--- title: More record-breakers and oddballs: sloth, narwhal, chameleon, electric eel, giraffe — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «More record-breakers and oddballs: sloth, narwhal, chameleon, electric eel, giraffe», a lesson of the biology course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: Every record-breaking body is an answer to a problem: the sloth is slow because leaves --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/45-sloth-narwhal-chameleon-eel-giraffe/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [Biology](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/) / More record-breakers and oddballs: slo… # More record-breakers and oddballs: sloth, narwhal, chameleon, electric eel, giraffe Lesson 45 of the biology course of Mova's primary school: 18 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/biology/45-sloth-narwhal-chameleon-eel-giraffe/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/45-sloth-narwhal-chameleon-eel-giraffe/0/) — Every record-breaking body is an answer to a problem: the sloth is slow because leaves give little energy, the giraffe is tall to reach leaves nobody else can, and the electric eel makes shocks to hunt in muddy water. - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/45-sloth-narwhal-chameleon-eel-giraffe/1/) — A giraffe's neck looks as if it must have extra bones, but it has 7, exactly as many as yours; each one is just very long, up to about 25 cm, longer than a new pencil. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/45-sloth-narwhal-chameleon-eel-giraffe/2/) — Imagine being so slow that green algae grow in your hair and moths live in it, then remember that the same sloth can swim across a river about three times faster than it climbs. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/45-sloth-narwhal-chameleon-eel-giraffe/3/) — Cartoons get these animals wrong all the time: the chameleon turns tartan on a picnic rug, the sloth is lazy, and the narwhal's tusk is a unicorn horn; the real reasons are better stories. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/45-sloth-narwhal-chameleon-eel-giraffe/4/) — Sloths move only a few metres a minute and save energy with a slow body and a low body temperature, because the leaves they eat give little energy and take weeks to digest. - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/45-sloth-narwhal-chameleon-eel-giraffe/5/) — Algae grow in grooves in sloth fur, giving it a greenish tint that may help it hide from harpy eagles, and sloth moths and beetles live in the fur. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/45-sloth-narwhal-chameleon-eel-giraffe/6/) — A sloth climbs down about once a week to poo, and it swims about three times faster than it moves on land, holding its breath for up to about 40 minutes; calling it lazy is a myth. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/45-sloth-narwhal-chameleon-eel-giraffe/7/) — The narwhal's tusk is a tooth, usually the left upper canine, that grows in a spiral through the upper lip up to about 3 metres long; mostly males have one, and it has millions of tiny nerve channels. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/45-sloth-narwhal-chameleon-eel-giraffe/8/) — In the Middle Ages narwhal tusks were sold in Europe as unicorn horns and were worth more than their weight in gold. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/45-sloth-narwhal-chameleon-eel-giraffe/9/) — Narwhals dive to about 1,500 metres or more under the Arctic sea ice to hunt halibut, squid and shrimps, and must find cracks in the ice to breathe. - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/45-sloth-narwhal-chameleon-eel-giraffe/10/) — Chameleons change colour mostly to signal to other chameleons and to warm up or cool down, not to match any background; a cold chameleon turns darker to soak up more sunlight. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/45-sloth-narwhal-chameleon-eel-giraffe/11/) — It does this by changing the spacing of tiny crystals in their skin. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/45-sloth-narwhal-chameleon-eel-giraffe/12/) — Each chameleon eye moves on its own, so it can look forward and backward at once; to catch an insect both eyes turn forward and its tongue shoots out, sometimes longer than its body. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/45-sloth-narwhal-chameleon-eel-giraffe/13/) — An electric eel can make shocks of up to about 860 volts in one kind described in 2019, from many small electric cells firing together; it is really a knifefish, related to catfish and carp, not a true eel, and it lives in muddy South American rivers. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/45-sloth-narwhal-chameleon-eel-giraffe/14/) — Electric eels breathe air and must gulp at the surface every few minutes, and they send out weak electric pulses to sense things in murky water. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/45-sloth-narwhal-chameleon-eel-giraffe/15/) — A giraffe has 7 neck bones like almost all mammals, each up to about 25 cm long; sloths and manatees are among the few mammals with a different number. - [16](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/45-sloth-narwhal-chameleon-eel-giraffe/16/) — A giraffe is up to about 5.5 metres tall; its heart weighs about 11 kg, strong enough to push blood all the way up the long neck to its brain, and to drink it must splay its legs, which leaves it open to lions, so it often gets water from leaves instead. - [17](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/45-sloth-narwhal-chameleon-eel-giraffe/17/) — A giraffe's tongue is about 45 to 50 cm long and dark blue-black, which may protect it from sunburn, though scientists are not certain; it wraps the tongue round acacia leaves to pull them from between the thorns. - ← previous: [The axolotl, the tardigrade and the mantis shrimp](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/44-axolotl-tardigrade-mantis-shrimp/) - next →: [Food chains: sun, plants, plant-eaters, meat-eaters](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/46-food-chains/) - ↑ back to [Biology](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/)