A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1190 entries
sloth
A sloth is a tree-dwelling mammal of Central and South American forest that has taken slowness as a strategy. It moves at a few feet a minute, digests leaves over weeks in a many-chambered stomach, has around half the muscle mass of a comparable mammal, and lets its body temperature drift with the air. Its hair grows the wrong way, parted along the belly and running toward the spine, because it spends its life upside down.
Etymology
The English name is the abstract noun, from slow, applied to the animal in the eighteenth century by translation from Spanish and Portuguese, where it carried names meaning idle. Almost every European language named it for a vice or a failing, which says more about the eighteenth century than about the animal.
Notes
The hair carries grooves that hold algae, which grows in it and tints the animal green, and the fur supports a community of moths and beetles that live nowhere else. Three-toed sloths descend to the ground about once a week to defecate at the base of a tree, which is dangerous and metabolically expensive and has no settled explanation, though the moths that depend on the dung are part of every proposal.