![]() The answer, however, is a bit complicated. And since we all know hawks love an easy meal, it’s natural to wonder: do hawks eat sloths? After all, sloths are small mammals that spend most of their time sleeping and hanging upside down from branches. Little did I know the pharmaceutical potential these tiny ecosystems behold.Hawks prey on many animals, so it stands to reason that sloths would be on their menu. For another ten minutes I gazed at my filthy little friend that eats, drinks, and becomes more camouflaged from the algae growing on its fur that is continuously fertilized by the moths that matured in the animal’s poop. Surprisingly, it actually moved about 8 feet onto another cecropia branch. I then remembered how lethargic these animals are and set off to find the sloth in that same cecropia tree. I was heading back the Western NY in just a few days, and knew that my chances of finding another sloth was fleeting. I never see sloths, let alone on in its natural habitat. 15 of the 73 (20.6%) fungal extracts tested against this cancer cell line reduced cancer cell growth by 50% or more! Truly a staggering result from a tiny ecosystem we just learned about.Īfter that legendary hike in Central America, I found myself yearning to see that sloth again. Perhaps most intriguing result is the bioactivity against the breast cancer cell line MCF-7. Out of the 84 species of fungi isolated from sloth fur, 20 were active against at least one bacterial strain. This fur habitat was no different, as wide diversity of fungi was found to be living alongside the moths and algae. Novel habitats almost always contain a slew of bioactive microbes that can eventually be used to treat human pathogens and diseases. The same year of the initial study, Sarah Higginbotham and her teamwanted to delve deeper into this microbiome and see if there was any pharmaceutical potential. By looking even closer at these fur microbiomes, it turns out that humans may have something to gain as well. By maintaining this mutualism with moths and algae, sloths gain a lot. Largely inactive mammals with slow metabolisms don’t have the luxury of being able to seek out water every day. Thirdly, and possibly most importantly, the algae absorbs water that the animal can drink. The green coloration helps them blend in better with the canopy they live in, which reduces predation. A significant portion of their caloric demands come from these single celled plants when the sloths rake their teeth across their fur. The growing algae offers several fitness enhancing functions to the sloths, from daily nutrition to cryptic coloration. ![]() The algae that grows on sloth fur is continuously fertilized by moths and their waste products. Higher N concentration leads to more algal growth. ![]() ![]() Once the eggs hatch, the larvae feed on the sloth’s poop, where they mature and finally fly up to find their canopy inhabiting counterpart.īy taking fur samples of sloths with different densities of fur inhabiting moths, these scientists found that the higher the moth abundance, the higher the nitrogen concentration of their fur. These moths then lay their eggs in the waste. Upon closer investigation, these researchers witnessed mature moths jumping from the fur to its fecal matter. The researchers in this initial study had an inkling that this behavior must be carried out for some biological reason, since it puts the animals in grave danger. Instead of defecating from the safety of the canopy, they traverse to the ground for their weekly doo-doo, which makes them way more vulnerable to predators. The metabolism of sloths is sluggish to say the least. Pauli and his teamset off to better understand a bizarre behavior these animals carry out on a weekly basis. The interesting ecology sloths carry out to maintain this fur microbiome was only just realized in 2014, when Jonathan N. I later learned that this green color reveals the microbiome existing on these slow-moving mammals and that this is a key property to this species success. This particular individual had clean, gray fur, not like the green fur of the wild sloth. We saw another sloth in captivity that same trip, in a facility that rehabilitates injured wildlife. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |