'Roll call' of the world's slowest animals

Sea anemones move at a speed of 0.0001 - 0.00025 km/h; banana slugs crawl at about 0.0096 km/h... among the slowest in the world.

Sea anemones move at a speed of 0.0001 - 0.00025km/h - Photo: americanoceans.org

The world has many species of animals that run very fast to hunt prey, but there are also species that move 'unbelievably' slowly. LiveScience on August 25 listed these species.

'Slow King' under the ocean

If we consider the time it takes an animal to travel a particular distance, the slowest animal in the sea might be the sea anemone, as they only move at a speed of 0.0001 - 0.00025 km/h, usually when they need to find a new home, but most of the time they just stand still.

Next is the pygmy seahorse (Hippocampus zosterae) because of its vertical swimming style and small fins, it takes them about 1 hour to move about 1.5m. The pygmy seahorse is considered the slowest swimming fish and also one of the slowest moving animals in the world.

However, this is very suitable for the dwarf seahorse's lifestyle, because most of the time they use their tails to "anchor" their bodies to seagrass stalks and eat small crustaceans that drift past them. Because the food comes to them, seahorses do not need to be fast.

They also have a hard shell so they don't have many predators to hide from. The biggest movements of seahorses are when they perform dances for courtship or when breeding.

In the deeper ocean, the Greenland shark is a giant creature that can grow up to 7.3m long. It moves slowly at a speed of only 3km/h. The Greenland shark feeds mainly on dead marine life, so it does not need to swim very fast.

The slowest species on land

The Galapagos giant tortoise moves at a speed of about 0.26km/h - Photo: JACOB POUL SKOUBO

The slowest animal on land is the banana slug, at only about 0.0096 km/h.

In general, mollusks are much slower than other species. Some mollusks hardly move at all as adults, and some even remain stationary.

Another slow-moving land animal is the Galapagos giant tortoise. This reptile moves at a speed of about 0.26 km/h. To put that in perspective, a human of similar size would move at a speed of 4.5 km/h.

Tree-dwelling mammals are also among the slowest of all land animals. For example, the slow loris (Nycticebus) moves at about 1.8 km/h; the three-toed sloth 1.6 km/h, but their typical speeds are only a few dozen meters/h.

Three-toed sloths move very slowly - Photo: WWF

There is another way to measure speed: taking body size into account. Some biologists believe this allows for more accurate comparisons of speeds between species.

For example, in 1 second, humans can travel much longer distances than ants. But considering the small size of ants, they actually travel much longer distances and much faster than us.

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ANH THU

Source: https://tuoitre.vn/diem-danh-nhung-loai-dong-vat-cham-nhat-the-gioi-20250826134912222.htm