Slow down, you move too fast!
Brooklynites who need to make the morning last can take a lesson from a new exhibit coming to the Brooklyn Children’s Museum on Oct. 26. “Survival of the Slowest,” will feature about two dozen slow-moving creatures who have turned their lack of get-up-and-go into a virtue — including a creature named for the laziest of the Seven Deadly Sins: the sloth!
A two-year-old, two-toed sloth named Roger will live at the museum during the three-month-long exhibit, and professionals will remove him from his case three times a day to demonstrate his extraordinary, slow-moving abilities, which, according to a staffer at the museum, are remarkable.
“He sleeps about 16 hours per day,” said Winston Williams. “They’re just unbelievably slow. They move about 40 meters in a day. It would take them 45 days to cross the Brooklyn Bridge.”
The exhibit will feature plenty of other sleepy animals, including an iguana named Lizarnardo DaVinci, a chameleon named Chamuel L. Jackson, and two tarantulas named Fuzz Lightyear and Spinderella — along with a handful of other, equally amusingly named chilled-out critters, including tortoises, hedgehogs, and snakes. The animals will be displayed in 19 distinct glass habitats, much like they are in zoos, and youngsters will be able to observe them up close during multiple daily demonstrations.
The museum will explore how these animals work their extreme slowness to their advantage, said Williams.
“The exhibit kind of explores how all these animals who you wouldn’t necessarily choose to evolve as, who are slow, how some of them have taken advantage of that,” Williams said.
Sloths, for example, blend into their environment and only have to consume a few hundred calories a day — and sometimes, the lazy mammals move so gradually that food comes to them.
“Algae grows on the sloth because they’re so slow, they lick it, and it produces fats,” Williams said.
The exhibit, produced in collaboration with an animal education center in Canada called Little Ray’s Nature Centres, is the first of its kind in the United States, although it made its Canadian debut in 2018. The exhibit will offer Brooklyn children a rare opportunity to see exotic animals in the flesh, said Williams.
“We’re really excited about the exhibit,” he said. “It’s going to be many people’s first experience with these animals up close.”
“Survival of the Slowest” at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum [145 Brooklyn Ave. between St. Mark’s Avenue and Prospect Place in Crown Heights, (718) 735–4400. www.brook
