What does survival look like for animals who live in the slow lane?
Fast animals get plenty of attention for their incredible feats of speed. But what about animals that move at a slower pace?
“We definitely are programmed to think that speed is good,” said James Maclaine, senior curator of fish at the Natural History Museum in London. “For a lot of animals, that doesn’t make any sense to them at all.”
So what is the world’s slowest animal? And what does survival look like when speed isn’t part of your skill set?
Slow sea movers
These may seem like simple questions, but speed can be defined in different ways. One way to understand and compare animals’ speeds is to consider the time it takes them to cover a particular distance. In that regard, the slowest animal could be the sea anemone, which creeps along at just 4 to 6 inches (10 to 25 cm) per hour (0.00006 to 0.00015 mph), usually when it’s searching for a new abode; otherwise, it remains stationary.
Not far behind this largely stationary creature is the dwarf seahorse (Hippocampus zosterae), which is widely regarded as the slowest-swimming fish and one of the slowest animals in the world. Partly, that comes down to its upright swimming posture and its tiny dorsal fin, which has limited power to propel the seahorse through the water at that angle. “If you made it move, it would take it an hour to move a meter and a half [or 5 feet],” Maclaine told Live Science.
But this suits the seahorse quite well, as the creature spends most of its time tethered to its seagrass habitat by its long, prehensile tail, and eats tiny passing crustaceans. “Food comes to it, so that means it doesn’t need to be fast,” Maclaine explained. What’s more, these animals don’t have many predators because they’re well armored with defensive, bony plates and, therefore, have little need to escape.
Related: What is the fastest animal on Earth?
The only time these seahorses pick up their pace is when they’re ready to reproduce, Maclaine said. “This is really quite special, because they dance with each other … They sort of synchronize their movements.” The choreography can last hours, he added. “That courtship dance is the big seahorse movement.”
In the ocean’s deeper layers, the Greenland shark (Somniosus microcephalus) is a coldwater behemoth that can reach lengths of 24 feet (7.3 m). This ancient creature drifts along at an incredibly leisurely 2 mph 3 km/h. The Greenland shark lives in frigid waters where it scavenges on dead sea creatures. “You don’t need to move very fast for that, so it has slowed right down,” Maclaine said.