Slowest Animals: Meet 8 Slowest Animals In the World

There are animals for all tastes. There are the fast, agile and active ones, but there are also the slow, calm and lazy animals. All animals are special, each with its own characteristics. Hence, the great animal diversity on our planet Earth.

Being slow also has its advantages. The animals that lead their lives with total parsimony are usually the ones that seem most adorable and endearing to us as if we wanted to have them as a stuffed animal to hug and give a lot of love. But be careful, in some cases, these can only be for appearance. 

Three-Toed Sloth

The three-toed sloth species (Bradypus tridactylus) is the slowest: it barely moves two meters per minute, or at most, it could move (or rather crawl, because they don't walk) no more than five kilometres in a day. But it doesn't even need to, because it lives permanently hanging from trees, and lets mosses grow around its body to be able to camouflage itself from the environment and live protected from predators. 

However, this animal - which is distantly reminiscent of Chewbacca from Star Wars - is an excellent swimmer, and there it does acquire much more speed than when it is on land.

Garden snail

Surely you look at them and think they are dead since they walk so slowly that they seem motionless. Garden snails move at 0.046 kilometres per hour, that is, they always carry their house on their backs.

This spiral-shelled terrestrial mollusk is extremely slow. If you see it in a garden, it is possible that the next day it will be practically in the same place.

Starfish

There are different types of starfish that vary in their habitat and appearance, but they have one characteristic in common, their extreme slowness. The slowest of them travels at 0.009 kilometres per hour and the fastest at 0.16 kilometres per hour.

Giant Tortoise

The fact that slow people are related to turtles is not an error, but giant tortoises are the slowest of all, reaching maximum speeds of 2.7 kilometres per hour, in any case, they have plenty of time since they live more than 100 years.

They have heavy shells and tend to walk between their feeding areas in the early morning or late afternoon, spending the rest of the time grazing and resting.

Banana slug

Slugs, like garden snails, are slow-moving gastropod molluscs. However, unlike snails, slugs don't have shells, and this lack of shells can help them beat the garden snail in a race.

The banana slug (Ariolimax costaricensis) is an extremely slow species of slug, with a top speed of just over 8 centimeters per minute, or 0.48 kilometres per hour.

Loris

Belonging to the family of primates, the Lories live in India and Sri Lanka and only come out at night, although their nocturnal journeys to search for food cannot be very long, because they only move at a maximum speed of just 2 kilometres per hour.

Manatee

These marine mammals are not exactly slender and weighing around 590 kilos, they move very slowly: manatees advance at a speed of 8 kilometres per hour, very little considering that they are 4 meters long.

Manatees usually stay in shallow water. They don't really have true predators. Sharks or whales might eat them, but since they don't live in the same water, that rarely happens. Their biggest threat is from humans. But thanks to strong conservation efforts, Florida's West Indian manatee was removed from the endangered species list in 2017.

Koala bear

The koala bear (Phascolarctos cinereus) has a diet that is high in fibre and low in nutrients. It also has an extremely slow metabolic rate and is one of the slowest animals in the world.

These animals store little or no fat on their bodies and conserve energy whenever possible, mostly by sleeping and moving very slowly.

Koalas have a great sense of smell but have extremely poor eyesight and spend most of their time living in the treetops, eating eucalyptus leaves and not moving much.

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