Instant Genius - Sloths, with Dr Rebecca Cliffe

Episode Date: June 19, 2022

Dr Rebecca Cliffe, founder and executive director of the Sloth Conservation Foundation, busts the myths around these loveable animals and explains just how bizarre their biology is. Once you’ve mastered the basics with Instant Genius, dive deeper with Instant Genius Extra, where you’ll find longer, richer discussions about the most exciting ideas in the world of science and technology. Only available on Apple Podcasts. Produced by the team behind BBC Science Focus Magazine. Visit our website: sciencefocus.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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delivering digital precision with analogue warmth. So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com. to learn more. From BBC Science Focus magazine, this is Instant Genius, a bite-sized-to-mass class in podcast form. I'm Inny Barrett, editorial assistant at BBC Science Focus. And today I'm talking to Dr. Rebecca Cliff, the founder and executive director with the Sloth Conservation Foundation.

Rebecca tells me all about the incredible animal that is the sloth. She explores how they became energy-saving experts and explains why they aren't as slow and stupid as some people might believe. So thank you so much for joining me. It's really, really great to speak to you. First question is probably one that many people are wondering, I know certainly our team are, how do you actually pronounce slow? Is it sloth? Is it sloth? It's such a good question. I've always said sloth, but I know people like David Attenborough say sloth. And actually I do prefer that because it sort of emphasizes the slow rather than the lazy. because actually sloths have been persecuted for a really long time

based on the fact that they're named after the deadly sin of being slothful. And the name sloth literally translates as lazy in every single language on our planet. So I think sloth, but spelt with a W, is the way forwards. Maybe they need to do like a rebrand, the sloth rebrand. So were they actually named after it? Like what came first, the sin or the sloth? The sin came first and then the sloth. was named after them, the sloth, sorry.

I know, I think I'm not going to have to, I think I'll go for sloth because then, you know, then I won't feel like you have to have the pressure to change. And I mean, I still can't decide whether I say scorn or scone. So, yeah, exactly. So tell me what actually is a sloth? So sloths are mammals and they live in South and Central America and they live in the rainforest canopies. And they spend up to 90% of their lives, hang.

completely upside down. And they're energy-saving experts. So a lot of people think that sloths just sleep all day and do nothing. But actually, that's completely untrue. They're fascinating. And they're getting up to an awful lot of stuff up there in the canopy. We just never knew about it because they're so good at hiding and camouflaging. So, yeah, they're a very interesting group of mammals, almost reptilian in their biology, actually. They sort of push it as far as it can possibly go before actually becoming a reptile. And is it right that you've got like the two-toed and the three-toe sloths? Yes, so you've got the two main types, but they're only ancient relatives.

So they actually diverged about 30 million years ago, which is a really long time. So it's two very different animals with the same name and remarkably similar lifestyles. So I actually, we're trying to change the name on those as well. So we're trying to change it to the two-fingered sloth and the three-fingered sloth. Because actually this is a really bad, a terrible naming system because every sloth on the planet has got three toes. It's actually the number of digits on their four limbs, which differs. So calling them two-fingered and three-fingered is much more appropriate. But it all originates from a bad translation of Spanish hundreds of years ago,

because the name for fingers and toes in Spanish is exactly the same word. So they got badly translated and were stuck with the wrong name ever since. Oh, they've really had a poor time with naming, haven't they? Yeah, they've had a really bad past. Their first official description in the scientific literature was as the lowest form of existence. So there's only one way up. And up is where they spend most of their time. Tell me about what they do up in the counties for 90%. And what do we do for the other 10% of the time? So they actually spend a lot of time sitting on the branches as well as hanging underneath them. They do tend to prefer to sleep on the branch sort of lying on it. but it was one individual we tracked and studied who literally was completely inverted like head towards the ground for 90% of every day, which is phenomenal when you think about it.

Can you imagine standing on your head for 90% of the day? We have all sorts of problems. No, I couldn't do that for 90 seconds, I'm sure of it. How is their body capable of hanging? That's right their blood just rushes to their head? It does, yeah. Well, we're still trying to work this out. there's not been very much scientific research on sloths at all.

So what we do know is they've got loads of fun adaptations that allow them to be upside down without having problems. So they've got special valves in their veins which prevent the blood from pooling. And they can do things like they can eat upside down. Because if anyone's ever tried to stand on their head and eat a sandwich, then you end up with some problems because gravity gets in the way of swallowing. But of course, slots eat while upside down.

So they've got an amazing adaptation in their oesophagus where it essentially does a loop-the-loop. And it's like a one-way system. So what goes down can't come back out. Yeah, and they've got a whole array of different things going on. One of the things we found out actually is that they have all of their internal organs are essentially anchored against their rib cage. They're sort of taped in place by these internal adhesions. And so we discovered this by accident when we were doing necropsies of animals who had died.

and we were sort of confused about what all these internal adhesions were. It looked like scar tissue. But it's not. It's just anchoring their organs in place so that when they're completely upside down, their big heavy stomachs don't squish their lungs and it allows them to carry on breathing without any problems while they're completely upside down. But you say we just kind of took time to appreciate it.

Who's your team and what have you got going on? So when I started, it was almost 13 years ago, and it was just me by myself, I was working in association with a rescue center in Costa Rica who do a lot of work with sloths. But since then, I've pretty much worked alone until four years ago when I founded the Sloth Conservation Foundation, which is a big non-profit organization. And we specialize in the research and conservation of sloths. So now I have a team of 17 people who all work with me every day, team sloth.

Amazing. And you said that they're kind of really under research. searched what, when you kind of say that, what does that actually look like? I mean, what don't waste on it? So a lot of like the very old research into sloths. I mean, when I first started 13 years ago, the sort of research that was out there is things like if you cut a sloth's head off, its heart will be for 15 minutes. Or if you hold it underwater, it'll take them 40 minutes to drown. All these really sort of barbaric research topics, which actually, I suspect, aren't very accurate at all. I'm never going to try it, but I'm sure sloths can't breathe, hold their breath for 40 minutes.

But so there really was very scant research. And I think a bit like a lot of that, well, there's two things. I think one, not many people were interested in studying an animal that's called a sloth, that people just think sleeps all day and he's lazy and doesn't really do anything interesting. So they sort of got overlooked for a very long time. And then the people who did try and research them really found it difficult because sloths are almost impossible to observe in the wild. So observational research was just a complete waste of time. Nobody could see what they were doing because they're so good at camouflageing. So there was this combination of people not wanting to research them and then the people who did not actually being able to meant that really very

little was published on them and the stuff that was published was mostly incorrect. So what was happening is there was a lot of problems in countries where sloths live in terms of like the conservation efforts because nobody knew very much about them. So rescue centers were struggling to keep them alive and work with them because they were so poorly understood. They had no research to go off. So yeah, something that is a lot better today. There's a lot more people working with sloths now, thankfully. But yeah, back then they were, they were very poorly understood. People in the West hadn't even really heard of sloths back then either because, yeah, when I first started working with them and I told people I was a sloth scientist,

they looked at me like I had two heads. They really had no idea what a sloth was. But now, a decade later, if you go into even your local supermarket, you see things with sloths on. So now they're a pop culture sensation. But back then, nobody cared about them and nobody knew anything about them either. That's true. Although I suppose now they've become such a kind of fascination in that lots of people are wanting to keep them as pets, which I think we'll probably talk about when we get on to maybe some of the threats and problems with them.

Yeah, so this is like, we call it the cute curse. It's like people love them, but it's a double-edged sword, isn't it? Where, yeah, too much love can actually be a bad thing. And so in terms of what you do, your conservation work, are you very, like, hands-on with them? It's a mix. So for a lot of my research work, it was very hands-on because I was working with wild sloth. And as I mentioned briefly, you can't really observe sloths in the wild and know what they're doing. So it does require using some modern technology.

So I created something called the Sloth Backpack Project, which is as ridiculous as it sounds, actually. I was putting backpacks on wild sloths. So this all started because when I was 19 years old and I went into the jungle for the first time to research sloths, I was sort of staring up at patches of fur 30 meters above my head. And I had no idea whether I was looking at a termite nest or a bird's nest or a sloth. And eventually, after spending far too many hours collecting data on like coconuts, thinking they were slots, I was like, something's got to change. So I decided to start using data loggers and tracking devices.

And so I'd have to climb up the trees and catch the sloths. And we'd put these little backpacks on them and release them. And then I'd follow them around all day every day. And the data loggers would record a lot of things about their behavior and the environment that they're in, like the temperature and the humidity and things. So we're able to start building up a picture of what the sloths are doing and where they're doing it. But to do this, yeah, involved quite a lot of hands-on contact with wild sloths, which are much fiercer than you think, by the way.

To me as in, you know, quite dangerous. Yeah, quite dangerous. Again, you've got the two types of sloth, the two-fingered sloth in there. the three-fingered. The two-fingered sloths in particular are really quite able to defend themselves. They've got really big teeth, teeth that measure about an inch long on the top and the bottom, and they know how to use them. So it's a bit dodgy when you're wrestling one at the top of a tree. Yeah, so now today, I still do a lot of research, but a lot of my work actually involves working with people more than sloths, which is the case for a lot of conservation work. Yeah, a lot of

time spent with communities and people and doing politics and all that boring stuff now. And, you know, speaking to people for podcasts and stuff, and you'd much rather be out in the trees hanging with the swaths. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. So in terms of the two types, what kind of other, aside from the obvious fingers, what are the other differences? Oh, there's an awful lot when you get into detail. I mean, there's obvious similarities, right?

They both move slowly. They both live in the canopy. a lot of time upside down. One of the really big similarities, which I find fascinating, is that they've both evolved this really strange habit where they'll only poop on the floor. So they live up in the canopies, but the only time they'll come down to the ground is to poop, and they do it at the base of the tree. So they climb down once a week, and then they do something that's actually, we call it the poop dance, which is ridiculous. But they literally wiggle around at the base of the tree. It looks a bit like they're twerking.

but they're trying to dig a hole and they're using their bum to do it. And they'll go to the bathroom there. They lose up to 30% of their body weight when they poop and they then climb back up the tree. But what's remarkable is that both types of sloth have evolved this strange routine independently. Independently? Yeah, because they're 30 million years apart. So their lifestyles are sort of an example of convergent evolution. And they've both evolved this really bizarre habit of pooping on the floor.

So there's all these fantastic similarities. But when you get past that and look at what's different about them, they're also very different animals. So the two-fingered sloths are bigger, they're much stronger. They've got more varied diets. So they'll eat a lot of fruit as well as leaves. They've got these big teeth. They look completely different. So one looks sort of like a tree pig, I guess.

They've got sort of like a big pink nose. And the three-fingered sloths are the ones with that stereotypical black mask or around the eyes. Two-fingered sloths are kept in zoos all over the world. They're very able to survive in captivity, but three-fingered sloths are not. No one really understands them. They're very, very strange creatures and no one can keep them alive outside of their home range, which is good for them, actually, because it means they're not victim to the pet trade as much. But yeah, so there's lots of things going on. Three-fingered sloths have got a little tail, two-finged sloths don't. Yeah, Loads of similarities and differences.

And do we know, like, what caused kind of this divergence 30 million years ago? No, so what we think is that they both shrank down because they were originally giant ground sloths. And you had two different families even back then. So you had two-fingered sloth lineage of the giant ground sloths and the three-fingered sloth lineage. And then both of them shrank over time and sort of moved up into the trees where it was safer, which sort of happened around the period of the dinosaurs. So that's sort of how they survived that era. And they've been separate ever since.

And they're not far separated from anteaters either. So the two sloths are pretty much as related to each other as they are to an anteater, which is pretty fascinating as well. Hang on. Giant ground sloth. How giant o'd be? Pretty massive. The biggest one was called Megatherium and he stood about six meters tall.

So pretty massive. But there were so many different types of ground sloths. They were in this incredibly diverse group. You had some that were huge. You had some that were tiny. And there was even some that lived in the ocean and ate seaweed. So aquatic ground sloths. Yeah, which is just mind-boggling.

I really wish they still existed today. And now they're kind of never on the ground or only on the ground to poop. Why don't they come down to the ground poop? What can't they do you have to be hanging? This is the big mystery. You've just hit the nail on the head. Nobody knows. Okay, it's a fascinating one because they're very vulnerable on the ground. This is where all their problems happen. It's estimated that about 30% of sloth deaths happen while they're pooping.

So they literally risk their life to do this once a week. And not only that, but they're also carrying around 30% of their body weight in waste. And for an animal that doesn't have very much energy, that seems like a really strange thing to do. So there's lots of different theories. Some are more bizarre than others. Some people say that they're fertilizing their favorite trees. Other people say that they're trying to bury it, that they're trying to avoid predators by burying their poop, which I don't buy into because they, I mean, they risk their lives by coming out of the trees. But what I think is that it's to do with communication.

So we know that sloths where they go into heat once a month and a female will be in heat for 10 days every month. And during those 10 days, she'll actually climb down from the tree every single day and poop on the floor just a little bit and climb back up again. And they poop in the same places over and over. They're sort of marking their territory, leaving these little scent posts. And that's how sloths learn about each other is through scent and pheromones and things.

So I think it's got to be, I mean, reproduction is the only thing a lot of animals will risk their life for. So it's got to be something along those lines. But as of yet, there's no concrete proof. So how would the male, like if he's, down on the ground, kind of once a week. How does he come across the kind of scent post that there's a female nearby? So they can smell it for quite a way away. It was about 300 meters away. They can smell it. And so what happens is they come down to the ground. They follow the smell

to the ground. And then usually, so what happens is the female will pick a tree and she'll stay in that tree for the whole 10 days that she's in heat. And three finger sloths actually vocalize as well. so they make this incredible noise. Sounds a lot like an eagle, actually. It's a really high-pitched scream. So this attracts the males too, and they come down to the base of the tree and then climb up to reach her,

but she'll only allow one male in the tree with her at a time. So you end up with these really entertaining sloth fights that break out. Oh, it's crazy. And the aim of the fight, it's genius. The aim of the fight is to knock your opponent out the tree. So they sort of hang on to each other and try and yank each other off the branch, because if you're a male sloth, this is the best thing to do.

Your opponent will be all the way down on the forest floor. You're up in the tree with the lady, and it's going to take the other guy, like a good few hours to climb back up the tree again. So it's genius. And in terms of like reproduction, do they, how many kind of sloth babies can they have? How often?

Sloth babies, the cutest animals in the world, by the way. So they reproduce very slowly. They only have one baby at a time. have a really long gestation. For two-finkered sloths, it's 11 and a half months. And they spend another full 12 months raising the baby, females raise the babies alone. She'll carry it on her belly for about six months and then slowly sort of wean the baby and sort of let the baby establish its own territory. So it's about one baby every three years, which is a really slow rate of reproduction for a small mammal. So this, yeah, further contributes to their conservation problems,

unfortunately. And you mentioned that they were almost kind of reptilian in their biology. Can you kind of dive into that animal? What kind of aspects make them more like reptiles than they are mammals? Yeah. So most mammals are able to maintain their body temperature. So we're endotherms, which means that if we go outside and it's cold, then we'll shiver and warm ourselves back up. Or if we're too hot, then we're sweating and we can sort of regulate our own internal temperature. but this takes a lot of energy and sloths don't have that energy. So what they've done is they have sacrificed disabilities. So just like reptiles, they rely on the environmental conditions to regulate their temperature.

So on warm, sunny mornings, they'll climb up to the top of the trees and they'll bask and sunbathe. And if it's cold, then they sort of huddle in a ball and they wait for it to warm up again, which is really smart because sloths live in areas which are really warm and stable climatically anyway. So what's the point in wasting all your energy on regulating your own body temperature when you can let the environment do it for you? So yeah, this is a typical reptile trait which sloths have adopted and it works really, really well for them. It's very strange as mammals, but saves them a lot of energy, which is the most important thing for a sloth.

And you would have thought, like, if, you know, a lot of their problems come from, well, not problems, but adaptations have come from low energy levels. Is it not possible up and then to kind of evolve to have more energy? It's a good question, but not really, because sloths, so if you think about leaf-eating mammals in general, so there's generally two strategies, because leaves don't have very much energy in them, right? So you've got something like a howler monkey, for example, which use leaves, but they're full of energy. And the way they do that is they eat absolutely loads of leaves all day, every day, digest them really quickly and just keep eating. Or you can go down the sloth route, which is only eat a few leaves, then you don't have to run around looking for food

because you don't have that demand, but then you spend a really long time digesting them and getting all the nutrients out of them. And it actually takes the sloth 30 days to digest a single leaf, which is absolutely mind-blowing. It's by far the slowest digestion of any animal on the planet. So this means they can't actually eat more because their stomachs are always full. So they're sort of limited by the amount of room in their stomach every day. And this then links back to the temperature as well. So if it's a warm sunny day, then their metabolism increases like a reptile and they digest their food a little bit faster and they can eat more and they can be a bit more active. But on cold days, everything slows down and stops. So they can't really digest

their food very well, they can't eat very much, they can't move very much, so they just sit and wait it out. Sounds like how I'd love to spend the winter, just move out, watching TV. Just wrapped in a blanket. Yeah. I would imagine if they've not got much else to do, are they sleeping a lot of the time? Like, I have this impression of them being very sleepy creatures. Yeah, if you look online, it'll tell you that sloth sleep for 23 hours a day or something. That's not actually true. So from a lot of recent research that's coming out, we've learned that they only sleep for about 10 to 12 hours a day in the wild. And I know some humans that sleep more than that, actually. So especially teenagers. And there's a lot of other animals that sleep far more than that as well.

So those howler monkeys we were talking about earlier, they sleep for about 18 hours a day. And koalas sleep for 23 hours. So you've got a lot more sleepy animals out there that don't have the bad reputation. The poor sloths have just been sort of dumped with this lazy, sleepy, stupid label, which hasn't served them very well. But what they are doing is just moving really, really slowly up in the canopy. And they're spending a lot of time awake and looking around, but they're just spending a lot of time digesting their food. And this slow movement is genius. Because a lot of people wonder how can a sloth even survive? How have they not been eaten by everything in the jungle because they can't run away, right? Well, if you think about it the other way,

you don't need to run away if no one can see you. So sloths move so slowly, they just don't get detected by predators and then they don't need to worry about running away. So if you think about the sloth's main predators, it's animals like jaguars, so the big cats, and then birds of prey like harpy eagles. And all of these predators are visual hunters. So they find their prey by seeing it move. if you're a sloth and you move really, really slowly, then they don't see that as prey. So they just are able to go about their business, do their thing and not worry about any predators seeing them.

And of course you mentioned they're quite camouflaged. Can you tell me what their kind of, is it fur, is it hair? What is it like to touch one? They are incredible at camouflage. I know people must say that about a lot of animals, but I would bet my life that sloths would. win the camouflage competition of the world. They have a lot of things going on. So they're camouflaged visually and in terms of scent and in terms of movement. So they move slowly like the trees they live in.

They don't have any body odor at all. So they smell just like the trees they live in. And their fur is actually, it's got these incredible adaptations. So each strand of hair has got a groove running down it. And in that groove there grows all these different species of algae and fungi. Some of them grow nowhere else on earth except on a sloth's fur. And this basically turns them green. Yeah, if you see a sloth, especially after it's rained, it's green and it's just a fantastic form of camouflage. So yeah, they look exactly like the trees they live in as well, which is brilliant. So they smell like the tree and they look like the tree.

And they move like the tree. How do they have nobody on you? Because they don't sweat. Yeah, they just, they don't have any sweat glands. So they're except on the tip of their nose for a two-fingered sloth. Yeah, they're not producing any sweat, so they aren't smelly. But people think they're smelly. If you look at them, you think they look kind of dirty and smelly, but they're incredibly clean, but very soft hair because they spend up to three hours a day grooming themselves with their fingers.

It looks like scratching, but they're actually grooming their hair, keeps it all nice and tangle-free. So they're very soft. Yeah, they smell just sort of like the jungle smells, like a tree trunk might smell, like musty, sort of algae, natural smell. So how, when they're grooming, do they not upset the kind of algae and other species that are living on? So the algae is actually embedded in each hair. So it's not like, a lot of people think it's like moss or mold or something that grows between the hairs, but it doesn't. It's within the strand. So the hair is actually dry, but green.

It's really difficult to describe, actually. And they, yeah, as you just mentioned, they also have a, they have an whole ecosystem living in their fur. So there's lots of different types of beetles that live in sloth fur. And my favourite is something called the sloth moth. Try and say that ten times. It's a type of moth, which is only found in the fur of a sloth. And they can have up to 300 sloth moths living in the fur of a single sloth. So it's this bizarre ecosystem.

It's amazing. Do you think David Atterborough has to call it a sloth most? Oh, I really, really hope so. How did this relationship between the algae and the fungi and stuff, how did that start with the sloth? No one's really sure, actually. That's a really good question. I don't think anyone's ever got an answer to that one, but it's a symbiotic relationship.

So the algae obviously gets a place to live by having these cracks and grooves in the sloth sphere. The sloth benefits through having camouflage. So it's a win-win. There is some research done which suggests there's a, sort of a love triangle going on between the sloth, the moth and the algae, which is that it's quite complex. It's that the sloth, and it's the reason, well, they say why the sloths come down to the ground, poop.

Oh, it gets so complicated. What happens is the sloth comes down the tree once a week to poop. The moths lay their eggs in sloth poop. So while the sloth is down there, all the moths run off the sloth's fur, lay their eggs in the poop, and then run back on the sloth before it climbs. the tree again. There was some research that said that the moths fertilised the algae, and then the sloth eats the algae, if you can follow me. And that's why the sloths are coming down to the ground poop. But there is a snag in this plan because the sloths don't eat the algae. So no one has

ever seen this. It just doesn't happen. It's not something they do. So, yeah, unless the camouflage benefit is so big that that sort of warrants them. coming down to the ground. I'm not sure this theory holds up. But it is one that is out there for sure. And the moths definitely use the poop. It's fascinating. It's incredible, a whole ecosystem on the back of one sweet seats. And it all centers around this strange habit they have of climbing down to the floor, which is brilliant. But what we usually like to do at the end of this first episode is to talk about the kind of the three main things we want our listeners to take away. But I guess for the sloths, it's even more important that we kind of dispel three of the

main myths of the sloths. I wonder what do you think those would be and what would you all kind of response to them? Oh, this is a good question. Okay, so the biggest myth is that they're lazy and they sleep all day, which obviously is not true. They only sleep for about 10 to 12 hours a day and they're actually getting up to an awful lot in the meantime that they're just doing it so slowly we've not been able to see them. So they've tricked everybody for thousands of years. Another myth would be that sloths are sort of stupid because a lot of people, there was a show done which fired a gun next to a sloth's head and the sloth didn't even turn around. And so it was sort of assumed that well sloths are like blind, deaf and stupid. But that's not the case either because the sloths have evolved to not respond to big sudden threats because they can't run away, right?

they don't have that option. So if they're scared, what they'll do is stay still and pretend it's not happening and just hope that whatever's, fine, whatever scaring them goes away and doesn't notice them. So they hold still under those situations. But a lot of people interpret that as the sloths being stupid or blind or deaf or something. So yeah, that's not true either. And then another myth. So there's one, a lot of people look at sloths and think that they're also very weak because they, have about 30% less muscle mass than a normal mammal of their size. They're incredibly skinny. A lot of people assume that they're probably not very strong, but they're on average about three times stronger than a human of that size. So actually, if a sloth was human-sized, their grip strength would be able to crush a steel girder quite easily. They are incredibly strong. They're much stronger than me, actually. And if you try fighting one at the top of a tree, It's really a nightmare. But the way they're doing this is they've got this incredibly specialized muscle arrangement.

So their muscles don't anchor in the same places that humans' muscles do. They sort of span the joints. So it gives them this amazing lever system. And it allows them to have this phenomenal pulling strength and power without having to invest in having really big muscles. So, yeah, they're actually very strong. They're smart and they don't just sleep all day. Those are the three. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius.

That was Dr Rebecca Cliff. If you want to know more about her work, you can visit slothconservation.org or listen to our second episode with Rebecca on Instant Genius Extra, available only on Apple Podcasts. There, she tells me all about the great work being done to save the sloths from some of their biggest threats,

which, unfortunately, are all linked to us humans. For more science and tech stories, check out the latest issue of BBC Science Focus magazine. pick up a copy install or visit sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analogue warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist focal,

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