'll do it and he may well, on the strength of my impersonation, let's see if Teddy, who's a boy, He swipes right. Exactly. Let's just see if he goes, OK, I'm going to do it. I've actually seen bradipusses having sex. It's the only thing they do quickly. I mean, I was shocked. But then afterwards, both male and female retreated and had the deepest snooze.

Behind Lucy Cook's cheeky sense of humor is a hefty resume. She has a master's degree from Oxford and published four books, including two on sloths. She's also hosted wildlife programs for the BBC and National Geographic. The photos Cook takes on her expeditions have gone viral, leading to donations for conservation and crowds at lectures that mix biology with stand-up. We humans are obsessed with speed. We idolize animals like the cheetah, capable of doing 0 to 60 in three seconds flat.

Well, so what? Are they cute or are they so ugly they're cute? Oh, no, they're cute, surely. Well, so what? Are they cute or are they so ugly they're cute? 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. You like a beetleist animal. Yeah.

Bats, hyenas. I mean, there's a whole list of animals that I think, you know, just have extraordinarily strange and wonderful lives. And just to me, just add to the richness of the universe. Just look how one of those B-list animals can leave Lucy Cook starstruck. You guys have got to see this! As we were making our way through the Costa Rican rainforest, Cook noticed this. What looks like fluffy golf balls, she realized, was a cluster of something we'd never heard of. Come and have a look, Sharon, Sharon.

The elusive Caribbean white tent-making bats. Look. They're bats, but they're white, and they live in these leaves. My heart rate's gone right up. I'm going to start pouring in sweat, and I might start crying, actually, because it's just so... I mean, it's just a miracle of evolution. I mean, it's just why? Like, why? That sense of wonder... That's about as exciting as it gets.

...has made Lucy Cook a compelling advocate for sloths. Like them, she looks at the world from a different point of view. Your latest book is called Bitch. I do apologize. I really like you and your work, but yeah, my book's called Bitch. In it, Cook 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 study dozens of animals, reporting how killer whale pods are led by postmenopausal orcas and how tyrannical matriarchs control meerkat society. Her re-examination flips parts of Charles Darwin's theories upside down. Charles Darwin's a hero of mine. I studied evolutionary biology, but he was a Victorian man. And so when he came to brand the female of the species,

she came out in the shape of a Victorian housewife. Passive, coy, chaste. You know, we were sort of a feminine footnote to the macho main event, basically. I can hear people saying, is this biological wokeness? Well, it would be if it wasn't true. So you just have to ask the hyena, for example, the female spotted hyena, if she's passive and coy,

and she'll laugh in your face after she's bitten it off. You know, it's like. Challenging conventional wisdom is a large part of Lucy Cook's crusade to improve the reputation of sloths. But there is a more somber kind of rehabilitation she wanted to show us. This is the Toucan Rescue Ranch near Costa Rica's capital, San Jose. So sloths are incredibly strong. They care for sloths nearly killed by power lines.

How are the sloths injured? So most of the time it's through electrocution where it'll just look like this straight vine, you know, going through the forest. And so they'll grab a hold of that and then become electrocuted. Leslie Howe 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 sloth's slow metabolism somehow allows them to recover from injuries that might kill other creatures. The Toucan Rescue Ranch also takes in orphans.

This is little Gio, and this is Marilyn, and then we have Landon here. Oh, he's a toddler? He's a toddler, and this is our tiniest little Benji. Okay, now my ovaries have cracked. It can take up to two years for the orphans to be ready to go back into the wild. We watched as a female named Nasara was prepared for release. She was given a final checkup and a tracking collar before getting a lift to a promising tree. Off she goes. And if she falls asleep in the middle of the release, is that a bad thing?

There she goes. It's a scary moment. Mission Impossible has nothing on this. With that high drama behind us, we headed down the Caribbean coast with Lucy Cook to visit another British scientist. Becky Cliff is conducting the first population study of sloths ever.

That might seem like low-hanging fruit. It is not. Why is it so hard to get scientific data on sloths? They've evolved over the last 64 million years to be masters of disguise, right? They are so good at pretending to be coconuts and bird nests, then they're hiding from the very people who are trying to help them. Neither of the sloth species in Costa Rica is officially considered endangered. But Cliff says her staff is suddenly seeing fewer sloths,

and some are suffering from an illness she suspects may be related to climate change. We're getting extreme periods of hot, dry weather, and then extreme periods of prolonged cold and rain. And that is not what sloths have evolved to survive in. What we're discovering is that the microbes in the sloth's stomach that they use to digest the leaves they eat, when the sloth gets too cold, those microbes die. So even though the sloth might be eating and looking well, it's not digesting its food properly. So they're losing energy and they're getting very weak. It sounds like they're starving to death

but with a full stomach. That's exactly it. It's a really strange phenomenon that I think only happens in sloths, but it's happening here. For Cliff to collect data, she has to collect sloths. Which branch is she? That's the full-time job for her colleague, Debar Leon.

He climbed barefoot up a three-story high tree covered in biting ants, snatching the sloth, then lowering it in a bag. Come on, little one. Hi. That's impressive. So do you have to do that every time you want to get a sloth down? And this is easy, yeah. The stuffed sloth she's holding is not a gimmick.

It was used to comfort the real one, as we helped replace a memory chip in a tiny backpack the sloth wears. Oh, you're very strong. Very strong. And then lean her back a little bit. Come on sweetie. I'm going to clip those little things up. Very strong and then lean her back a little bit. Come on sweetie. I'm going to clip those little things up.

This is like dressing a baby. Done. What kind of information does this give you? We collect a lot of manual data in terms of what type of tree she's in, how high in the tree she is. There's also a data logger inside here, which collects a lot of information about her behavior. So even her micro body movements are being recorded inside there. There we go. Yeah, that's a girl. LUCY COOK, 32-year-old LUCY COOK, 32-year-old LUCY COOK, 32-year-old LUCY COOK, 32-year-old LUCY COOK, 32-year-old LUCY COOK, 32-year-old LUCY COOK, 32-year-old LUCY COOK, 32-year-old

LUCY COOK, 32-year-old LUCY COOK, 32-year-old LUCY COOK, 32-year-old LUCY COOK, will get backpacks and be returned slowly to the wild. Lucy Cook told us she hopes this study will provide a deeper understanding of an animal we can be too quick to judge. What can we learn from this, Loth? We can learn how to be more slow and sustainable ourselves because we need to. You know, we're destroying this planet at an alarming rate.

And part of that is because of our addiction to speed and convenience. So if we took a few carefully, slowly digested leaves out of the sloth's book, you know, we might save this beautiful planet and all of the amazing creatures that live on it. I'm Cecilia Vega. We'll be away for the next two weeks while CBS celebrates New Year's Eve live from Nashville and on January 7th broadcast the Golden Globe Awards. We'll be back on January 14th with an all-new edition of 60 Minutes.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.