Lyme Fact #1

At 93 body lengths per minute, the Lyme spirochete is faster than a sloth at 42 body lengths per minute.

Resources: PLOS, Hypertextbook, World Animal Foundation

At its top speed, the Lyme bacteria has been clocked in at 2,800μm (micro meters) per minute or 0.00010439036029608087 miles per hour (0.00016800000000032254085 kilometers per hour).

To get the body lengths per minute of the Lyme spirochete, we divided its maximum clocked speed of 2,800μm by its maximum measured body length of 30μm and got 93.3 body lengths per minute.

To get the body lengths per minute of a sloth, we took its recorded speed of 0.54 meters per second and multiplied it by 60 to get 32.4 meters per minute. We then converted the sloth's maximum body length of 2.5 feet to meters and got 0.762 meters. From there, we divided the sloth's speed of 32.4 meters per minute by the sloths body length of 0.762 meters and got 42.5 body lengths per minute.