Post #14072

Three-toed sloth: You'll be surprised how much life is crawling inside its fur Whoever understands life is in no hurry? Well then it’s clear why the three-toed sloth is such a drag. He not only understood life, he was its creator. After all, each sloth is a whole ecosystem in miniature! Well, the creator has no need to rush. The most visible and important inhabitant of the sloth ecosystem is the algae that colors its fur green. Moreover, this is not a random set of algae species whose spores fell onto the sloth’s fur from the air. The animals cultivate Welker's trichophilus on themselves, a unique species that grows only on the fur of sloths - and nowhere else. The most real domesticated plants, it turns out. For a very long time, people believed that sloths needed trichophilus solely for camouflage. And there is logic in this - Mother Nature deprived mammals of green pigments, so none of us are able to masquerade as leaves. Nobody but sloths and their little friends. But in 2018, researchers found that sloths have another good reason for their symbiosis with algae. Houseplants are an important source of food for them. Although algae cannot replace a sloth’s diet of leaves, the animal can’t live without it. After all, the fat content in algae is 5 times higher than in tasteless greens! There are also useful vitamins there! But you can’t feed algae with water and sunlight alone; you also need to give them nitrogen, and a lot of it. But the sloths managed to get out of this too - they got themselves tame fire butterflies! Butterflies also live in the fur of sloths: they communicate, reproduce and, of course, throw away waste products. And this waste not only gives sloths a unique aroma, but also provides food for their tame bacterial-fungal ecosystem. And that, in turn, decomposes the experiments and remains of butterflies, producing simple nitrogen compounds that algae use for their growth. A pleasant side effect of such a complex system is the extremely high resistance of sloths to skin inflammation. The fact is that the bacteria living on the sloth not only process waste, but also release antibiotics into the external environment that protect their owner. Thanks to this ability, they are not afraid of dermatitis, and any wounds of sloths are disinfected by themselves and, in most cases, do not require additional treatment. But for all the goodies of their ecosystem, sloths pay a high price - they are forced to go to the toilet. Instead of routinely defecating from trees, sloths must spend precious time and energy going down to the ground and doing their dirty work at the roots of trees. At this moment, the already vulnerable animals become completely defenseless: any predator passing by is capable of grabbing the animal, and it will not be able to offer even symbolic resistance. However, while they are sitting in the bushes, the moths hanging on their fur are doing the most important thing in their lives: laying eggs nea