According to a new study, something isn’t done to reverse the effects of climate change, everyone’s favorite extremely slow and plodding creature with a kind, gentle face—the sloth—could go extinct by the end of this century.
As published in the journal PeerJ, researchers found that rising global temperatures could wreak havoc on the metabolic responses of two-fingered sloths found in South and Central America, especially those in high-altitude areas.
Sloths digest their food slowly. Very, very slowly. Up to 24 times slower than similarly-sized herbivores, and they can’t really do much about it. Couple that with a potentially limited pool of food resources that could dwindle as the climate changes, and we are looking at a potential future without sloths.
The team measured oxygen consumption and the core body temperatures of sloths in simulated future climate scenarios. They found that some of the sloth’s unique traits, like thier slow metabolism and terrible temperature regulation, would hinder their adaptability to higher temperatures.
In other words, sloths’ metabolisms are too slow for how hot it’s going to get. The hotter things get, the harder your body needs to work to maintain balance. A sloth’s resting metabolic rate rises as temperatures rise, which increases their body’s demand for energy that they will likely struggle to meet.
Lowland sloths, another type, are better suited for warmer conditions and can enter a state of metabolic depression to deal with temperatures that rise beyond their typical comfort zone. But highland sloths are kind of fucked unless we get our act together and start making more concerted efforts to reverse the effects of climate change.
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