Not all animals feel the need for speed.

“Why are sloths so slow?” Vittorio Colonna recently asked us via Facebook. Sloths may be the slowpokes of Central and South American forests, but they are hardly the only animals that dawdle through life. So Saturday’s Weird Animal Question of the Week thought we’d look at some of the planet’s pokier animals and why, for them, slow and steady wins the evolutionary race.

The slowest mammals in the world, sloths, have a top speed of a mere mile (1.6 kilometers) per hour. Their biology makes them poke along at a rate that would get them honked at in traffic.

Sloths are “living on the edge of their energy budget,” Becky