The Sloths Slow. French paresseux also mean lazy or similar. Sloths are almost helpless on the ground but are able to swim.
Why are sloths so slow. It takes them 50 days to digest a fully leafed meal. All they do is slow down.
With so much effort exerted to extract a minimum of nutrients the sloths metabolism is amazingly slow- the slowest in the entire animal.
One of the main reasons these animals are so slow is so that they can move about unnoticed. A sloth hugging onto a tree branch. Their slowness permits their low-energy diet of leaves and avoids detection by predatory hawks and cats that hunt by sight. You probably wouldnt have a ton of excess energy to say sprint around the block.