Which animal’s fur grows backwards?

There is plenty of competition for the title of “world’s fastest animal”, but have you ever wondered which animal is the slowest? To find it, you have to visit a rainforest and look way up into the canopy. The slowest animal in the world is a sloth!

Sloths spend most of their time hanging upside down from trees, using their long hooked claws to do so.They eat, sleep, and even give birth hanging upside down. They spend so much time in this position that their fur actually grows backwards! If you look at your arms, you can see that your hair (like the hair of most mammals) grows toward your limbs – feet, hands, and tail. But a sloth’s fur grows the other way. This helps protect it from things like heavy rain. If its fur grew the way our hair does, the rain would fall right between the hairs to the sloth’s skin as it hung upside down. It’s backwards fur means that the rain runs right off it!

The sloth moves so slowly that there are actually two different kinds of algae that grow in its fur. This makes the sloth appear to turn green! It may seem strange to have algae growing in your fur, but it’s actually very helpful to the sloth, as it helps it blend in with the green leaves around it. There are even insects in the sloth’s fur that feed off the algae.

Even the sloth’s digestion is slow! Two thirds of a sloth’s body weight is the chewed-up leaves in its stomach, and it can take over a month for the sloth to digest it. They only leave the trees to go to the bathroom once a week!