Fast animals are attracting plenty of attention for their incredible speed feats. But what about animals that move at a slow pace?
“We’re definitely programmed to think that speed is good,” said James McClain, senior curator of fish at the Museum of Natural History in London. “For many animals, that doesn’t mean anything to them.”
So, what is the slowest animal in the world? Also, what does survival look like if speed is not part of your skill set?
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Slow sea mover
These may seem like simple questions, but speed can be defined in many ways. One way to understand and compare animal speeds is to consider the time it takes to cover a particular distance. In that respect, the slowest animal could be sea anemones that usually creep up at 4-6 inches (10-25 cm) per hour (0.00006-0.00015 mph) when looking for a new home. Otherwise it remains still.
This mostly stationary creature is the dwarf seahorses (hippocampal shingles), widely considered to be the slowest swimming fish and one of the slowest animals in the world. In part, it results in an upright swimming posture and a small dorsal fin. This means that the ability to run through the water at that angle is limited. “If you moved it, it would take an hour to move the meter half [or 5 feet]”McClane spoke to Live Science.
However, this is very well suited for seahorses. The creatures spend most of that time in their long, front and rear tail-bound habitat, feeding on small street crustaceans. “It means there’s no need to go faster because the food comes,” explained McClain. Furthermore, these animals are defensive and well decorated with bone plates, so there is little need to escape, and therefore there is no large number of predators.
Related: What is the fastest animal on Earth?
These seahorses only pick up the pace when they are ready to recreate, McClain said. “This is really special because they dance to each other. They synchronize the movements,” he added. “The choreography can last for several hours. “That courtship dance is a big seahorse movement.”
In the deeper layers of the ocean, the Greenland shark (somniosus microcephalus) is a cold water giant that can reach 24 feet (7.3 m) long. This ancient creature floats incredibly slowly at 2 mph 3 km/h. Greenland sharks live in the frigid seas, where they clean Dead Sea creatures. “It didn’t have to move very quickly so it slowed down quickly,” McClain said.
Movement on land
According to John Ablett, senior curator of Morsk at the Museum of Natural History in London, the slowest animal on land is probably the banana slug, moving at a very slow pace of 0.006 miles per hour (0.0096 km).
While it is difficult to obtain a definitive estimate of the speed of an animal, mollusks are significantly slower than other animals, Ablett told Live Science in an email: It’s not just that these animals are small, adds Beltt. “It generally moves slowly. Considering other groups like beetles, spiders, and ants, for example, they are small, often smaller than slags and snails, but much faster.”
Nevertheless, the kingdom of molluscs has a variety of speeds. For example, a typical garden snail (Cornu aspersum) is skating with an incredibly quick clip of 0.03 miles per hour (0.048 km/h), Ablett said.
Another outstanding slow mover on the trajectory is the Galapagos giant turtle (Chelonoidis niger). These reptiles ring along approximately 0.16 mph (0.26 km/h). To put that into perspective, people of similar size walk at around 2.8 mph (4.5 km/h).
On the other hand, mammals that live in trees are one of the slowest animals around. Slow Lories (nycticebus), as its name suggests, is a group of small primates that slowly move around the trees at a deliberate pace, carefully rotating their surroundings to observe their surroundings. They can stay motionless for hours, but these creatures move at about 1.1 mph (1.8 km/h).
Speed and size
There is another way to measure speed. This is to take into account your body size. Some biologists consider this a more accurate way to compare animals. For example, consider that humans can cover far longer distances in a second than ant cans. But given its small body, the ants are covered by a greater distance and much faster than us, compared to their size.
Rory Wilson, professor of aquatic biology and sustainable aquaculture at Swansea University in Wales, says that the range of creature speed is another factor that you think about when identifying the slowest animals in the world. For example, some snakes may creep up to the point of little notice, but then they will quickly ambush and rampage to catch their prey.
Given these various traits, Wilson believes there is no contest for three-toe sloth (Bradipus) because of the slowest animal title.
“From the perspective of those studying animal movements in the broadest sense — not only does it reach from one tree to another, but also the speed of movement when responding to stimuli — it’s like a really slow sloth,” Wilson told Live Science. These animals can hit speeds of 1 mph (1.6 km/h), but some estimates suggest that they are usually in an area of several tens of meters.
In addition to taking a long time to cover small ground, sloths deserve the slowest animal crown as all movement unfolds at a glacial pace. “When I first saw the wild sloth, I couldn’t believe how slow it was,” Wilson said. “It’s all like Tai Chi.”
Like many other animals living at a relaxed tempo, sloths require some adaptations to compensate for the advantages of lack of speed. Sloths evolved to become masters of camouflage because they have no ability to escape if discovered by predators. These animals are also surprisingly strong, three times as strong as humans, giving stability to trees that can maintain thinness and speed safely and at high speed.
The slow pace of sloths also leads to slow metabolism that can survive with small amounts of energy-deficient foods. It can take days to digest the leaf diet, and they only drop off the tree once a week to defecate.
“The question is, why are they so slow? What do they get from it?” Wilson said. The simple answer is that speed requires power, and power requires energy. This can be difficult and costly to acquire, Wilson said. Sloths were able to avoid that need by almost thriving. It means living in slow lanes. “Your whole lifestyle is ‘I’m cold so I don’t need to eat too much, I can eat pretty poor food, so I can digest it for days rather than hours, the energy return is very slow, and it’s okay because I’m very slow” – it all works very well,” Wilson explained.
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